Case in point, one Georgia family has been forced to sell their home, after the state utility concern decided it needed to build a new transmission line to connect new AI data centers.
As reported by CBS, the Brown family of Coweta County, Georgia decided to sell their home to Georgia Power, rather than risk seizure by eminent domain.
Ansley Brown, whose parents raised her in the home, told CBS, “it’s ours. It’s our family. We belong here.”
The Browns are just one of likely 300 landowners who will have their property seized so that Georgia Power — a for-profit, investor-owned corporation — can make a cozy home for the tech industry.
“To us it’s theft,” Browns’ mother told CBS. “It’s literally a billion-dollar company stealing land from smaller people, people who can’t fight back. We don’t have the money to fight Georgia Power.”
For its part, the utility company told CBS they “have worked hard to be transparent, negotiate in good faith,” and “make the process as easy as possible.”
The Browns, understandably, don’t see it that way.
“You can’t tear down 35 miles of rural Georgia and it not hurt something or somebody,” the mother said. “And to say that you’re doing it in the name of data centers is a slap in the face to us, our community, our animals.”
Look, dating in the 2020s sucks. The apps are bad, people are rude, and the etiquette of it all seems to be evolving at the speed of sound. Yet for all the downsides, there’s nothing that can’t be made 100 times worse with the addition of AI slop.
For better or worse, that’s exactly what Hinge founder Justin McLeod has in mind for his latest dating app, “Overtone.”
First spotted by TechCrunch, McLeod announced an $18 million round of funding on the company’s blog. While that’s a hefty chunk of change for any startup, confidence from venture capitalists isn’t exactly shocking considering the founder’s previous success. What really stands out about the blog, though, is that McLeod used the bulletin to vague-post about his grand vision for a new, AI-integrated dating app.
“Think about the most un-human parts of the dating app experience,” McLeod challenged: “writing personal ads for ourselves, judging each other in a split second based on photos, sorting through thousands of potential partners, and wrangling them through the precarious funnel of like to match to chat to date.”
“None of those steps exist because anyone wanted them,” McLeod’s pitch continues. “They exist because they were the best the technology could do.”
Like many, many startup founders before him, McLeod asserts that Overtone is “not a dating app,” but something different — in this case, a “service.” That may be a distinction without a difference, but it signals a sloppified shift in the founder’s approach.
While details remain scarce, we do know that Overtone is meant to be a “a voice- and audio-forward service, enabled by AI, that provides highly curated introductions.” What that means in practice is difficult to say. Will the app be manipulating voice messages meant for potential lovers? Does it connect people based on the information they give, or on the information generated by AI?
In his blog, McLeod provides few concrete clues as to what Overtone might encompass, though the app he envisions isn’t exactly inspiring.
“We get to know each person deeply, learning about them in their own voice, hearing their own unique story,” McLeod writes. “And we make only the introductions that are worth making, grounded in relationship science and thoughtful reflection. We transparently explain why we believe someone is a great match. And we leave it up to our daters to meet in person and discover chemistry, with guidance along the way.”
So, if you ever saw some AI-generated fruit slop and thought, “how can I integrate this into my dating life?” Overtone might be just the app for you.
Those environmental burdens also come with a financial one: skyrocketing demand for electricity, which is increasing the cost of utilities for renters and homeowners alike.
According to a report by Monitoring Analytics, an independent monitor for the largest transmission company in the US, PJM, data center demand is expected to drive over $23 billion in customer price increases by 2028. That eye-watering figure, first spotted by Fortune, is a direct result of the country’s old and confusing electrical infrastructure, which ultimately leaves regular people, not the tech industry, holding the bag.
Whether they’re data centers, factories, or other large facilities, Fortune points out that local regulators and transmission companies like PJM have a hard time figuring out who’s responsible for rising energy demand. While a small power line from a data center campus to a nearby substation is easily billed to the data center, figuring out who to invoice gets harder further on down the line, particularly with shared infrastructure like the substation itself, or the long-distance transmission lines connecting to it.
Though utility companies can and do charge data centers for the electricity they use, Fortune observes that the facilities undergirding the AI boom can “fine tune” their electricity use minute-by-minute, gaining an edge that the average consumer could only dream of.
