Free Republic

FIRST ON FOX: The same hard-left network behind "No Kings" and other protests is leading the battle against data centers and Flock surveillance cameras, according to a Fox News Digital investigation and a new report. In growing protests from San Francisco to North Carolina, organizations and activists associated with the same ecosystem that rallied against President Donald Trump, Israel, Elon Musk, Tesla and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the last two years are now taking on data-center construction and license-plate readers. The overlap includes organizations funded by pro-China, Shanghai-based tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham, whose sprawling nonprofit and media...

Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night. Why it matters: The U.S. and China are racing to build the world's most advanced AI systems — and it appears Chinese propaganda has infiltrated American circles with the hope of slowing the U.S. down. Driving the news: The X Safety team probed suspected Chinese accounts involved in influence operations and identified 200,000 accounts, including 200 accounts "posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy,"...

In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing Luddites, environmentalists and all kinds of naysayers to call the tune. There is some truth in that, which is why the growth in the US economy has outstripped that of Europe this century. It’s also why America has a near monopoly in the tech sphere that now shapes our age. Now, however, America, like Europe, finds itself consumed by a popular war against data centers. Given that these centers are the beating heart of the modern economy, just...

SpaceX's plan to build the world's largest facility -- 100 million square feet in Grimes County, Texas, near Houston -- to do advanced computing and also manufacture, test and package silicon chips for its own use and by other Elon Musk-owned companies, will be self-powered using a gigawatt-scale natural gas power plant and battery storage, according to the company.The operations "are not expected to use electricity from the grid," the company said in a tax abatement agreement it entered into with the county in June.

President Donald Trump went to bat for data centers on Monday morning, arguing that communities opposing the warehouses powering artificial intelligence will “end up being backwards and poor.” Data centers have become an increasingly contentious and toxic issue for many Republicans on the campaign trail, especially in key swing states like Ohio and Michigan. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” Trump...

Despite the tech industry’s conviction that the rise of AI is an inflection point that will change the course of humanity, many humans remain skeptical whether the new direction we’re headed in is the right one. As Statista's Felix Richter reports below, the pace at which AI seems to be taking over parts of our lives, whether we like it or not, is especially worrisome to many.In a recent Statista Consumer Insights survey, 31 percent of U.S. respondents said that they were worried about the speed at which AI is developing and 25 percent of respondents claimed to be avoiding...

On Dec. 13 last year, a stranger in a Brown University bathroom noticed a man dressed head to toe in black, wrong for the weather, mere hours before that same man opened fire on Brown University’s campus, killing two and wounding eight before vanishing. Investigators had almost nothing: no name, no plate, just a tip describing a gray Nissan with Florida plates. But that was enough: Providence police ran it through a network of more than 70 Flock Safety cameras, which reached back through 30 days of history, and found the car had passed 14 times since Dec. 1. “We...

Grass roots opposition to data centers has spread rapidly. Why? In part, at least, because it is funded by the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese view artificial intelligence as the great arms race of our time, and they are determined to surpass the United States in what may prove to be the most important battleground of the 21st century. Given the technological expertise the Chinese have attained and the human capital in their population, that goal may well be achievable. For many years, the USSR subsidized the environmental movement in the U.S. Why? To suppress American production of oil and...

It’s all about how and where. It seems that everyone is talking about data centers these days; they’ve taken over the Internet with memes and conspiracy theories. As a computer professor, I decided to apply an academic research regimen to the situation and cut through the exaggeration and emotion that often accompany these current polarizing issues. Two important points to begin with: AI’s water and power usage. As I have demonstrated in my previous article, data centers use about 0.02% of the water supply in the US according to recent sources, and most future data centers are already planned to...

The Global Government Affairs team over at X dropped a bombshell Thursday night, revealing that the X Safety team had uncovered proof positive of a foreign influence campaign targeting the build out of AI and data centers in the United States. It turns out that, after launching an investigation, the team uncovered a massive bot farm consisting of roughly 200,000 "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts," including hundreds that appear to have been trying to manipulate debate in the U.S. over artificial intelligence, data centers, and the associated energy costs. ... According to X, about 200 accounts within the bot farm network...

