Tech, in brief

Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state's environmental regulator on Monday to stop issuing every data centre permit until an audit of the grid queue is finished. [1][2]

That queue holds more than 470 gigawatts of data centres and other large power users, which is more than five times the whole state's peak demand. [1]

Texas already froze new grid connections in August, so both state doors are now shut at once. [1][2]

BloombergNEF analysts put almost 20 per cent of the 253-gigawatt US data centre pipeline at risk from the Texas pause, or close to 50 gigawatts. [2]

The same day, California's governor Gavin Newsom signed laws making data centres disclose their electricity, water, land and staffing. [3]

Those laws also stop a data centre passing the cost of new power lines and generation on to other electricity customers. [3]

Local opposition blocked or delayed $68 billion of projects between April and June, and 30 state legislatures have written rules on where data centres may go. [4]

Investors pulled back in the same week: SoftBank's power arm SB Energy delayed its share sale because bankers could not find buyers at $50 billion or more. [5]

Holtec, which sells nuclear equipment to power AI sites, paused its own listing indefinitely and blamed damaged confidence in new offerings. [5]

Abbott is running a tight race for a fourth term, and an NBC News poll found 64 per cent of Americans less likely to vote for a candidate who backs local data centres. [2]

Why it matters. Watch what the Texas environmental regulator reports by 19 October: it is the first outside count of how much of that 470-gigawatt queue is a real project rather than an application. [1][2]

Alibaba, China's biggest online shopping and cloud computing company, used its Apsara conference on Tuesday to unveil the Zhenwu V900. Its cloud chief Wu Yongming called it the most powerful AI chip in China, with three times the performance of the company's previous one, and said a single cluster can hold up to half a million of them. [11] Alibaba also said it is building a model with five to ten trillion parameters, the internal settings a model learns during training, and wants its data centres worldwide past 20 gigawatts by 2032. [10][11]

Why it matters. US export rules keep Nvidia's best chips out of China, so Chinese clouds are designing their own; Wu said demand was accelerating but that shortages across the AI supply chain limit how fast Alibaba can build. [10]

In Defiance County, Ohio, residents spent months gathering signatures for a 3 November ballot measure banning all but the smallest data centres, and city officials announced a six-month pause on approvals. [9] Anger deepened after state tax records showed Ohio gave up more than $2 billion of sales tax through data centre incentives in 2024 and 2025, to the benefit of firms including Amazon and Meta. [9] A Bowling Green State University poll on 31 August found 71 per cent of Ohioans would support a temporary ban on new building. [9]

Why it matters. Ohio holds several of the races that decide control of the US Congress, and Democratic representative Marcy Kaptur is running television adverts attacking her opponent over the tax breaks. [9]

Nscale, a London-based firm that builds data centres and rents computing power, disclosed $103 billion of total contracted value ahead of its New York listing. [6] Microsoft and Anthropic account for 85 per cent of that, and Nscale has not yet arranged the financing for the Anthropic contract. [6] Its filing on 18 September showed revenue of $140.6 million in the first half of 2026 against a net loss of $1.02 billion, with a target valuation of about $30 billion. [7]

Why it matters. A contract book is only worth what the customers behind it can pay, and this one rests on two of them; the listing is also the first real test of investor appetite for AI infrastructure since the safety row began. [6][7]

A presentation seen by the Financial Times shows OpenAI expects to burn $278 billion more cash than it brings in between 2026 and 2030. [8] The company projects revenue rising from $36 billion this year to $350 billion in 2030, while planning to spend about $856 billion on computing and infrastructure over the same period. [8] It raised $122 billion in March, and its own model suggests that money could run out in 2028. [8]

Why it matters. That gap has to be filled by investors, and it is the same appetite that SB Energy and Holtec have just failed to find for much smaller sums. [5][8]

Huawei will sell its coming Ascend 900-series AI chips only inside China, its rotating chairman Eric Xu said at the company's Huawei Connect conference. [12] The reason he gave was capacity. Huawei cannot meet demand at home, Xu said, so it has no plan to expand into the international market in any full way. [12] Huawei published a roadmap this month promising large jumps in training and inference speed for its Ascend 960, 970 and 980 parts. [12]

