After over two decades of operation, Amazon Prime has become the backbone of American commerce, more akin to a public utility than a private company. Its logistics network has blown past the US Postal Service in parcel volume, delivering crucial goods to small business owners, trade workers, and teachers at record speed.
And like any public utility, Amazon Prime comes with a public price tag — a massive state subsidy paid by taxpayers around the country.
Blistering new reporting by Fortune revealed that the number of Amazon workers receiving government assistance via Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid has nearly tripled between 2020 and 2025, a stunning rise for any group, let alone workers employed at one of the wealthiest companies in the world. It comes as the megacorporation posted a massive rise in annual profit over the same period, from $11.6 billion in 2020 to $77.7 billion in 2025.
Those federal assistance numbers, obtained by the independent US Government Accountability Office, found that 12,346 Amazon workers across 11 states were getting help affording basic groceries through SNAP. A further 11,338 in those states rely on Medicaid.
The federal assistant amounts to a de facto subsidy of Amazon’s labor force, allowing the company executives to rake in record profits while paying its workers starvation wages. If it weren’t for these government programs, in other words, thousands of Amazon’s lowest-paid workers wouldn’t be able to afford to make ends meet.
Though Amazon was far from the only company whose full time employees are struggling, the GAO survey found that Amazon was consistently among the very top employers of adult SNAP and Medicaid enrollees. Other top offenders include Walmart, ride-share platform companies like Uber, and chain stores like McDonald’s and Dollar General.
Beyond Amazon, the survey observes the grim reality of working class life in the wealthiest nation on Earth. Overall, the report points to the fact that nearly 14 million working adults were enrolled in Medicaid in 2024, while 10.6 million received SNAP benefits. Of those receiving government aid for groceries, some 71.3 percent — about 7.5 million people — worked 35 hours or more per week.
“What this analysis really points to is the large number of people who have very low incomes and continue to have very low income,” GAO director for education, workforce, and income security issues Kathryn Larin told Fortune. “I mean, these are families that are really barely able to make ends meet, and yet they are working, and they are working a lot.”
More on Amazon: Amazon Investigating Its Own Employees for Daring to Question AI Data Centers
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Despite being one of the world leaders in AI development, the private firm Anthropic has yet to post a quarterly profit. That operating deficit isn’t for a lack of trying — and, as the company tells it, could be reversing very soon, at least if you’re willing to swallow one massive caveat.
According to new reporting by the Financial Times, the company behind the Claude told a select group of trusted investors that its adjusted operating income (AOI) is set to be positive for the second consecutive quarter.
AOI is an accounting technique that strips out non-recurring costs, giving backers a very specific look under a company’s hood. Posting a profit on AOI is very different from posting a profit on net income, otherwise known as the “bottom line,” under which Anthropic remains billions of dollars in the red.
Aside from the fact that Anthropic is not about to turn a real profit anytime soon, it may still be a noteworthy signal. The AI world is currently awash in fear-mongering over AI safety, a phenomena some analysts say could signal a turn away from the race-to-the-bottom to build artificial general intelligence toward a more reasonable — if less ambitious — embrace of AI as it currently is.
While it remains to be seen how these narratives and business realities play out in practice, if the top American AI companies choose to stop and let the dust settle, Anthropic may very well find itself ahead of its competition. Though Anthropic is still far underwater, companies like ChatGPT developer OpenAI are somehow even deeper.
As lead AI analyst at the firm SemiAnalysis Joey Brookhart told the FT, “if you continue to operate at these margins and growth rates, it will be so hard to compete [with Anthropic] because they have so much [in the way of computing resources].”
Still, there are some questions in the AI lab’s story that have yet to be answered. For one thing, this profitability forecast — a flattering projection conveniently leaked to the financial press at a pivotal moment — comes in place of a highly anticipated public prospectus which the company was expected to make public sometime last week. Anthropic may still be planning to release the prospectus soon, but it’s worth noting the company has chosen to lead with spectacle and innuendo, as opposed to the formal legal document.
