“It’s going to be an absolute nightmare,” says an executive at a big American tech company. He is talking about an emerging problem for businesses that use artificial intelligence. AI agents—bots that can read, interpret and act—use masses of processing power and have started to run up huge bills. As they proliferate, the problem will grow. Big companies, the executive points out, typically use hundreds of software programs. If each of those offer agents (as they probably will), AI costs could easily spiral out of control.

Budget management is a new worry for AI adopters. Not long ago employees were encouraged to binge on the technology, as bosses and investors saw spending as a sign of innovation. Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—became a badge of honour; techies dubbed it “tokenmaxxing”. Companies showed off staff’s AI use on internal leaderboards. Meta’s display awarded top users titles like “Token Legend”.

Such incentives partly explain the boom in AI spending. Another contributing factor is a change in the way enterprises use the technology. Token-heavy applications, such as reasoning models and agents, are growing more popular. In some cases agents build their own agents, sending costs higher still. Ramp, a corporate-credit-card provider, analyses its clients’ transaction data to shed light on how they use AI. It reckons their overall spending has risen 13-fold in the past year. In April Uber said that it had already spent its annual AI budget in four months. Other firms are experiencing similar problems. One reportedly spent $500m on AI tokens in a month. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has described mounting customer costs as “a huge issue”.

For now, the problem is concentrated. The top spenders tend to be tech firms….

Read it all.

Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—was once a badge of honour. Now budget management is a worry for AI adopters https://t.co/TZsf1H2BHC

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 16, 2026

A new style of architecture is rising in the sprawling suburbs of the Sonoran Desert: windowless data centers that hum 24 hours a day and guzzle as much electricity as a midsize city.

As Microsoft and other tech giants expand their footprints in one of the nation’s largest data-center markets, a high-stakes battle is unfolding over how to pay for the massive power-grid upgrades needed to drive the AI revolution. 

Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility, sits at the center of the firestorm. APS is proposing a 45% electricity-rate increase for “extra-large energy users,” primarily data centers, and a roughly 14.5% increase for residential customers.

Nearly everyone is unhappy.

Consumer advocates warn the plan would shift the financial risks of the AI build-out to households already struggling with high summer electricity bills and temperatures that often hit triple digits. If the AI boom fizzles or the energy consumption of data centers wanes, they worry residents could be left paying off the infrastructure upgrades years from now.

Read it all.

Phoenix Is a Data-Center Mecca—and Test Case for How to Pay for AI’s Power Needs
State’s largest utility is proposing a 45% electricity-rate increase for data centers and a 14.5% hike for households. No one is happy.https://t.co/m1xMQtoJsq

— Giovanni Staunovo🛢 (@staunovo) June 4, 2026

Elon Musk’s SpaceX pulled back the curtain on a business empire that has racked up ballooning losses and debt after acquiring a cash-hungry startup, and pumping billions of dollars into futuristic endeavors ranging from AI to a Mars rocket.

The prospectus that SpaceX filed Wednesday for an IPO of unprecedented size boiled down to a well-worn strategy that entrepreneurs commonly hawk up and down Wall Street: in order to make money, we need to spend money. And nowhere are the outlays larger than in space and artificial intelligence.

“The big takeaway for me is that SpaceX is now an AI company,” said Chad Anderson, an early SpaceX investor and founder of Space Capital.

Musk is seeking to pull off the unprecedented feat of achieving a $2 trillion valuation from the outset, an audacious plan that’s set to transform both the public and private markets if it succeeds. At the same time, the prospectus lays bare concerns over whether private companies with limited financial disclosures and largely illiquid shares are reaching unjustified valuations in venture capital-led funding rounds.

Read it all.

Elon Musk is seeking to pull off the unprecedented feat of achieving a $2 trillion valuation from the outset, an audacious plan that’s set to transform markets if it succeeds. Read more: https://t.co/9IYTIOGzoh

📷: Brandon Bell/Getty Images pic.twitter.com/1EFis4o0TP

— Bloomberg (@business) May 21, 2026

I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead.

A few days later, I sat across from my bishop, explaining the experiment and watching a look of pastoral concern come over his face. After some consideration, he said (a bit tentatively, if I’m being honest), “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.” He grasped the difference between gambling with my own money and using my employer’s for research purposes. But he had also seen too many lives wrecked by vice to let me leave without a warning. He told me stories he’d heard about upstanding family men who had let an initially modest gambling habit ruin them, and a cautionary tale about a churchgoing lawyer who developed an unhealthy curiosity about sex work after handling a prostitution case and wound up devastating his family.

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

Read it all.