Because many utility companies charge based on a system of “peak demand” — a measure of a customer’s energy usage at the exact moment the collective grid hits peak demand — data centers have gotten into the habit of scaling down right when the grid measures highest demand. That’s not because they’re actually trying to use less power, but because that narrow window is what determines how high their bill will be. In reality, their overall usage remains the same.
This is more or less the scenario that played out in a Bitcoin mining operation in Texas, where the company Riot Platforms agreed to cut its power use on hot summer days, only to ramp back up massively at night. In exchange, the company negotiated for a lower flat electricity rate overall, and even snagged some state subsidies meant to encourage responsible energy use.
Load-shifting like this can genuinely help the grid, but it also means companies with the ability to game the system get rewarded with subsides that an average household will never get. And because companies are merely changing when they suck their juice — not how — subsidized load-shifting ends up being a poor strategy for reducing electrical use overall.
And while data centers are just the most contemporary example of this practice, the shrewd manipulation of US energy markets by for-profit corporations dates back decades. That may not be comforting news for citizens scrambling to hold data center firms accountable in the here-and-now, but it should at least give them an idea of where tostart looking for inspiration.
After years of being engaged, it looks like SpaceX and the Pentagon are finally ready to send out save-the-dates.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s formerly-just-rockets company is now in talks with the Department of Defense over providing the military access to its data-center capacity for running AI models, tying the knot on their already close relationship.
People familiar with the matter told the newspaper that the arrangement could cost the Pentagon billions of dollars, but stressed the talks are ongoing and could fall apart.
Computing power is a precious commodity during this ever-raging AI boom, and SpaceX has it in spades. Musk has rapidly built data centers in Memphis, Tennessee and a lot of that capacity hasn’t been tapped into, with Bloomberg reporting that his AI startup xAI is only using 11 percent of its total computing power.
Selling this excess compute would help generate the company some much needed revenue, even if it directly benefits its rivals. SpaceX has struggled to be profitable, losing $5 billion last year. And xAI, which was folded into SpaceX before its IPO last month, burned through $6.4 billion over the same period. All the while, Musk has struggled to sell his Grok chatbot to businesses, as its capabilities lag behind leaders like Anthropic and ChatGPT.
Those collaborations have gotten way bigger in the past year. In May, it won a $2.29 billion Space Force contract to build a network of satellites that could function as a military internet service, connecting weapon systems across the globe. That same month, it was awarded an even larger $4.16 billion contract to provide the technology to build a system that can track missiles and aircraft from orbit.
To be clear, Musk’s companies are far from the only tech leaders to be getting in bed with the Pentagon. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle all have similar deals for providing cloud computing capacity to the military, as well as for providing their AI models, the WSJ noted.
But it’s a particularly hypocritical road to be going down for Musk. When Musk cut off Starlink satellite access to the Ukrainian forces in 2023, he reasoned that he didn’t want SpaceX to be “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” Fast forward to this June, when a Pentagon official bragged that the military used Grok to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran during Operation Epic Fury, sparking a war that killed thousands of civilians in the country.
Yet another domino appears to be falling as part of the Rube Goldberg machine that will eventually pop the AI investment bubble.
Earlier this month, economic forecasters were sounding the alarm that overspending on AI was at a level far more severe than Black Tuesday, the day that jump-started the worst economic catastrophe in the history of the industrial economy. Now, investors seem to be coming to that same conclusion all on their own.
This week, Taiwanese semiconductor giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) posted its second-quarter earnings results, revealing a staggering revenue of over $40 billion — a record-breaking sum for the company.
While that should come as welcome news to investors, the results had the exact opposite effect, sending shares of TSMC stocks tumbling by four percent. That in turn led the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index to fall by 1.4 percent Thursday, compounding losses from Wednesday, Bloomberg reported.
The issue seems to be TSMC’s revision to its capital expenditure. As the key manufacturer for chip design company Nvidia — arguably one of the most pivotal players in the AI boom — TSMC is a major bellwether for investor confidence around the buzzy tech.
The trouble is that, in addition to posting record revenue, the Taiwanese chip firm raised its 2026 spending forecast to a range of $60-64 billion, up from $52-56 billion. That shift will test how much more spending investors are willing to stomach on AI, a technology that has yet to justify the nearly $1.6 trillion spent developing it over the past decade.