For months, Anthropic has been teasing a public stock offering that hasn’t yet materialized, and it remains to be seen whether the latest slowdown talk will impact that timeline. In fact, there’s reason to believe this song and dance is all part of the lead-up to the AI lab’s IPO, as investors whip themselves into a frenzy about AI safety.
As Anthropic investor Brad Gerstner said in a post on X-formerly-Twitter over the weekend, “Anthropic will IPO” anyway, because there is “huge appetite to invest in the AI leaders,” especially those which are seen as bringing “even more transparency, scrutiny, accountability” into the AI space (at least as far as Gerstner’s investments are concerned.)
More on Anthropic: New Anthropic Ad Implies AI Could Kill Us All
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At this point, if you’re not using personal access to political power to run billion-dollar crypto scams, you’re seriously missing out.
Previously, it was the Trump dynasty cashing in, using the family name to rake in over $1 billion off the backs of gullible crypto bros. Now, it’s former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter, whose memecoin $LAPTOP is following the tell-tale signs of a cyrpto rug pull.
If you’re not familiar with this side of the cryptoverse, here’s a quick breakdown. A memecoin is basically an extremely volatile financial vehicle designed to cash in on trending memes or other viral phenomena. Unlike other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, memecoins lack even the thinnest pretense of real world utility. Instead, they live or die on hype alone, with the vast majority of memecoins collapsing like a house of cards as soon as a few early investors begin selling off their holdings.
This, of course, is exactly what happened with $LAPTOP. According to DeCrypt, the young Biden’s memecoin launched at 8 am on Wednesday morning, peaking at a price of $190.81 dollars just two minutes after opening to traders. Before 9 am rolled around, the value of the memecoin had plummeted to just $3.70, collapsing from a fully diluted value of $144 billion to $4.8 billion in a matter of minutes.
As the Washington Post observed, roughly 80 percent of people who bought the crypto token ended up losing money.
Biden, for his part, touted $LAPTOP as a way to reclaim his honor in the wake of the convoluted laptop controversy of 2020, where it was alleged that the younger Biden was appropriating his father’s political position in business dealings in Ukraine and China.
“The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery,” Biden posted on X-formerly-Twitter before the memecoin went public. “They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.”
It’s unclear exactly how much he made from the rugpull, or where exactly any of that money went. In his post, Biden alluded to a “mechanism” by which “20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community,” without elaborating on what that means.
A further portion of the tokens could be sent to a charity in a spiteful dig at Trump, as Biden cryptically explained.
“Thirty percent of the tokens are tied to a pre-programmed mechanism,” he tweeted. “We publicly say what has to happen in the world. If it happens, the corresponding tokens are permanently burned. If it does not, those tokens are sent to charity. Either way, they leave our hands and an additional 50 million tokens will go to charity no matter what.”
“With $TRUMP, nearly one million wallets have collectively lost ~$3.8 [billion],” Biden continued. “With my token, 20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community, and I am even including people that lost money on the $TRUMP grift.”
A follow-up post published on the blogging platform Medium clarifies that this “mechanism” is a kind of prediction-market line, where “30 percent of supply is tied to public, verifiable events criteria.”
“When a prediction resolves YES, the tokens are burned. When it doesn’t, they go to charity,” Biden explained. Basically, there are dozens of these “events” baked into $LAPTOP that determine what happens to the tokens as time goes on. Some of them are relatively straightforward, like “will President Trump be impeached during his term?” while others only add to the labyrinthine scheme.
“The first event, 5,000,000 tokens, was resolved yesterday when Beeple referenced $LAPTOP,” Biden wrote on his blog.
Of course, the memecoin’s valuation matters a great deal: whether the five millions tokens are priced at a few cents or a few hundred dollars when the prediction resolves has drastic implications for the final payout. Now that the price of LAPTOP is in the gutter, the not-at-all-ironclad law of memecoins says that it’s extremely unlikely to shoot back up without a major cash injection.