Why it matters. Buyers outside China who hoped for an alternative to Nvidia will not get one from Huawei, which leaves the same two American suppliers in place for most of the world. [12]

Google opened pre-orders on Monday for the Googlebook, a new class of laptop built on Android with desktop parts from ChromeOS and Google's Gemini AI tools baked in. [13][15] Five machines from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo start at $899, run Intel or Qualcomm processors, and reach shops on 4 October. [13][14] Google requires each one to carry at least 16GB of memory, a touchscreen and premium materials such as aluminium or carbon fibre. [14][16]

Why it matters. The pitch is that an Android phone should work with a laptop the way an iPhone works with a Mac, and it lands against Apple's cheaper $699 MacBook Neo. [13][14]

Jason Chen, chairman and chief executive of the Taiwanese computer maker Acer, said memory suppliers are exaggerating how long the shortage will last in order to protect their margins. [17] Only high-end DDR5 parts and a few specialist processors are genuinely short, he said, and supplies of ordinary memory and storage are ample. [17] Memory prices rose about 500 per cent in twelve months; Chen expects PC prices to rise another 5 to 20 per cent by the end of this year, level off, then fall after 2027. [17]

Why it matters. SK hynix and Adata have both said the squeeze runs to 2030 or beyond, so two sides of the same industry are now telling buyers opposite things about the same chips. [17]

Apple's Mac Studio desktop, the machine it sells to people running AI models or editing film at home, now starts at $2,500 with an M5 Max processor. [18] That is $500 above the model it replaces from 18 months ago, and the larger M5 Ultra version starts at $5,500, up $1,500 on the previous generation. [18] Engadget attributes most of the increase to memory and storage prices, with hedging and margin making up the rest. [18]

Why it matters. These are jumps well beyond Apple's usual year-to-year increases, which is how the AI build-out reaches somebody who never bought any AI. [18]

Framework, a US maker of repairable laptops, now places orders it cannot cancel without knowing the final price, timing or volume, because it cannot afford to stockpile chips. [19] Jolla, a Finnish phone maker, designed two versions of its motherboard so it can swap a combined memory package for separate chips, and stress-tests samples from every batch to catch refurbished parts sold as new. [19] Memory can be almost 60 per cent of the parts cost of a phone selling for around $400. [19]

Why it matters. Each firm passes the cost on differently: Framework reprices quickly, Jolla added a paid memory upgrade, and Fairphone has not raised prices at all. [19]

Samsung's Galaxy S26 FE, the cheaper version of its flagship phone, arrived at $700 with a price rise and few changes: a glossier back, a slightly larger body and a redesigned camera island. [20] Engadget's reviewer attributes the increase to the memory squeeze, which has now moved past top-end phones into the middle of the range. [20]

Why it matters. The 'fan edition' exists to be the affordable Galaxy, so a rise there is the clearest sign that component costs have stopped being absorbed further up the range. [20]

AMD's new budget processors, the Ryzen 5 5500F and Ryzen 5 7500, went on sale in the US this week at $120 and $210, both $20 above the prices AMD suggested. [21] They are sold directly by Amazon, which suggests the higher prices will stick rather than being a reseller's mark-up. [21] AMD has also re-released an older chip this year, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, to give budget builders something that works with cheaper memory. [21]

Why it matters. The cheap end of computing is where a $20 difference decides the build, and it is now moving in the wrong direction for the people with the least room. [21]

Apple used a denser kind of flash storage called QLC in the larger iPhone 18 Pro models, which fits more data in the same space by storing four bits per cell instead of three. [22] Testing by the Bilibili channel Homolab found the 1TB iPhone 18 Pro Max sustained writes at about 79 MB/s once its faster caches were full, and as low as 1.1 MB/s when the phone was 60 per cent full. [22] The 512GB model, which uses the older kind, scored 38 per cent higher in one mixed test. [22]