Zooming out, the market’s response seems to indicate a few things. For starters, good news is clearly not enough to maintain confidence in the tech industry’s ability to make AI a financial success. It likewise signals that belief in the AI bubble is no longer confined to a few brave contrarians, but is becoming a mainstream narrative, as investors grow wary of an industry which promises the Moon, yet only seems to deliver hot air.
New data reveal major geographic disparities and highlight the urgent need for global action on prevention, early detection, and equitable access to treatment. For roughly one in five people worldwide, cancer will become part of their lifetime. Global Cancer Statistics, 2026 estimates that nearly 21 million people were diagnosed with cancer in 2024 and 9.8 [...]
SpaceX was forced to scrub the 13th test flight of its hulking Starship spacecraft Thursday evening. A computer system automatically aborted the launch as the mega rocket fired up its engines and as the countdown struck zero, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk noting afterwards that “some of the engines didn’t start.”
“Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days,” he added.
The aborted flight is a sobering parallel to the rocket company’s performance on Wall Street. It’s notably the first Starship launch attempt since SpaceX went public last month.
And, perhaps as predicted, investors were not impressed. Shares nosedived to a new record low of $124 before recovering to around $126, well below its IPO price of $135. Shares are down almost 14 percent over the last five days and a whopping 45 percent compared to the all-time high of $225 just over a month ago.
As Bloomberg points out, SpaceX is set to wipe out more than $1 trillion in market value compared to its June 16 record high.
It’s certainly not just the failed Starship launch that’s haunting the company. The Nasdaq composite slid almost two percent in early trading this morning, with spooked investors selling shares of AI chip makers as concerns over a bubble continue to mount.
Now that Musk has merged SpaceX with his AI startup, xAI — which has since been renamed SpaceXAI — the rocket company will have to do extra work to convince investors that its lofty valuation is justified. SpaceX lost almost $5 billion last year, while xAI burned through $6.4 billion over the same period.
Despite the poor stock performance, Wall Street remains extremely bullish on SpaceX. For instance, Morgan Stanley believes the company will reach a price tag of $300 — far more than double its current stock price.
Musk himself is convinced that “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.”
But now that its latest Starship launch attempt still hasn’t produced a successful sequence of both reaching space and landing in one piece after years of trying, investors are bound to ask some tough questions.
After all, Musk’s entire vision for SpaceX — including enormous AI orbital data centers and colonizing the Moon and Mars — pivots on the success of its enormous spacecraft.
SpaceX bears are smelling blood in the water. As its stock languishes below its IPO price — at press time, $131 — short sellers are going all in against the company, hoping to make a killing off of CEO Elon Musk’s faltering pull on investors.
As CNBC reports citing data from S3 Partners, 185 million SpaceX shares are now sold short, which is nearly 29 percent of its publicly tradable shares, when it was around only five to seven percent three weeks ago.
It’s one of the highest levels of short selling for a company in its first month of being publicly traded, Ihor Dusaniwsky, a managing director at S3, told Bloomberg.
“The recent price weakness has spurred short selling as well as the anticipation of lockups expiring soon,” he added, referring to the additional SpaceX shares that will soon be tradeable and will play a large role in how the stock performs.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and seemed to set the tone when its price rose to $150 on its opening day and powered past $200 in the days that followed. Those blockbuster gains were short-lived, however. Its price has steadily declined over the past month, losing a third of its value since its peak.
Investors have questioned Musk’s vision for the company — which includes an ambitious pivot to building orbital AI data centers — while its path to profitability remains unclear. Last year, the company lost nearly $5 billion.
Musk’s decision to combine SpaceX with his AI startup xAI before the IPO has also exposed the rocket company to xAI’s numerous controversies, such as its chatbot Grok being used to generate millions of nonconsensual sexualized images of real people. Before, the public fascination around spaceflight had helped shield SpaceX against anti-Musk sentiment.
Off the back of this waning enthusiasm, short sellers have seen their paper profits surge to $3.88 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
But the next few months could be a key turning point for the stock’s performance — or further sink its hopes. Only a small percentage of SpaceX’s shares were made available when the company went public as a measure to prevent insiders from quickly cashing out and crashing the stock price. But around half of its shares will be unlocked from now until December, dwarfing what’s currently available.
If investors dump those unlocked shares, it could send SpaceX’s stock tumbling. Experts have warned that this period of gradually unlocking stocks could be considerably volatile— which isn’t exactly reassuring, given the company’s recent performance.
