Despite a financial situation more reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme than a technological revolution, the data center boom is continuing at a rapid pace, bringing novel kinds of biological contamination, ear-splitting noise, and unprecedented levels of pollution to communities across the US.

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 to start looking for inspiration.

More on data centers: New York Becomes First State to Ban AI Data Centers

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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.

More on the AI bubble: Tech Billionaires Are Quietly Rooting for AI Bubble to Collapse

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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.

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Investors Are Lamenting All the Money They’ve Lost

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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.”

More on AI: Americans Increasingly Alarmed About Tech Industry’s Looming AI Bubble

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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.

Kalshi, which has started to crack down on insider trading, was alarmed by the activity.

“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.

Government insider trading allegations have plagued Trump’s second term. And Trump has long sided with prediction market companies in their fight with state gambling regulators. His family has extensive ties to the industry as well, with his son, Donald Trump Jr, serving as an advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

Netizens were left shaking their heads following the latest revelation.

“Even his teleprompter guy is corrupt,” one user wrote on Bluesky.

“Feel like it’s been too long since there was a prediction-market scandal?” reporter Ben Horney tweeted. “You’re in luck.”

More on Kalshi: Kalshi Says It’s Busted a MrBeast Staffer for Insider Trading

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