In all, it’s an extremely sketchy — not to mention gimmicky — setup for a guy who’s already worth $17 million.
Maybe it’d be one thing if all of the proceeds were guaranteed to end up with a charity, but that whole mechanism looks to be a distant afterthought. Instead, Biden is focused on the more nebulous task of “help[ing] each other and our country to get back up” — though how a hundred-billion-dollar crypto scam is supposed to accomplish that remains to be seen.
More on crypto scams: Trump Fans Confused by How Their Investments in His Crypto and Stock Are Now Worth a Tiny Fraction While He’s Getting Richer
The post Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP Meme Coin Is Either a National Disgrace or the Funniest Thing He’s Ever Done, and We’re Not Entirely Sure Which appeared first on Futurism.
With his approval ratings in the gutter, US president Donald Trump is cooking up another cash advance for the American people, and it’s a doozy.
At the first-ever Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas — which is really more of a MAGA pep rally than a legitimate party assembly — President Trump promised that “if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” the BBC reported.
“Because we’ve done so well and because our country is making so much money, that only I can make you this promise,” Trump told supporters in a slightly garbled quote, to rapturous applause. As Al Jazeera noted, the president was scant on the details around the payments, saying only that the money would have to be spent on US goods and services.
“We don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money,” Trump admonished the crowd.
Split across the entire adult-aged population of the US, we’re talking 270 million $5,000 checks. While that would no doubt provide some relief for working class families struggling under Trump’s erratic economic regime, it would immediately cost taxpayers $1.3 trillion, before factoring in administrative costs and hits to the inflation rate, per Al Jazeera.
Such a payout would essentially land straight on the US national balance sheet, Fortune explains, which is already so far in the red that it suffers a $2 trillion annual deficit.
Though the math on this is pretty simple, the massive figure leaves more questions around the theoretical payout than answers. For example, if Republicans have control of the House and the Senate, why not issue the $5,000 check now, to demonstrate what the party can do for voters? Given that Trump’s second term has been defined by broken promises and financial misconduct, voters from across the political spectrum are quickly running out of patience for more GOP can-kicking.
Either way, we’re talking about an 80 year old man who recently started believing he was lifted from the rubble of the World Trade Center collapse — which is to say there’s a pretty good chance he won’t remember his $1.3 trillion promise come November.
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The post Trump’s Plan to Give Every American Adult $5,000 After the Midterm Would Add $1.3 Trillion to the National Debt appeared first on Futurism.
Will AI supercharge the economy? Will the data centers powering it bring prosperity and provide paying jobs to the communities they’re built in?
Probably not. New research shows that rapid rise of AI has instead coincided with “unusually high levels” of unemployment among college graduates in Texas, the Financial Times reports. Texas, crucially, is the state with the most data center under construction.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas found that job postings in the state had dramatically fallen for AI-exposed fields since the release of ChatGPT, disproportionately affecting college graduates. By the first quarter of 2025, postings plummeted by 8 percent compared to jobs that were deemed less exposed to AI, it also found.
“These dynamics suggest that recent college graduates, whose unemployment rate rose to unusually high levels during this period of rapid [generative AI] adoption, are where the effects of GenAI on employment and earnings are likely to first appear,” the researchers wrote in the analysis, as quoted by the FT.
Until recently, Texas and its governor Greg Abbott has embraced the AI data center buildout with open arms. A recent Reuters analysis found that requests from data centers and other large power users to connect to the state’s power grid soared from about 48 gigawatts in 2023 to more than 474 gigawatts currently, making it one of the fastest growing hubs for AI and cloud computing facilities.
But as public backlash against data centers has continued to mount — and with midterm elections looming — Abbott changed his tune and became an AI industry critic, announcing a freeze on new data center connections last month. Along with the myriad concerns around the data center’s environmental impact, many fear that the technology that the data centers support will destroy jobs, while the facilities themselves provide little for local economies.
The latest research, its authors say, demonstrates the reality of how AI is shaping labor demand in the very area that should be directly benefiting from it.