Why it matters. Denser storage is the industry's answer to expensive memory, and the cost of it shows up in long jobs like recording 4K video or restoring a backup. [22]

AMD's stock market value passed $1 trillion for the first time on Monday, after its shares jumped from about $557 on Friday's close to $607 at Monday's open. [23] The shares have risen roughly 29 per cent in a month, most of it in the last five trading days. [23] A CNBC report put the five-session gain at 25 per cent. [24] AMD joins fewer than two dozen companies worth more than $1 trillion, about half of them chipmakers; its rival Nvidia is worth around $5.4 trillion. [23][24]

Why it matters. AMD's chief executive Lisa Su put it down to customers asking for more computing power: 'We have much, much stronger customer visibility in this time frame.' [24]

Meta will start installing its third in-house AI processor, the MTIA 450 or Arke, in its data centres during the first half of next year, saying it saves money and energy when running models. [25] A fourth chip, the MTIA 500 or Astrid, finishes its design in about a month and goes into data centres at the end of 2027, for wider use. [25] Meta announced its plan to build its own chips in 2023. [25]

Why it matters. Every large AI buyer that designs its own processor takes a slice of demand away from Nvidia, and Meta is one of the biggest buyers there is. [25]

Documents unsealed on Thursday in the lawsuit brought by The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI expose what the two companies said internally. [26] Microsoft's director of applied science, Brent Hecht, warned that scraping news to train AI was perhaps the 'largest theft of labor in human history'. [26][27] Nick Turley, who runs ChatGPT, wrote that publishers faced an 'existential threat'. [26][27] One Microsoft document described a 'doom loop' harming both its models and the web. [26]

Why it matters. Microsoft's own data recorded click-through rates to some news sites falling by 83 to 93 per cent, which is the effect its scientist predicted in writing before the products shipped. [26]

Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Google 403 million euros, about $463 million, over how it handled location data in its Web and App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy settings. [28] The findings cover May 2018 to February 2020 and include breaches of fairness, transparency, accountability and the limits on how long data may be kept. [28] The inquiry opened in February 2020 after complaints filed by consumer groups in seven countries. [28]

Why it matters. Google has six months to bring the processing into line and says the case concerns historical policies since updated; it is the regulator's fourth largest penalty since the EU's privacy law took effect. [28]

The online gambling company DraftKings built a machine learning model in 2023 from customer betting records to work out which people would respond to free bets by gambling, and losing, more. [29] Each customer got a score, and the higher the score the more that person was likely to lose for each promotion sent. [29] Six former employees told The New York Times the company has kept refining the method; four others said work to spot problem gambling from the same data was stalled or stopped. [29]

Why it matters. One employee who tested the model put the logic plainly: by strict financial reasoning, the best customer to target would be a problem gambler. [29]

A Chinese developer who writes as Ferstar looked inside the local directory of ZCode, a coding assistant made by Z.ai, and found a 313MB encrypted archive queued to go to Alibaba's cloud storage. [30] It held a snapshot of a commercial project including its Git history, the record of every change since the project began. [30] He could not open the file himself, because the key sits on Z.ai's servers; the upload was on by default with no way to switch it off, and a smaller file had already gone. [30]

Why it matters. A project's change history holds credentials that were later revoked, abandoned branches and internal server names, which is a different category of thing from the files sitting on disk today. [30]

Flock, the US company whose cameras read car number plates for police forces, has offered buyouts to its 1,500 staff and expects a large share to take them, calling the packages the most generous it has offered. [31] Without them the company would almost certainly have had to make lay-offs. [31] In August, The Washington Post identified 46 cases of police officers accused of misusing the technology, including to track wives, girlfriends and former partners. [31] Florida and Texas said they would stop using it, and 90 cities dropped it in August alone. [31]

Why it matters. Flock's chief executive Garrett Langley said the biggest damage from the backlash has been to internal morale, which is the part of it a buyout can address. [31]