The Atlantic: Sucker – My year as a degenerate gambler – A fantastic longform article on gambling https://t.co/9ShN6LGFwD

— Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 (@aaron_renn) March 13, 2026

It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as Vinay Prasad. In his latest drive-by shooting, the leader of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine without even a cursory review. This is arbitrary government at its worst.

The FDA rarely refuses to review a drug or vaccine application. Our sources say the FDA has rejected only about 4% of applications without a review, typically when they are missing important information. That wasn’t the case with Moderna.

Dr. Prasad spiked Moderna’s flu vaccine because its Phase 3 trial was putatively not “adequate and well-controlled.” He quibbled that the control group in Moderna’s late-stage trial didn’t receive the “best-available standard of care.” He decides what is “best.”

Moderna launched a global randomized controlled trial in September 2024 with 41,000 participants, half of whom received its vaccine. The other half received a standard flu vaccine as a control. The FDA blessed its trial design, and agency staffers gave Moderna a thumbs up to apply for approval last August based on the results. Its vaccine was 27% more effective at preventing symptomatic cases of flu and 49% more effective against hospitalization than the standard flu vaccine.

Read it all.

The WSJ Editorial Board weighs in:
“It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as Vinay Prasad. In his latest drive-by shooting, the leader of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division rejected Moderna ’s mRNA flu…

— Amy Siskind 🏳️‍🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) February 13, 2026

‘In large corporations and administrations, justification and self-protection have become the primary motive in place of achievement. In this world, intuition is not talked about openly, but relied on surreptitiously.’

–Gerd Gigerenzer, The Intelligence of Intuition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Gerd Gigerenzer:

Why simple rules of thumb often outperform complex models.https://t.co/FrPo8Csqfd

— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) March 2, 2021

Those who believe in Elon Musk are convinced both by his vision to go where no one has ventured before and his ability to pay for it—what some call the “Elon backstop”. Mr Musk’s announcement on February 2nd that he will merge SpaceX, which builds rockets and sells satellite broadband, with xAI, his artificial-intelligence lab, was not short of ambition. The world’s richest man declared that the new company would “extend the light of consciousness to the stars”. Back on Earth, however, it is getting harder to see how Mr Musk’s numbers add up.

The transaction values the new entity at $1.25trn; investors in SpaceX will be entitled to 80%, with the remainder going to xAI’s owners (Mr Musk holds a controlling stake in both). The stated rationale behind the tie-up is that the companies will work together to launch a fleet of data centres into space, giving xAI a big advantage in the race to develop cutting-edge models while furnishing SpaceX with a new line of business. More immediately, combining the two could further boost interest in a public listing expected this summer.

By bringing SpaceX and xAI together, however, Mr Musk is saddling a money-spinning space champion with a loss-making AI laggard. At the same time, he is reshaping Tesla, the carmaker he runs, into a “physical-AI company” focused on self-driving taxis and humanoid robots. If the latest wave of AI proves as transformative as some expect, these bold gambles might just pay off. If not, Mr Musk’s business empire could well be in jeopardy.

Read it all.

The fates of xAI, SpaceX and Tesla are increasingly intertwined https://t.co/UlUWKowPVk

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 4, 2026

Corporate America’s latest hot job is also one of the oldest in history: storyteller.

Some companies want a media relations manager by a slightly flashier name. Others need people to produce blogs, podcasts, case studies and more types of branded content to attract customers, investors and potential recruits. All seem to use the word differently than in its usual application to novelists, playwrights and raconteurs.

“As storytellers,” a Google job ad said last month, “we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long-term growth.”

The listing sought a customer storytelling manager to join the company’s Google Cloud storytelling team. One article the unit published this year was titled, “Lowe’s innovation: How Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences.”

Microsoft’s security organization meanwhile is recruiting a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling, described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator and part marketer. Compliance technology firm Vanta this month began hiring for a head of storytelling, offering a salary of up to $274,000. Productivity app Notion recently merged its communications, social media and influencer functions into one 10-person, so-called storytelling team.

Read it all.

The hot new job at tech companies is leading "storytelling."

The term doubled on LinkedIn job posts in the U.S since last year. The WSJ writes:

"Compliance technology firm Vanta this month began hiring for a head of storytelling, offering a salary of up to $274,000."… pic.twitter.com/TQzUXPwl8g

— Natalie Sportelli (@N_Sportelli) December 15, 2025

What uses of AI are in your life that the rest of us might not yet have?

Yesterday, I stayed up far too late watching a film and afterwards, I added to a table that I’ve made in Copilot, which basically records all the films I love, lists them by date. I add my personal notes, it gives me a link to the film poster. I can keep just saying, What would be a similar one?