It’s not the only research suggesting AI is wiping out entry level jobs — an outcome that industry figures like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned would happen.
A recent analysis by researchers at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab similarly found a marked decline in employment among young knowledge-workers, while the headcount of those working in fields not considered vulnerable to AI automation, including industrial and retail work, rose.
“For 22 to 25 year olds, employment is falling in the most AI-exposed jobs and rising in the least exposed jobs,” one of the report authors said.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty around how many jobs are truly being replaced by AI, and whether some of the chaos can be explained as AI being used as an excuse to fire workers for other reasons. But it’s brought a demoralizing effect on the workforce. In a Gallup poll conducted over the final three months of 2025, 72 percent of respondents said it was a “bad time” to find a good job.
More on AI: Employees Absolutely Loath AI in the Workplace, Survey Finds
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At this point, the AI economy is like a drunk guy who managed to mount a tiger. Though nothing about the current situation is ideal, there’s no clear way to hop off without ensuring certain doom at the hands of a large, angry cat.
So it goes with AI: though the ridiculous cost of data centers demands a seemingly exponential amount of capital, the rest of the economy would be in freefall without it — so better to stay atop the tiger, on the unlikely chance that this chaotic approach somehow domesticates our large furry friend.
As far as productivity goes, the great AI boom has failed to generate even a fraction of the economic returns sought by institutional investors. Despite that pesky reality, they’ve gone all-in on the tech industry, leveraging every possible asset — including the country’s retirement savings — on the biggest gamble of the 21st century.
Yet if things continue at their current pace — if we manage to stay atop the tiger — we might someday find ourselves looking back at 2026 wondering how we ever had it so good.
According to a new analysis by accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and spotted by Bloomberg, global spending on data centers could reach an astounding $31.6 trillion by 2050, with over $15 trillion of that concentrated in the US.
And that’s a middle-of-the-road prediction. If productive AI adoption happens to pick up beyond its current middling level, according to the analysis, AI spending could rise as high as $50 trillion over the next two and a half decades.
Whether that kind of spending is actually possible seems unclear. Even PwC, which takes a decidedly optimistic view of the future, is careful to condition its forecast: “although an enormous amount of funding is required to meet mounting compute needs from a widening set of users, capital should be available in sufficient quantities” (emphasis added.)
Unfortunately, it seems there’s no other choice at this point but to hold onto the tiger for dear life. As a shocking chart by the Wall Street Journal illustrates, the amount of capital spent on non-data center construction in the US has quite literally fallen off a cliff, while the capital deployed to build data centers soars into the stratosphere.
With the cost of debt swelling amidst skyrocketing inflation, it’s unclear how our inebriated jockey is going to hold his grip for the next year — let alone the far-away date of 2050.
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The post As the Rest of the Economy Crumbles, the Amount of Money Flooding Into Data Centers Is Simply Astounding appeared first on Futurism.
When the long awaited role playing game “Fallout 4” dropped in 2015, it marked the first installation in the franchise in five years. The release quickly became a running joke, with working class gamers yukking it up over their plans to call in sick the day it hit store shelves, and the game’s developer even issuing a bogus doctor’s note.
Now history seems to be repeating itself — and this time for almost certainly the most hyped game ever, making its release an actual liability for economy-wide productivity.
Enter “Grand Theft Auto VI,” the first installation in the beloved GTA franchise in 13 years. With nearly 5 million pre-orders worldwide, the game’s release on November 19 is poised to take a sizable chunk of the working population with it, a phenomenon tantamount to an unofficial holiday, as the Wall Street Journal tells it.
“We’ve got a couple of days where we’re like, ‘daddy’s very busy,'” Bud Burruss, a software engineer and father of three told the WSJ. When the game drops, Burruss said he plans on taking five whole days to himself.
“I’m not going to be playing it for, like, 20 hours straight like an absentee father,” the software engineer explained. “But right out of the gate we’re going hard. I’ll have the cave door shut.”