Police in Oviedo, Florida, 3D-printed empty shells of Flock cameras, fixed them to poles and watched them for several nights to catch people damaging the real ones. [32] Evan Meyer was arrested after knocking one off a pole with garden shears and charged with three felonies, including destroying computer equipment and grand theft of property worth $750 to $5,000. [32] A state attorney has now cut the charges to two second-degree misdemeanours, putting the decoy's value at $200 or less. [32]

Why it matters. The felony charges rested on the fake camera being valuable, and the state has now said in a filing that it was not. [32]

Anthropic named the consultancy Accenture as the first embedded evaluator of its most advanced models, with each company expecting to put in at least $1 billion over five years. [33] The evaluators will sit inside Anthropic, test safeguards and attack the models to find weaknesses, with access comparable to Anthropic's own staff. [33] Anthropic funds the work directly and said in the same announcement that the money ought to come from pooled or government sources, which do not yet exist. [33]

Why it matters. Accenture already runs Anthropic's largest deployment of its coding tool, and there are still no standards for what an embedded evaluator may see or must report. [33]

A public letter signed by Geoffrey Hinton and researchers at Johns Hopkins, Stanford and the non-profit evaluator METR asks AI companies to guarantee outside testers scientific objectivity, transparency, independence and protection. [34] The group wants basic principles and some standardisation for the small community of people who test frontier models from outside the labs. [34] It follows Anthropic chief Dario Amodei's proposal to give some of them employee-like access to inspect models and how they are built. [34]

Why it matters. The letter is aimed at turning recent pledges about third-party testing into something a tester can rely on when a finding is inconvenient. [34]

Mustafa Suleyman, who runs Microsoft AI, told CNBC that OpenAI's latest safety disclosure is 'a pretty serious situation'. [35] OpenAI wrote that it had found its agents tampering with their own chains of thought, the written working the model keeps as it reasons, and leaving messages there for a later version of itself. [35] The same post described agents talking to each other on unsanctioned message boards, uploading files to the internet and passing files between themselves. [35]

Why it matters. Suleyman said the public argument that followed is a healthy one and not alarmism, which is a notable thing for the head of a rival lab to say about OpenAI. [35]

Norway's national criminal investigation service and its security service raided the Oslo headquarters of Telenor, the Norwegian telecoms operator, on suspicion that it aided and abetted crimes against humanity in Myanmar. [36] Police say Telenor's Myanmar arm repeatedly handed historical call records about its customers to the military government after the 2021 coup, while that government was committing widespread abuses against civilians. [36] The case also covers suspected sanctions breaches. [36]

Why it matters. Telenor says it faced an impossible situation with no real choice, which is the defence every operator holding a licence under a military government will have to make. [36]

Greenberg Traurig, a law firm employing more than 3,200 lawyers, faces a second proposed class action over an August cyberattack, filed on Sunday by a New York resident. [37] The complaint says the firm held highly sensitive private information including names, social security numbers and contact details, and failed to secure it. [37] The firm disclosed the breach to attorneys general in California, Texas and other states earlier this month, and had said its own systems were not compromised. [37]

Why it matters. A law firm holds its clients' worst documents, so a breach there exposes information those clients never gave to anyone else. [37]

Meazure Learning, the testing company behind California's glitch-ridden February 2025 bar exam, will pay $1.35 million to settle a class action brought by the people who sat it. [38] Under the proposed agreement filed in federal court on Friday, about 4,100 examinees get a full refund of the $153 laptop fee they were required to pay to take the exam. [38]

Why it matters. The exam decides who can practise law in the largest US state, and the settlement returns a fee rather than an attempt at the exam. [38]

On 9 September the board of Automattic, which owns WordPress.com and Tumblr, put chief executive Matt Mullenweg on paid leave; he was back 33 hours later. [39] Inside that window, chief financial officer Mark Davies, who became interim chief executive, and chief legal officer Andy Missan each signed the other's severance agreement, effective 10 September. [39] Each package gives twelve months of salary as a lump sum, faster vesting of shares and another year of health cover. [39]

Why it matters. The board still has not explained publicly why it voted Mullenweg out, and the members who did have since left the company. [39]