It’s possible to ask your AI to do pretty much any knowledge work task — just like you might ask an assistant to organize your life. The more obscure, creative [and] challenging the task you’re going to ask your AI, the better. 1

¹ Suleyman also appears to be a keen reader; the bookshelf behind him in Seattle offered a glimpse of his tastes. Titles included the most recent books by Michael Wolff and Robert Kaplan, as well as The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley, and Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.

Have you used AI for autonomous tasks? Has it booked tickets or bought a gift for you? I know this is the promise of Copilot Actions — it’s just not available in my region, so I haven’t been able to try it myself.

We’re still experimenting. It can do it. It doesn’t always get it right. It’s in ‘dev mode,’ so not generally available just yet.

When it does work, it is the most magical thing you’ve ever seen. It essentially types stuff into your browser, clicks on buttons, opens up new tabs. It can look at your history, [and] personalize the purchase or the response to you.

Read it all.

AI is “already superhuman,” says Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman in a Weekend Interview that touches on medical superintelligence, AI talent wars and Copilot as a companion. https://t.co/sVwI0jOVLA a través de @business pic.twitter.com/JmGRqTAEkX

— maria betancur n (@mariabetancur9) December 12, 2025

When describing the health of the US economy, there is a temptation among economists, market analysts, and politicians to argue that the only true picture of our current situation is a sweeping portrait — only by looking at the broadest of aggregate statistics can you determine the state of play, they argue. But the wide view can ignore important developments unfolding under the surface. Sometimes, even the healthiest-looking person might have high cholesterol.

Right now, the economy seems OK on the surface. GDP growth has been running north of 3% for the last two quarters. In the labor market, the boilerplate appears to be that conditions are gradually cooling, but nothing more, nothing less. For example, despite the slowdown in new hiring, the unemployment rate of 4.4% is still low by historical standards. But there are serious dangers lurking beneath the surface of our economy, and it is better to clearly identify them than to ignore them in favor of broad aggregate measures.

Major employers in industries like homebuilding and restaurants are looking shaky, and they offer ominous signs about the direction of the overall economy. By getting a sense of what sectors and industries are struggling, you can get a forward-looking sense of the economy’s trajectory and a clearer-eyed view of the possibility of recession.

Read it all.

Read of the Weekend. Once more, Dutta with devastating Charts. @RenMacLLC https://t.co/o5t4kotvIL

— tom keene (@tomkeene) November 24, 2025

No one worries about the insurance industry quite like Tom Gober.

From his home office outside of Pittsburgh, the forensic accountant has been tracking, documenting and highlighting the weaknesses of the $9.3 trillion sector responsible for the financial well-being of millions of Americans.

“I’ve been seeing warning signs for years, and I’ve been very vocal about it,” Gober, 66, said in a recent interview in his living room. More recently, he’s been paying attention to what he says is the most troubling development yet: The influx of private equity’s billions.

The industry waves off its critics as needlessly alarmist, always predicting a disaster that never comes. But that mid-October afternoon, Gober’s phone began to light up. Josh Wander, the co-founder of 777 Partners, a private equity firm on Gober’s radar, had been charged with cheating investors and lenders out of almost $500 million — an alleged fraud enabled in part by its opaque and intricate ties with some US insurance companies.

Read it all.

Some great reporting from Bloomberg this week about how private equity is making a grab for life insurance money and hiding it away where traders are gambling it without much oversight. https://t.co/QNe2jf8OzO pic.twitter.com/AIwLA0GEQT

— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) November 19, 2025

The financing package stitched together for Meta’s humongous Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana made Alphaville curious about just how much energy the new AI infrastructure will consume if it all comes online.

After all, massive new projects are being announced almost every week, in what even KKR’s digital infrastructure lead called a “bragawatts” phenomenon in MainFT on Monday.

The latest example is OpenAI on Thursday revealing plans for a 1+ gigawatt data centre hub in Michigan. Together with previously announced “Stargate” projects this brings the total to over 8 gigawatts — close to the 10 target it floated earlier this year. This will cost over $450 billion over the next three years, according to the company that spends more on marketing and employee stock options than it makes in revenue.

So how many data center projects have now been started or announced? Which ones will actually happen and which ones are fantasy? As Barclays noted last week, tracking “what is real vs. speculative is a full-time job”, but the bank has forced some poor sell-side plebs to at least tally all the announcements and collect some rudimentary details.

So what is the total so far? With OpenAI’s Michigan project they now total 46 gigawatts of computing power. Apologies for the virtual shouting, but this seems a bit mad.