“It has been rescheduled so many times that I’m like, you know what, if we are for sure doing this on Nov 19, I’m taking Thursday to Thursday off,” medical sales rep Anna Ray told the WSJ.
What the overall hit to workplace productivity looks like remains to be seen, but given the astronomical hype around GTA VI, it sure won’t be zero. While there are the immediate lost work-hours to consider, there’s also the long-term effect to workplace productivity to consider even after gamers return to work.
According to one analysis based on a survey of 2,000 gamers, late-night gaming sessions contribute to a two-hour drop in the next day’s productivity on average.
On the other hand, given that we live in a time of record corporate profits amidst brutally sluggish wages, maybe the least managers can do is let their faithful workers enjoy a day or five of uninterrupted gaming bliss.
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Former Republican congressman and ironic meme icon George Santos was just banned from Kalshi — for life.
It’s the first lifetime ban that the prediction market has ever handed out, the New York Times reports, which is pretty incredible considering all the inside trading that’s suspected to happen on the platform. There was pretty much nothing “suspected” about Santos’ offenses, though, which were about as blatant as they come.
According to a notice Kalshi posted this week, Santos placed multiple bets on markets related to his attendance of president Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February this year.
Needless to say, “as a person capable of influencing the outcome of the underlying event, Santos was prohibited from trading in this market,” the notice explained.
He then began making public statements about attending the event to influence the price of the contracts. Some of those statements were “false or misleading.”
Just days before the address, for example, Santos posted a video on X saying, “I’m going to be there for the State of Union in the gallery, guys,” before writing a follow-up telling his followers he was stuck in an airport, watching it on TV.
“FML,” he added.
Santos’s unsubtle market-moving utterances were successful at manipulating the price of the “Yes or No” contracts he purchased, Kalshi’s Compliance Department found. All told, he made nearly $18,000 in profit from the scheme.
Santos won’t see the inside of a cell, but he is getting a heavy slap on the wrist. Kalshi fined him $71,356, and it also flagged the bets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The federal agency ordered Santos to return all the profits he made as part of a settlement both parties reached in July, and slapped him with its own $17,500 fine for good measure.
Anyone familiar with Santos’s antics won’t be surprised by this latest one. The 38-year-old is a notorious fabulist and con artist. He was expelled from Congress in 2023 after an ethics investigation, following the discovery by news outlets that he’d embezzled campaign funds and had lied heavily in his biography. In 2024, he plead guilty to wire fraud and identity theft. His seven year sentence was commuted by — who else — Trump last year.
Ironically, Santos used to be a paid ambassador for Polymarket, Kalshi’s biggest rival. Polymarket dropped him like a hot potato, though, once the CFTC began poking into his suspicious Kalshi bets.
The ban and hefty fines haven’t caused him to lose his spunk, though.
“Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform,” Santos wrote on X. “Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.”
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As backlash against surveillance grows, governments overseeing cities, townships, and counties around the US are dropping their Flock contracts at a record pace — a retreat so widespread that some say it could affect the company’s viability.
The police tech company, known for its sprawling network of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), has become one of the flashpoints for the country’s revulsion at AI infrastructure, joining data centers and drone-as-first-responder programs as symbols — and targets — of a rising AI dystopia.
According to reporting by TechSpot, some 214 municipal governments have opted to drop previously-held contracts with Flock since 2021.
That data comes courtesy of Secure Justice, an anti-surveillance group based out of Oakland, California. Just across August, Secure Justice analysis found that some 90 local administrations dropped or non-renewed Flock contracts, quadruple the number of cancellations across July, and a rate of three per day across the whole month.
And as cancellations increase, the hit to Flock’s collective utility — not to mention the company’s bottom line — only becomes more pronounced. That’s because Flock offers police the ability to reference data collected by ALPRs belonging not only to other law enforcement agencies, but also to commercial and individual contractees as well.
Recent history has shown that when Flock cameras in neighboring towns go down, police become much more likely to cancel or non-renew their own contracts, as the main utility for law enforcement comes from the combined network, rather than just those ALPRs local to one jurisdiction (granted, police officers have often used that network to stalk women instead of actually fighting crime, but that’s another story.)