What jobs do data centers actually create? It is a question increasingly on Americans’ minds as public opinion turns against data centers, their construction, environmental footprint, energy and water use, and uncertain local economic benefits. Yet in an era when President Trump has promised to reindustrialize America, many people are asking a simpler question: what good jobs will these facilities actually provide?First, it is important to remember that jobs should not be the primary metric for evaluating any infrastructure project. Treating them as such is reminiscent of the public-works programs of the 1930s under FDR, when the focus often shifted...

Artificial intelligence data centers have been a hot topic in Utah this summer, and reforms could be on the way. Gov. Spencer Cox told reporters at his Aug. 20 monthly news conference to expect efforts to change the approval process and additional regulation for data centers when lawmakers return to Capitol Hill in January. Central to that move toward reform, he said, was the contentious Stratos Project in Box Elder County, which experienced incredible public pushback earlier this year. “The process was not good, and the MIDA process, especially,” he said. “I think we need major reform when it comes...

This is crazy! I hope someone knows how to post transcribed video.

MARQUETTE, Mich. (WBUP / WJMN) — Communities across the Upper Peninsula are rallying against the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers, drawing support from local residents and a well-known Midwestern comedy star. Dozens gathered at the Ore Dock Brewing Company in Marquette on Monday night for a panel discussion hosted by the Northern Michigan Alliance for Responsible Development. The event, one of four held across northern Michigan, aimed to educate the public on how to protect their communities from potential infrastructure strain and environmental impacts. Comedian Charlie Berens, of Wisconsin, attended the Marquette event to lend his platform to the...

I ask for your patience, this is an experiment. This is an AI summary of a video that Jay Martin released yesterday so that you don't have to spend 25 minutes watching the video, which I recommend but which few of you would bother doing. I firmly believe that we are heading down a perilous economic path that few here have an understanding of. Executive Briefing: 2008 vs 2026 — The Same Dominoes Are Falling1. Executive Summary & Core Thesis• High-Level Overview: This briefing provides a detailed structural breakdown comparing the subprime mortgage mechanics of the 2008 Financial Crisis with...

The job market has been a tough sell for many Gen Z graduates, with tariffs, economic uncertainty, and artificial intelligence reshaping hiring plans across corporate America. But according to Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, the next wave of six-figure opportunities won't be found in a Wall Street cubicle or Silicon Valley Slack channel. Instead, high-paying careers will partially come by picking up a wrench—literally.As tech giants race to build sprawling data centers—totaling $7 trillion in global capital outlays by the end of the decade—Huang believes the world is on the cusp of what he calls the "largest infrastructure build-out in human...

A quaint palm-tree-lined coastal California town is in revolt over plans to build a massive 'hyperscale' data center on their doorstep. Residents of Pittsburg, California, a sleepy boating town that shares the same name as Pennsylvania's second city, are furious about the move to build a 76-acre data center campus called Perseus on what was once the beloved local golf course. AVAIO Digital's 99-megawatt facility is 'strategically' positioned near the East Bay, which is located 35 miles outside of San Francisco. In a rowdy city council meeting on Monday, Pittsburg residents demanded answers and insisted that the project has no...

After a year of holding back on new hires, companies from tech and transportation to defense now say they need more people to work alongside AIAmerica’s biggest companies say they might need more people after all. For months, major employers treated hiring as an expensive last resort. Now, a shift is emerging across industries. Companies ranging from railroad giant CSX to Google parent Alphabet GOOGL have told investors in recent days that they plan to hire to meet growth goals or to seize on emerging technologies.The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing...

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it has attacked Amazon’s data infrastructure in Bahrain, according to a statement reported by Fars, an IRGC-linked state media outlet. Fars News Agency said on Tuesday the IRGC had “attacked the central data infrastructure of the American company Amazon in Bahrain with several cruise missiles and destroyed it,” according to a translated Telegram post. CNBC was unable to independently verify the information. CNBC has reached out to the National Communication Center of Bahrain and Amazon for comment. Hostilities between the U.S. and Iran have ratcheted up over the past 10 days as President Donald...

They’re bot for teacher. A rural upstate New York school district will be one of the first in the nation to bring a humanoid robot into the classroom. The Salamanca City Central School District, located on Seneca Nation territory, will be introducing $57,000 AI-powered “Sally” in high school classes in September as a teaching assistant, it announced last week. “Sally” will have brown hair, latex skin and will be able to move its arms and hands — but won’t be able to cruise around the classroom since her legs don’t move. “It’s exciting but also a bit nerve wracking,” superintendent...