These centers will cost $2.5 trillion to build, according to Barclays, to service an industry that still doesn’t turn a profit. But the maddest bit arguably is how much energy they will require once completed. Using Barclays’ 1.2 “Power Use Effectiveness” ratio, all these data centres — if they are all completed — would need 55.2 gigawatts of electricity to function at full capacity.

If we also use Barclays’ rule of thumb that 1 gigawatt can power over 800,000 American homes, it means that these data centres will consume as much energy as 44.2 million households — almost three times California’s entire housing stock.

Read it all.

Hyperscalers announced new data centres with 46GW of computing power

>Cost: $2.5tn to build
>Require 55GW to 65GW of base load electricity

That's more than the total installed capacity of Poland or Sweden, 6 times New Zealand or Singapore, 50% of UKhttps://t.co/7j43C7QUwV pic.twitter.com/LrEfaKvpEk

— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) November 4, 2025

The nation’s largest employers have a new message for office workers: help not wanted.

Amazon.com said this week that it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs, with plans to eliminate as much as 10% of its white-collar workforce eventually. United Parcel Service said Tuesday that it had reduced its management workforce by about 14,000 positions over the past 22 months, days after the retailer Target said it would cut 1,800 corporate roles.

Earlier in October, white-collar workers from companies including Rivian Automotive, Molson Coors, Booz Allen Hamilton and General Motors received pink slips—or learned that they would come soon. Added up, tens of thousands of newly laid off white-collar workers in America are entering a stagnant job market with seemingly no place for them.

At 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Kelly Williamson woke up to an alarming text from her employer, Amazon’s Whole Foods Market, urging her to check her email.

“Review asap and stay home from work today,” the message said. Williamson’s role on the asset-protection team was being eliminated. The badge and laptop for the 55-year-old from Austin, Texas, were deactivated. She was given 90 days to look for another job at the company. She said her personal belongings are being mailed to her.

Read it all.

Tens of Thousands of White-Collar Jobs Are Disappearing as #AI Starts to Bite#RiseoftheRobotshttps://t.co/xvlekZBJIq via @WSJ

— Martin Ford (@MFordFuture) October 29, 2025

Editor’s note: Today, we’re announcing research that shows — for the first time in history — that a quantum computer can successfully run a verifiable algorithm on hardware, surpassing even the fastest classical supercomputers (13,000x faster). It can compute the structure of a molecule, and paves a path towards real-world applications. Today’s advance builds on decades of work, and six years of major breakthroughs. Back in 2019, we demonstrated that a quantum computer could solve a problem that would take the fastest classical supercomputer thousands of years. Then, late last year (2024), our new Willow quantum chip showed how to dramatically suppress errors, solving a major issue that challenged scientists for nearly 30 years. Today’s breakthrough moves us much closer to quantum computers that can drive major discoveries in areas like medicine and materials science.

Imagine you’re trying to find a lost ship at the bottom of the ocean. Sonar technology might give you a blurry shape and tell you, “There’s a shipwreck down there.” But what if you could not only find the ship but also read the nameplate on its hull?

That’s the kind of unprecedented precision we’ve just achieved with our Willow quantum chip. Today, we’re announcing a major algorithmic breakthrough that marks a significant step towards a first real-world application. Just published in Nature, we have demonstrated the first-ever verifiable quantum advantage running the out-of-order time correlator (OTOC) algorithm, which we call Quantum Echoes.

Read it all.

"Google claims ‘quantum advantage’ again — but researchers are sceptical" by Elizabeth Gibney of @Nature https://t.co/mD54zWFEKE
Original @Google article, "Observation of constructive interference at the edge of quantum ergodicity," is at https://t.co/tY8MiIq4Sn @JointQuICS pic.twitter.com/nh26Z4QWzA

— Charles W. Clark (@g8ge) October 23, 2025

Josh Batson no longer has time for social media.

The AI researcher’s only comparable dopamine hit these days is on Anthropic’s Slack workplace-messaging channels, where he explores chatter about colleagues’ theories and experiments on large language models and architecture.

Batson is among a group of core artificial-intelligence researchers and executives who are facing a relentless grind, racing to keep pace with a seemingly endless cycle of disruption in pursuit of systems with superhuman intelligence.

Inside Silicon Valley’s biggest AI labs, top researchers and executives are regularly working 80 to 100 hours a week. Several top researchers compared the circumstances to war.

“We’re basically trying to speedrun 20 years of scientific progress in two years,” said Batson, a research scientist at Anthropic. Extraordinary advances in AI systems are happening “every few months,” he said. “It’s the most interesting scientific question in the world right now.”

Read it all.