Though Flock told TechSpot its new contracts still outnumber its cancelled contracts at a rate of 10 to one, privacy activists are more focused on the cumulative effects rising cancellations will have in the long term.
“When you see that now 165 [cancellations] are just in the first almost eight months of this year… At that speed, if it goes another year, we’re talking serious money,” Secure Justice executive director Brain Hofer told TechSpot. “That number is going to get huge, fast.”
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It’s no secret that AI is becoming increasingly unpopular around the world, as the tech’s garbled output has become impossible for the average person to avoid. For a rising cohort of workers, AI is also becoming inescapable on the job. According to one piece of research, staffers aren’t exactly thrilled with that reality.
The new survey, conducted by the Indeed-owned workplace review site Glassdoor, found that mentions of “AI” in employer reviews has skyrocketed over the last few years — though sentiments, tellingly, are becoming overwhelmingly negative as time goes on.
Since 2019 when Glassdoor first began tracking references to “AI” or “LLMs” (large language models) in worker reviews, the number of mentions has exploded year over year, rising by 240 percent from May 2025 to May 2026 alone.
Though 81 percent of reviews mentioning AI were positive in 2019, attitudes have swiftly reversed to just 43 percent in 2026. Negative sentiment also seems to be rising fast as well, from 41 percent in 2025 to 53 percent earlier this year.
Sorting it out by job type, Glassdoor’s economic research team found some surprising haters rising to the top. Some are to be expected, like writers, editors, and journalists, whose reviews mentioning AI were critical of the tech 81 percent of the time. Other jobs less exposed to the ravages of AI stood out, like accountants, whose reviews mentioning AI were negative 80 percent of the time. Far and away the biggest detractors, interestingly, were insurance claims adjustors, who were critical of AI in a whopping 98 percent of comments.
While it’s clear that professional workers hate AI tools, specific complaints were all over the map.
Per Glassdoor, 20 percent of negative comments around AI between 2025 and 2026 mentioned their bosses using AI as a “job killer,” while 14 percent complained that their workplaces are “AI pushers,” forcing workers to use the tech whether they want to or not. A further 13 percent said AI at their workplace was “distracting” from the main business, and 10 percent indicated that management is using AI to “alienate” workers through things like heightened workplace surveillance.
“It’s not just about the fear being replaced by AI,” the Glassdoor research team wrote. “Workers resent the push to incorporate AI into products, to use tools internally, and when employers use AI to monitor or communicate with them.”
All in all, opinions around the buzzy tech seem sharper than ever — even if everybody has their own unique reason to be an AI hater.
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There was a time in the United States when the richest moguls, regardless of their many personal shortcomings, embraced philanthropy in a cynical effort to keep the angry mobs at bay. Andrew Carnegie famously built libraries, John D Rockefeller helped fund research that eventually eradicated hookworm, while JP Morgan donated vast collections of art and books to museums and other cultural institutions.
Today’s robber barons aren’t in such a giving mood. Sure, there are some figures like Microsoft’s Bill Gates — who has plenty of his own problems, to be clear — but they seem to be quickly becoming the minority.
Case in point, the billionaire CEO of cyrpto-trading company Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, recently went on a tirade about how charity is actually a “net negative on the world.”
“The common view is that philanthropy is a noble cause,” Amstrong said during a recent appearance on the right-wing Katie Miller Podcast. “And like, Bill Gates after the DoJ thing is like, ‘I’m going to go rehabilitate my image, I’m going to do philanthropy.'”
That’s a fool’s errand to Armstrong, however, as such philanthropic aspirations — selfish as they are — can become “captured by ideology.”
“I guess I have sort of a contrarian view where a lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative on the world,” Armstrong continued. “And they get captured. It’s actually remarkably hard to find a foundation that has not gotten captured by ideology.”
