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For years, privacy advice has been relatively straightforward: turn off location services, strip location metadata from photographs, keep your face out of pictures, and be careful about what personal information you post online. Artificial intelligence is beginning to complicate that advice. A new generation of AI systems doesn't necessarily need you to explicitly reveal where you are or even who you are. Instead, machines are becoming increasingly capable of extracting clues buried inside photographs, videos, voices and surveillance footage -- clues most people would never notice. Some of these technologies have obvious benefits. They could help locate hostages, identify criminals,...

I am sick and tired of the left’s war on data centers. Hey leftist idiot jerks, if you use a mobile device such as your phone, do any online searching, visit any website, have a bank account, or basically interact with the modern world in any way, a data center is not just involved but essential. So the two major Trojan horses are (a) water use and (b) electrical costs. Let’s address each in turn. (a) Water use: Data centers recycle their water. A massive data center fills up with about as much water as two hotel swimming pools. Then...

Apple is making a much clearer bet on local AI computing with its latest Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops. Announced on August 25, 2026, the new machines are built around Apple’s new M6 and M5 Ultra chips, with the company emphasizing on-device AI, AI agents, large language models and professional workloads rather than treating AI as simply another feature. The new Mac mini starts at $899, while the Mac Studio starts at $2,499. Both are available for preorder, with availability beginning September 22. The bigger story, however, is not just faster Macs. Apple is increasingly positioning its desktop hardware...

Are data centers draining Arizona's water? Today, Project 48 officially launches a public information campaign to take on that question and the bigger debate over Arizona's growth. We're putting the facts where Arizonans can see them: on digital billboards across the Valley, online, and in your hands. Arizona has added millions of people and built a $600 billion economy while using less water statewide than it did in 1957. Data centers account for less than 1% of Arizona's total water use. Explore the research, see our sources, and send us the data center questions you want answered: 🔗 project48az.com/datacenters 📱...

Four American startups have brought their first small nuclear reactors to life, each reaching the point where the reactor can sustain a controlled chain reaction. The companies are chasing a specific goal: generating power on-site for the electricity-hungry data centers behind the artificial intelligence boom. Reaching criticality is a significant technical milestone, though it remains a long way from a fully operational commercial power plant.

“I would hate to see China win the war on AI… I have a sense that China is funding the opposition to AI [data] centers.” That was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in a Breitbart News interview on Aug. 31 warning that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might be funding opposition to data centers — there are more than 5,400 data centers nationwide according to Cloudscene — utilized by artificial intelligence (AI) and other internet companies to store and process large amounts of data used every day on our smart phones, computers and by large critical infrastructure including financial, educational, communications,...

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that the rollout of the current round of AI panic was pre-planned and that the incidents that "triggered" it were staged, but there is no direct proof.

In early 2025, almost no one predicted a recovery in American manufacturing. But manufacturing output has been recovering for a year and a half, and this year hiring finally joined it: factory employment stopped falling in December and has added 58,000 jobs in 2026. The recovery is narrow. Almost all of it, in output and in hiring, comes from advanced manufacturing: chemicals including pharma, machinery, computers and electronics, and transportation equipment. The rest of the sector is still flat or shrinking. The job gains are modest and probably always will be, because these are the most capital-intensive factories in the...

Hacking a weak computer system does not equal global doomsday. The news has been full of articles recently about how we’re all going to die by 2030, 2027, or insert your year number. (The piece then quotes from an article from another source... and then continues.) For starters, we can discount the AI supervirus threat. AI doesn’t have to develop a doomsday virus, that world killing doomsday virus was already developed by the Aussie CSIRO in 2001 – who then promptly went on to tell everyone how to replicate their work. Aussie researchers stumbled across a simple genetic hack which...

While China has been pouring billions into its own AI infrastructure and expansion, it may also be funding an equally expensive influence campaign here in the U.S. to oppose the building of data centers — critical to advancing the technology. *** While China is massively expanding their AI industry growing evidence indicates they are pushing misinformation campaigns in the U.S. with the goal of stopping or delaying the build out of data centers. These centers are massive computing factories with significant energy and water needs that are key to running AI systems like Grok*** The data centers have become a...

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...