Take an early look at the front page of today's Wall Street Journal https://t.co/5Z4hcbTVXK pic.twitter.com/NrLMRqJWUU

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 23, 2025

Sequoia Capital’s chief operating officer resigned over comments made by partner Shaun Maguire that she regarded as Islamophobic, as political debates sow division at one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms.

Sumaiya Balbale — a practising Muslim who has spoken publicly about how her gender, ethnicity and faith have shaped her career — stepped down after five years at the company in August. Her decision to leave was precipitated by Maguire’s social media posts, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Maguire, an outspoken and high-profile investor who is close to Elon Musk, wrote on X in July that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.”

Balbale complained to other senior partners at the firm, who declined to take action against Maguire, arguing he was just exercising his right to free speech, the people said. She left soon after, feeling her position was untenable.

Read it all (subscription).

Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire’s comments about Mamdani https://t.co/3WQUHQ0Qnd

— FT Technology News (@fttechnews) October 22, 2025

Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.

Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

Read it all.

Amazon, the second largest employer in the U.S., aims to replace more than half a million jobs with robots, internal documents show. https://t.co/jzxzhcMmfo

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 21, 2025

Meta will use conversations people have with its chatbots to personalize advertising and content across its platforms, in a sign of how tech companies plan to make money from artificial intelligence.

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Wednesday said it would use the content of chats with its Meta AI to create advertising recommendations across its suite of apps.

“People will already expect that their Meta AI interactions are being used for these personalization purposes,” said Christy Harris, privacy and data policy manager at Meta….

Big Tech groups and AI labs have invested billions of dollars in developing and running popular chatbots, but have only recently started to indicate how they will monetise the technology.

Read it all.

Meta to mine AI interactions to help target advertising https://t.co/xtjXT3Hh8X

— FT Technology News (@fttechnews) October 1, 2025

Data centers are proliferating in Virginia and a blind man in Baltimore is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills.

The Maryland city is well over an hour’s drive from the northern Virginia region known as Data Center Alley. But Kevin Stanley, a 57-year-old who survives on disability payments, says his energy bills are about 80% higher than they were about three years ago. “They’re going up and up,” he said. “You wonder, ‘What is your breaking point?’”

It’s an increasingly dramatic ripple effect of the AI boom as energy-hungry data centers send power costs to records in much of the US, pulling everyday households into paying for the digital economy.

The power needs of the massive complexes are rapidly driving up electricity bills — piling onto the rising prices for food, housing and other essentials already straining consumers. That’s starting to have economic and political reverberations across the country as utilities and local officials wrestle over how to divvy up the costs. Yet those same facilities are a linchpin of US leadership in the global AI race.

A Bloomberg News analysis of wholesale electricity prices for tens of thousands of locations across the country reveals the effects of the AI boom on the power market with unprecedented granularity. The locations and prices were tracked and aggregated monthly by Grid Status, an energy data analytics platform. Bloomberg analyzed this data in relation to data center locations, from DC Byte, and found that electricity now costs as much as 267% more for a single month than it did five years ago in areas located near significant data center activity.

Read it all.

AI data centers are sending US power bills soaring, Bloomberg analysis shows
🇺🇸⚡📈

Wholesale prices more than doubled since 2020 in some markets, but those increases arent equal

Of the nodes where prices rose, over 70% are within 50 miles of significant data center activity pic.twitter.com/CwhudAlEcU

— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) September 30, 2025

The windswept town of Ellendale, N.D., population 1,100, has two motels, a Dollar General, a Pentecostal Bible college—and a half-built AI factory bigger than 10 Home Depots.

Its more than $15 billion price tag is equivalent to a quarter of the state’s annual economic output.

The artificial-intelligence boom has ushered in one of the costliest building sprees in world history. Over the past three years, leading tech firms have committed more toward AI data centers like the one in Ellendale, plus chips and energy, than it cost to build the interstate highway system over four decades, when adjusted for inflation. AI proponents liken the effort to the Industrial Revolution.

A big problem: No one is sure how they will get their investment back—or when. 

The building rush is effectively a mega-speculative bet that the technology will rapidly improve, transform the economy and start producing steady profits. “I hope we don’t take 50 years,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a May conference with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, referring to the initially slow adoption of electricity.

“Yeah, well, we’re all investing as if it’s not going to take 50 years,” replied Zuckerberg, who surmised at a recent White House dinner the company’s U.S. spending through 2028 was “probably going to be something like” $600 billion.

Read it all.

Media: "Spending on AI is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off? — There are growing, worrying signs that the optimism about AI won’t pan out. An @MIT report found 95% of organizations surveyed are getting no return on their AI product investments. A @UChicago economics paper… pic.twitter.com/qqE1XpcCs4

— Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) September 26, 2025

American companies are once again beating profit expectations, but this time around they aren’t banking on blockbuster consumer spending to make it happen.