Though Amstrong’s estimated net worth of around $8.7 billion puts him in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, he says that “so far, I’ve just been like ‘I’m not going to do that.’“
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For protestors rising up against the data centers undergirding the AI boom, the math is simple: wherever they sprout, the facilities make frightfully poor neighbors — inflating utility prices, discharging hazardous waste, and blasting horrid noise at all hours of the night.
For data center developers, there’s a different calculation to be made: namely, one of supply and demand around the seemingly infinite drive for computing power.
Against the backdrop of an industry measured in the trillions of dollars, a few scattered protests at city hall may seem inconsequential. Yet as more and more local campaigns arise in opposition to data centers, the collective financial implications are becoming impossible to ignore.
According to new reporting by Reuters, which indexed data compiled by the research firm Data Center Watch, there are now hundreds of billions of dollars exposed to the growing risk of local opposition.
In the first three months of 2026 alone, at least 75 separate data center projects faced some kind of organized opposition at the local level. Together, those 75 developments represent a combined $130 billion worth of investments.
The funders of those data centers include major banks, but also more than a few private equity firms, which are sure to notice as the social risk to their data center investments climb.
Simply put, the potential that any given data center could be cancelled due to local opposition is rising, a sign that organized efforts against data centers are becoming more than the sum of their parts.
Yet despite growing costs, opposition alone may not be enough to slow the behemoth industry. As one anonymous senior official at a foreign lending firm told Reuters, investors are now becoming more comfortable pricing in cancellation risks as the demand for AI compute grows — like frogs adjusting to boiling water.
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German AI researcher and hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner became the poster child for the hubris of an AI-obsessed Wall Street last month.
Some $35 billion of investors’ money, in the form of leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks, evaporated in front of the 24-year-old’s eyes as tech shares were hit by yet another major sell off.
The humbling couldn’t have come at a worse time. The funds vanished days before his wedding with Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. According to the New Yorker, the two had to cancel their honeymoon as a result.
Aschenbrenner isn’t alone. According to new data from Hedge Fund Research, tech funds dropped by seven percent in July, the worst period for the investments since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Telegraph reports.
A separate hedge fund, called value Aligned Research Advisors, which shares a similar portfolio to Aschenbrenner’s, similarly slid 44 percent in July as tech stocks reeled from major volatility.
The bruising month has further compounded fears over a massive surge in AI spending with no clear path to profitability in sight. Investors have become wary of big tech companies’ ever-higher capital expenditure forecasts as concerns over an AI bubble continue to mount.
Staying on track and maintaining high profit margins has become a high risk high reward game.
“When valuations are elevated, and positioning is concentrated, the difference between being on the right and wrong side of a trade can become unusually large — and very quickly,” Erlen Capital Management managing partner Bruno Schneller told the Telegraph. “Specialist technology strategies can generate exceptional returns when momentum and narrative are aligned, but they can also experience abrupt, leverage-amplified reversals when those conditions change.”
The game is far from over. Even Aschenbrenner’s fund has since recovered and his making new investments after being forced to unwind trades and sell major chunks of its holdings last month.
Yet how much longer the highly AI-leveraged stock market can sustain itself is anybody’s guess. In a blog post on Friday, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok pointed out that those who reap the biggest profits, including companies making AI models, are massively depending on profits being “funded by investors rather than earned from customers.”
Put simply, AI companies aren’t making any significant amount of money from providing a worthwhile product, but from “capital raised by the layer losing money,” per Slok.
“Capital can bridge the gap for a while, but not indefinitely,” Slok argued. “And therein lies the risk: will the ROI show up for AI’s end customers fast enough to sustain the spending that is generating those upstream margins?”
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In terms of demoralizing the federal workforce and demolishing the public sector, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was a success.
In terms of actually saving money, though — its ostensible raison d’être — it was a dismal failure.
Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion in government “waste and fraud.” Then he lowered that target to $1 trillion, and behind the scenes reportedly promised Trump to save just a tenth of that figure. In the end, DOGE boasted on its website’s “Wall of Receipts” that it had saved around $215 billion — peanuts compared to its original promise.