With hundreds of billions of dollars still flowing into the tech industry, it’s becoming harder and harder to deny the reality that the US economy is enmeshed in a financial bubble of incredible proportions. As recent polls have shown, the majority of Americans don’t only agree that there is an AI bubble, they’re increasingly concerned about it as well.
One man who isn’t swayed is Japan’s richest investment mogul, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Speaking at his company’s annual corporate conference in Tokyo, Son groused that any talk of an AI bubble is “absurd,” adding that he’s willing to waste trillions of dollars a year for decades if that’s what it takes to make AI a financial success.
“Asking if AI is a bubble is absurd. I don’t think people who ask that question know what AI is about,” Son said to conference attendees, as Reuters reported. “Every year $5 trillion, or 800 trillion yen, you might think that’s a lie, but I am confident that’s what it will cost.”
Son has previously said he thinks it’s “blasphemy against AI if you say it’s a bubble,” claiming that the tech’s “potential will be unlocked.”
But whether the tech industry can ever make AI financially viable is a particularly sensitive issue for SoftBank. The investment bank has lavished ChatGPT maker OpenAI with nearly $65 billion so-far, a spend so enormous that it forced major credit ratings agencies to downgrade SoftBank’s standing over the last few months.
As S&P Global’s analysts wrote when they downgraded SoftBank’s outlook from “neutral” to “negative” in March, the “liquidity of SoftBank Group’s investment portfolio will worsen because OpenAI now accounts for a bigger share of it.”
In particular, S&P warned against the exact path CEO Son seems to be doubling down on.
“The additional investment will further reduce SoftBank Group’s financial capacity, in our view,” S&P’s credit report explained. “We estimate that the additional investment in OpenAI will knock nearly four percentage points onto the company’s [loan-to-value] ratio, worsening this key financial metric.”
These invectives evidently haven’t spooked Son, who once predicted that AI superintelligence would exist by 2035.
Now, he’s adding five years to that prediction: “The business model will be viable because by 2040,” Son said, “if AI revenue makes up 20 percent of global GDP, spending 800 trillion yen a year is a rounding error.”
Insider trading has long run rampant on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. We’ve seen shady accounts profit from accurately predicting the US invasion of Venezuela, resulting in arrests, or correctly guess everything that was going to happen at this year’s Super Bowl half-time show.
Now, in a particularly egregious instance of the worrying trend, president Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator made tens of thousands of dollars by betting on Kalshi what the president would say, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
According to the sources, federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are in settlement talks with Trump’s technical assistant, Gabriel Perez, over allegations that he used inside knowledge to win more than $100,000.
That’s despite Trump being well-known for going on lengthy, off-script tirades during his infamously incoherent speeches.
“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators,” Kalshi’s lead lawyer, Bobby DeNault, told ABC in a statement.
Despite Trump being in the news today about manipulating markets by promoting companies on Truth Social, the White House claimed that it had “strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow.”
“The staffer in question is fully cooperating with the CFTC,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told ABC.
At the time of writing, Perez is still one of the president’s teleprompter operators, despite glaring evidence he was enriching himself on Kalshi. Given the Trump administration’s lengthy track record of throwing its staff under the bus following controversies, we wouldn’t be shocked to see the technical assistant get the axe sooner rather than later.
But we’re not holding our breath over any imminent federal rules and regulations aimed at prediction platforms.
Reflect Orbital staff shown standing by one of its large reflective surface components (Credit: Reflect Orbital)
Welcome to this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief… a controversy has erupted in recent days with the FCC’s approval of a proof-of-concept satellite that reflects daylight to Earth at night, in a move that has astronomers concerned. In our analysis, we’ll be looking at 1) the FCC’s approval of Reflect Orbital’s Eärendil-1 satellite, 2) what the company says about its sunlight mirror orbital technologies, 3) the sharp responses from the astronomical community, and 4) where things go from here as the demonstration satellite heads toward production.
Quote of the Week
“While we fully support American technical innovation in space, this innovation cannot come at the cost of imperiling scientific research, which has been at the forefront of American innovation and global leadership for decades.”