Instead, the latest batch of quarterly earnings is getting a lift from managers who are squeezing out costs, boosting productivity and turning to new technologies. Companies from Monster Beverage to Estée Lauder said they are holding down hiring, often while finding new ways to get employees to work more efficiently. And they are raising prices when they can.

“The processes are human-light now,” Damon Lee, chief financial officer of C.H. Robinson Worldwide , said last month as he told investors about an initiative that includes automation upgrades. The global logistics company reported higher profit margins in the second quarter despite a nearly 8% drop in revenue, which it attributed to a prolonged freight recession. It said it had increased productivity 35% since 2022.

“The outcome of those transformations means less head count, more productivity,” he said.

More broadly, the gains enjoyed by companies and their investors aren’t softening the unease consumers and employees feel—and might be obscuring signals that ordinary Americans are putting their anxiety into action.

Read it all.

For retailers, price increases have generated most of the growth in sales since 2021, with volumes largely flat. Meanwhile, companies are cutting staff on the margins and relying on new technologies to fill gaps. “The processes are human-light now." https://t.co/61FEHkzBCa pic.twitter.com/nprY1Qo2Mg

— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) September 3, 2025

Another reason companies hire consultants is to cover their *&^. As the old saying goes, “Nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey”; even if the project goes poorly, the CEO can blame the consultant instead of management.

But it’s becoming much more difficult for consulting firms to stick with their old tactics, and their old business model. The industry is being disrupted by two powerful forces. The first is the Trump administration’s crackdown on consulting for the federal government. According to the General Services Administration, the top 10 contractors alone were set to be paid $65 billion by the government in 2025—and the administration is adamant that that number be substantially reduced. It is voiding contracts that it does not believe are “mission critical.” And it is insisting that government consultants find significant savings—or else.

In a pointed letter to procurement officials throughout the government, acting GSA head Stephen Ehikian, complaining about the amount the government was spending on consultants, wrote: “This needs to, and must, change.”

The second factor is the arrival of artificial intelligence as a dominant force in American business. Although the big consulting firms are hoping to make money providing AI services to clients, the clients have figured out that AI can often provide an analysis in 10 minutes that used to take a team of junior consultants weeks or months to do. “It used to take two weeks to do a SWOT analysis with all the people engaged in doing research,” said Soren Kaplan, an innovation expert who has predicted for years that AI would upend the consulting business. (“SWOT” stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.) “Now it takes two minutes with AI. It is going to change the economics in a huge way, making everything cheaper and faster. And this is going to come into play in consulting in a huge way.” Ten minutes of work versus two weeks means a lot less money for the consultants.

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The Consulting Crash Is Coming, argues Joe Nocera (@opinion_joe) in @TheFP

"Bloated, overpaid, and outpaced by AI—big firms confront a future they can’t outsource."https://t.co/NTrGqpgGBI pic.twitter.com/j4KNBWR3TK

— Stephen Landry (@landryst) July 11, 2025

After Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center on the edge of Newton County, Ga., the water taps in Beverly and Jeff Morris’s home went dry.

The couple’s house, which uses well water, is 1,000 feet from Meta’s new data center. Months after construction began in 2018, the Morrises’ dishwasher, ice maker, washing machine and toilet all stopped working, said Beverly Morris, now 71. Within a year, the water pressure had slowed to a trickle. Soon, nothing came out of the bathroom and kitchen taps.

Jeff Morris, 67, eventually traced the issues to the buildup of sediment in the water. He said he suspected the cause was Meta’s construction, which could have added sediment to the groundwater and affected their well. The couple replaced most of their appliances in 2019, and then again in 2021 and 2024. Residue now gathers at the bottom of their backyard pool. The taps in one of their two bathrooms still do not work….

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"As tech giants like Meta build data centers in the area, local wells have been damaged, the cost of municipal water has soared and the county’s water commission may face a shortage of the vital resource."https://t.co/hLr6i31S5z

— Pat_Garofalo (@Pat_Garofalo) July 14, 2025

…[America] lags behind Russia and China in manufacturing drones, training soldiers to use them and defending against them, according to interviews with more than a dozen U.S. military officials and drone industry experts….

Drones have become a weapon of choice on modern battlefields. In the early days of the war in Ukraine, soldiers beat back the Russian invasion by adding deadly modifications to the Mavic, a drone sold to hobbyists by DJI, a Chinese company that is the world’s largest drone manufacturer. Versions of the Mavic cost between $300 and $5,000, according to online retailers.