But the actual amount of spending it slashed may be even lower than that. In a sweeping audit, the Government Accountability Office looked through the $110 billion that DOGE claimed it saved between January and July 2025, and found a trail of staggering incompetency that let loads of supposedly saved money fall through the cracks. That framing, though, could be too generous to Musk and his pimple-faced lackeys. You could also take the view that DOGE, in all likelihood, was deliberately cooking the books.
Per the GAO’s new report, released this month, DOGE claimed it terminated 13,476 contracts, but nearly 2,000 of them weren’t actually terminated. Spending-wise, about $27.4 billion of the purported savings came from these contracts that DOGE botched the terminations of.
The clumsy — or deceptive — bookkeeping didn’t end there. The receipts “includes leases identified for termination before [the group] was established,” the report states, as quoted by The Washington Post. And 108 of 264 of the leases it claimed it nixed “were already in process for termination.”
In all, the GAO found that over half of DOGE’s claimed $61 billion in contract savings couldn’t be verified or came from contracts that weren’t actually terminated. Similarly, 96 percent of the savings that it claimed came from grants couldn’t be verified by the accountability office, either.
Last August, an investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE had claimed to save by cancelling contracts at the time, its actual savings were closer to just $1.4 billion. To calculate how it saved money, DOGE dubiously used the maximum spending limit listed on the contracts it axed, figures that in practice are much higher than what the government ends up spending.
At the time, government procurement expert Jessica Tillipman told the outlet that the practice was akin to “taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, cancelling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000.'”
More on Elon Musk: Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk
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It turns out the venture capital industry doesn’t just merely fund junky AI startups — it also systematically breeds the conditions for fraud.
A new joint study from researchers at the UK’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School analyzed 12 companies involved in 27 court cases related to civil or criminal cases related to securities fraud. The cases totaled around $688 million in financial losses, and resulted in 73 years of cumulative prison sentences.
After analyzing the individual cases, the researchers identified a persistent pattern of “façading,” in which startup entrepreneurs hide their flailing businesses from scrutiny through an assorted mix of fraudulent behavior.
The research, first reported by TechCrunch, identified three various types of façading: surface, reinforced, and deep façading, which are “contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality,” the paper explains.
The first form, surface façading, happens when startup founders create fictional stories of “imminent venture success,” like the kind of AI-washing that hit its stride in 2024, embodied by companies like Builder.ai that went on to collapse like a billion-dollar houses of cards.
This escalates into “reinforced façading” when founders begin to cook up things like bank statements or customer contracts to sell the surface story, and take pains to centralize the flow of information around the startup’s performance. One example of this might be the company iLearning Engines, a $1.5 billion AI startup which was found to be faking “virtually all its customer relationships and revenues” by a Department of Justice probe earlier this year.
Deep façading, the final and most severe form, encompasses broad forms of market manipulation, like faking product demonstrations, sabotaging internal efforts at due diligence, and manipulating regulation. This last form, one could argue, is embodied by the current front-runners of the tech industry’s AI boom, which have engaged in significant political lobbying, sabotaged their own internal research on AI safety, and routinely dress up human labor to appear like autonomous AI.
Ultimately, the line between criminality and free market innovation is thin, especially where seemingly-magical and proprietary new technologies like AI are involved (a technology which currently represents a $1.6 trillion gap between investor expectations and practical reality.)
“By engaging in façading, entrepreneurs effectively decouple the venture’s externally projected appearance from its operational reality, making it appear to audiences as if no expectation-reality gap exists, despite the venture’s actual (subpar) performance,” reads the paper. “Entrepreneurs transgress from dramatized discourse into criminal deception when their stories become unhinged from reality and involve increasingly sophisticated organizing efforts to fabricate material evidence, data, and information about their ventures’ performance.”
More on startups: We Are Mildly Horrified by This AI Startup That Coerced People Into Getting Tattoos of Its Logo in Exchange for a Job Interview
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