– American Astronomical Society statement
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FCC Approves Launch of Satellite Designed to Reflect Sunlight to Earth’s Nightside
This week, in a controversial ruling that has sky watchers (and others) concerned, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the launch of an experimental satellite crafted to reflect sunlight onto Earth after sunset.
The move has seen significant pushback from astronomers, who now warn that the technology would likely interfere with scientific observations and alter the natural appearance of the night sky.
Dubbed Eärendil 1, the satellite is being developed by the California-based Reflect Orbital as a proof-of-concept for the company’s larger, and potentially even more impactful vision: as many as 50,000 orbiting mirrors capable of directing sunlight to different regions on Earth.
While astronomers have expressed concern over the implementation of such orbital systems, the company says its satellites would offer the possibility for providing illumination after dark in select areas, which could be used to extend the operation hours for solar powered facilities.
Eärendil 1: A Case Study in Controversy
Branding itself as “the sunlight company,” Reflect Orbital says in a statement at its website that it aims to provide “clean, abundant energy available on demand,” because “reliable access to affordable energy is the foundation of human progress, economic growth, and a healthier planet.”
The satellite, which shares its name with Eärendil the Mariner, a character from J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythos, will carry an 18-by-18-meter (59-by-59-foot) reflective Mylar surface that unfolds in orbit after launch. Operating roughly 625 kilometers (390 miles) above Earth, the spacecraft is designed to redirect sunlight onto specific target areas of approximately five kilometers (three miles) in width.
Although many are sounding the alarm about the potential consequences of such technology, the Reflect Orbital says it maintains strict exclusion zones where astronomical operations or “sensitive areas” exist, and that its technology can be carefully deployed only to regions identified as target areas.
According to a FAQ page on the company’s website, the light produced by Eärendil 1 and future members of the company’s constellation will be “contained within the spot” among several other safety features it promotes. The company also says it can turn off the light quickly, and disable it at any time to prevent light from reaching Earth.
“The light is not bright enough to start fires or harm eyes,” the company’s FAQ page states, “even when viewed through a telescope, and cannot be concentrated past maximum natural sunlight irradiance.”
The company’s CEO, Ben Nowack, has argued the concept could improve the economics of solar power overall, allowing Earth-based power systems the ability to harvest additional sunlight before sunrise and after sunset.
Criticism Abounds
The proposal has drawn criticism from several groups, particularly the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which urged the FCC to reject the application.
“The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is dismayed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision on 9 July to grant a license to Reflect Orbital,” the organization said in a statement following the FCC ruling. “As the AAS expressed to the FCC, Reflect Orbital’s proposed satellite, which would reflect sunlight back to Earth at night, carries the potential for significant harm to our members and the broader community of those who depend on a dark night sky.”
“This harm could include damage to sensitive research telescope equipment, potential flash-blinding of pilots and drivers, and — as Reflect Orbital stated in its own FCC filings — potential permanent eye damage to anyone looking through a mid-sized telescope,” the AAS statement adds, noting what appears to be a sharp contrast between information contained in FCC filings, and that which appears on the company’s website.
Further, research cited by the AAS suggests that a full constellation of Reflect Orbital satellites could increase nighttime sky brightness by a factor of two to three, even at remote observatories, due to atmospheric scattering of the reflected light.
“While we fully support American technical innovation in space, this innovation cannot come at the cost of imperiling scientific research, which has been at the forefront of American innovation and global leadership for decades,” the AAS statement concludes.
Beyond FCC Authority
However, in the wording featured in the agency’s approval, the FCC concluded that such concerns fall outside its authority, which is primarily limited to regulating the use of radio-frequency spectrum, adding that it believes the overall likelihood of injury resulting from the launch of the proof-of-concept satellite to be low.
In the meantime, while the FCC’s approval marks an early win for Reflect Orbital, the company has said that it is planning to have independent research commissioned to help assess the technology’s environmental and scientific impacts. Additionally, the company says it plans to coordinate with the National Science Foundation to help ensure that its efforts align with those of the broader scientific community.
Fundamentally, the AAS’s disappointment—a view expressed by other members of the scientific community, argues that the ruling presents broader questions about who should oversee the environmental consequences of future space-based illumination projects, especially if such systems end up becoming more widespread in the years ahead.
“In the absence of another licensing agency that could take these considerations into account, we believe that it is critical for the FCC to consider all of the impacts of the satellite’s use case,” the AAS said in its statement this week.
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