DJI, of Shenzhen, China, accounts for about 70 percent of all commercial drones sold globally for hobby and industrial use, such as aerial photography, package delivery and weather research. The privately held company sells its equipment to customers in the United States — there’s even an authorized store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan — but U.S. law bars the military from buying Chinese drones. The company declined to share market data, but industry experts estimate that DJI’s output far exceeds that of any other drone manufacturer.

“No one even comes close,” said Bobby Sakaki, chief executive of UAS NEXUS, a drone industry consultant. “DJI can make millions of drones per year. That is a hundred times more than anybody in the United States can make.”

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Drones are key to winning wars. But the US hardly makes any. https://t.co/LDPLiCmDnC

— Samuel Bendett (@sambendett) July 13, 2025

But on other measures, firms that were strict on office time scored worse than more relaxed ones (see chart). Firms with five-day mandates received lower marks from employees for supportiveness (whether employees feel like their bosses care about them), quality of leadership, toxicity (the extent to which disrespectful behaviour is tolerated in the workplace), candour and work-life balance. (On the three other measures tracked by CultureX, the companies did not score meaningfully better or worse.)

The analysis has its limitations. In particular, it could also be the case that companies which care less about supporting employees or rooting out toxic behaviour are less inclined to heed workers’ pleas for more flexibility. Even so, the results are suggestive. “Companies that really score highly on agility—NVIDIA, SpaceX, Tesla—tend to strike a deal with their employees,” says Don Sull (who is also a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management). Employees are offered generous pay, great career opportunities and other perks. “But the trade-off is the work-life balance tends to be really bad.”

More than five years after the pandemic, companies are still trying to find the right mix of in-person and remote work. As labour markets cool, shifting power from employees to employers, bosses may be tempted to demand more office time, claiming that it will help corporate culture. For firms that prize agility, this makes sense. But the data suggest it comes a cost.

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Our analysis suggests it depends on what sort of culture bosses want https://t.co/N70yorNxsr

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 7, 2025

For the first time in decades, the rich world is embarking on mass rearmament. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the threat of conflict over Taiwan and President Donald Trump’s impulsive approach to alliances have all made bolstering national defence an urgent priority. On June 25th members of NATO agreed to raise their target for military spending to 3.5% of gdp, and allocated an extra 1.5% to security-related items (Spain insisted on a loophole). If they achieve that target in 2035, they will be spending $800bn more every year, in real terms, than they did before Russia invaded Ukraine. The boom goes wider than NATO. By one estimate, embattled Israel splurged more than 8% of its gdp on defence last year. Even doveish Japan plans to stump up.

Such vast sums could reshape the global economy, by squeezing public finances and shifting activity within countries. As politicians sell the benefits of rearmament to voters, many will claim that military spending will bring economic gains as well as security. Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, promises defence will offer “the next generation of good, secure, well-paid jobs”. The European Commission says it will bring “benefits for all countries”. However tempting politically, such arguments are wrong. Using defence spending for economic objectives would be a costly mistake.

The most obvious economic consequence of bigger defence budgets will be to strain public finances. Debts are already high and the financial pressures on governments, caused by ageing populations and higher interest rates, are mounting. The average nato member, excluding America, will need to raise annual defence spending by 1.5% of gdp.

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How the defence bonanza will reshape the global economy

As they spend big, politicians must resist using one pot of money to achieve many goalshttps://t.co/p7w5mjGcho

— Juhani Huopainen (@Huopainen) June 26, 2025

Donald Trump has already raised the average tariff on America’s imports by about twice as much as he did in his entire first presidency. Just as damaging, though, has been the uncertainty about what comes next.

After April 2nd—“Liberation Day”, Mr Trump calls it—there will be another round of levies. The president promises 25% tariffs on all imported cars and country-by-country “reciprocal” tariffs based on how much his administration objects to a counterparty’s trade and tax policies. Will these plans change? Who knows? Mr Trump’s use of emergency powers means that he can do as he pleases.

This freedom may suit him. It does not, however, suit America’s businesses, which have no idea how bad the trade war will get; nor its consumers, who fear future inflation. The liberation America needs is from the paralysing uncertainty brought about by Mr Trump’s chaotic approach.

Since the president came to office, hefty tariffs on Canada and Mexico have twice been announced only to be mostly postponed. A long-threatened 10% levy on China has doubled in size.

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The unpredictability of Trump’s tariffs will increase the painhttps://t.co/pstoI6GTl7

— Dennis Kendel (@DennisKendel) March 27, 2025

Rapturous applause and a sea of phones in the air greeted President Trump as he walked on stage and declared, “The golden age of America has officially begun.”

He was barely a month into office when the Saudi-backed investor conference in Miami captured the optimism. “The Nasdaq is up nearly 10% in just a few months,” Trump said, ticking through a list of economic indicators. “The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 2,200 points.” On the same day, Feb. 19, the S&P 500 hit an all-time high.

But as Trump unleashed an on-one-day, off-the-next tariff fight with America’s largest trading partners, those gains unraveled. In just a few weeks, the S&P lost $4 trillion in value driven by his whipsaw trade policy, receding optimism about an artificial-intelligence boom and souring consumer sentiment caused by threats of higher prices and weaker growth. A measure of consumer sentiment fell in March for the fourth straight month to the lowest level since January 2021, the Conference Board, a business-research group, said Tuesday.

Markets in the past week have recovered some losses, but Trump is preparing his next shock: an April 2 “liberation day” suite of reciprocal tariffs he said will be applied on any trading partner that charges tariffs or imposes other trade barriers on U.S. products.

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Required reading from @NickTimiraos
It's not just uncertainty. It's uncertainty paired with powerlessness. Business leaders now feel vulnerable.https://t.co/mUnpNDYA3V

— Peter Atwater (@Peter_Atwater) March 26, 2025

Over the past decade China’s hacking program has grown rapidly, to the point that in 2023 Christopher Wray, then FBI director, noted it was larger than that of every other major nation combined. China’s growing heft and sophistication has yielded success in three main areas.

The first is political espionage, linked primarily to the Ministry of State Security (mss), China’s foreign-intelligence service. Last year it emerged that one group of Chinese hackers, dubbed Salt Typhoon, had breached at least nine American phone companies, giving them access to the calls and messages of important officials. Ciaran Martin, who led Britain’s cyber-defense agency from 2016 to 2020, compares it to the revelations in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a government contractor, that American spy agencies were conducting cyber-espionage on a huge scale. China was “gaining vast access to the nation’s communications via a strategic spying operation of breathtaking audacity,” he says.

A second is in areas of little espionage value: hacking that lays the groundwork for sabotage in moments of crisis or war. These efforts are led by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), China’s armed forces. In 2023 it became apparent that a PLA-linked hacking group known as Volt Typhoon had, over several years, burrowed into an extraordinary range of American critical infrastructure, from ports to factories to water-treatment plants, across the continental United States and in strategic American territories such as Guam.

All of that builds on a third type of hacking: the industrial-scale theft of intellectual property. In 2013 Mandiant, a cyber-threat intelligence firm, which is now part of Google, made waves when it exposed “apt1”, the label for a group of hackers linked to the PLA. apt1 was not focused on stealing political secrets or turning off power grids but on stealing blueprints, manufacturing processes and business plans from American firms. A year later, America’s government took the then unprecedented step of indicting five PLA hackers for this activity. Keith Alexander, a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s signals-intelligence service, described this as “the greatest transfer of wealth in history”.

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I wrote a piece on China’s evolution into a bigger, more sophisticated and more threatening cyber power over the past decade, and particularly in the last few years. I also look at the pivotal role played by China’s private sector ecosystem in that shift. https://t.co/EyAyZsgG84

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) March 26, 2025

Some firms may even intend to quietly pare back their investment plans. In 2017 Foxconn, a Taiwanese maker of electronics, vowed to spend $10bn on a plant in Wisconsin that would employ 13,000 people. Mr Trump visited the proposed site, proclaiming it the “eighth wonder of the world”. Yet after much watering down of plans, the company said last year that it had spent just $1bn on the project, and created only 1,000 jobs.

Faced with American tariffs, some foreign companies could instead direct their attention elsewhere. That has been the case with Chinese firms, which bore the brunt of the duties imposed during Mr Trump’s first term. The flow of greenfield FDI from China to America slid from $8.2bn in 2016 to $6.5bn last year. According to Morgan Stanley, listed Chinese firms generated around a quarter of their foreign sales in America in 2024, down from roughly a half in 2016. Instead, they have turned to the fast-growing economies of the global south.

If Mr Trump’s objective is to encourage foreign businesses to build in America, there are more effective policies at his disposal than tariffs. On the campaign trail the president also promised to slash red tape. Tortuous planning processes have long held back American manufacturing. For foreign firms, fixing those would be far more motivating. 

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Will Trump’s #tariffs turbocharge #foreign #investment in America?
Companies from #Asahi to #TSMC are expanding production in the country—for nowhttps://t.co/ga2y1Ryoxw pic.twitter.com/kNAGIbbRpA

— pebbleone (@TACITWR) March 17, 2025