Tech, in brief

US voters backed limits on data centres in almost every local vote on Tuesday. [1] Data centres are the huge buildings full of computers that run AI. [2]

One tracking firm, Redbud Consulting, counted 45 local measures, and 44 went against data centres. [1]

The one exception was Harwood, North Dakota, a town of about 940 people. [1] Harwood voted 325 to 105 against giving residents more say over big projects. [1]

Another counter, Ballotpedia, lists 41 measures, and 21 of them were in Ohio. [3]

Urbana and Hubbard, 2 Ohio cities, voted on outright bans, and 76% and 77% backed them. [4]

The votes reach firms that build and supply these sites first. [5] Shares of Modine and Sterling, both data-centre suppliers, each fell about 21% on Wednesday. [5]

Shares of the biggest cloud companies rose, because traders bet they will have to slow their spending. [5]

Political scientists call this direct democracy: in Edgewater, Florida, voters themselves wrote a data-centre ban into the city's charter. [11]

Builders used to deal with local officials under secrecy agreements, says a Schneider Electric executive. [12] A ballot measure hands that choice to residents. [11]

A teacher can pick the class trip alone, or the whole class can vote on where it goes.

Local bans have stopped little so far: of more than 300, only 3 projects were delayed, totalling 2.3 gigawatts. [13] Another 38 gigawatts are expected online by 2027. [13]

Hinojosa takes office in Texas in January. [14]

Why a building permit is not the same as a town's consent

A company gets its legal permits from officials

The neighbours learn late what the project will cost them

They use what they have: a ballot, a recall, a protest

The project stalls, or the rules change

So companies start paying for local acceptance: water, openness, jobs

A permit says a company is allowed to build. The people next door did not sign it, and they can still make building impossible.

One tracker's count of Tuesday's 45 local votes in the US. Look at how few places sided with the builders.

EdgeConneX has its permits and has started building. Voters repealed the village's deal with it anyway.

After protests over water near data centres in India and Indonesia, Google is paying for a plant that also serves the neighbours.

Google can set its own product terms. Schools that object are now sharing work-arounds and hearing from DuckDuckGo.

The city cancelled the contract and its police unplugged the cameras. Flock's contractor still came and replaced one.

The town's no does not always hold: permits already granted can protect a project, and earlier local bans have delayed only a few.

Everyone who asks a chatbot a question is using a building in somebody's town.

US voters said no to data centres in almost every local vote, and new governors in Texas, Ohio and Georgia have pledged pauses. [1][8]

If new building gets harder, existing computing power may be worth more, a Morgan Stanley strategist says. [5]

It bought land in Piqua for a use that voters there have now banned. [5]

A $3 billion data centre is going up beside them, and they lost the vote for more say. [1]

How many local votes there really were.

Redbud Consulting counted 45, with 44 against data centres. [1] Ballotpedia counted 41. [3] Data Centers on the Ballot counted 46, with 2 still unreported on Wednesday. [14] They do not list the same things.

What happens to Meta's land in Piqua, Ohio.

Meta will only say it will work with local officials, and has not said if it will sell, fight or build. [5]

How much Gina Hinojosa can stop in Texas.

A University of Texas professor says developers' 'vested rights' protect a project's terms once its permits are approved, even before building starts. [9]

Elon Musk, who runs the rocket firm SpaceX, posted: "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now." [9]

He had spent more than $400 million backing Republicans who all lost. [9]

Google, SpaceX and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's rocket firm, are all working on computers in orbit. [9]

Blue Origin has asked a US regulator for permission to launch 50,000 satellites for this. [9]

Space data centres would still cost far more than ones on land, and cannot reach the same size. [9]

Engineers call this a trade-off: orbit has no Texas voters, but Wired says launches bring risks and higher costs. [9]

Moving a noisy band to a far-off shed ends the complaints, but now every practice means a long trip.

Whether data centres in orbit can work at the size AI needs.

Google, SpaceX and Blue Origin are all trying, and Wired says they can't grow to that size. [9]

US Democrats, who won control of the US Congress on Tuesday, are already calling for tech bosses to answer questions. [29]

Greg Casar, a Democratic congressman from Texas, said AI company chiefs should testify under oath. [3]

Robert Garcia, set to chair the House's main investigating committee, offered Republicans two words: "Lawyer up." [3]

Senator Ed Markey joked that new forests would be needed for all the legal demands. [29]

A subpoena is a legal order to hand over papers or testify, and the new majority holds that power. [29]

Political scientists call this oversight: the party holding a committee sets what it asks about. [29] Democrats will run those committees, and Semafor says tech chiefs are among their targets. [29]

Whoever chairs the school council decides whose complaints get read out at the meeting.

Political groups for and against AI rules spent millions on Tuesday's US elections, with mixed results. [30]

2 industry groups spent $4.8 million on Darline Graham's US Senate race in South Carolina, and she lost. [30]

One of them belongs to Leading the Future, backed by OpenAI's president Greg Brockman and the investor Andreessen Horowitz. [30]

Leading the Future's Democratic arm did better, backing Jared Moskowitz of Florida, who won. [30]

Public First, backed by Anthropic, the maker of Claude, had success with Democrats but lost with several Republicans. [30]

Guardrails Alliance, a labour-backed group on the other side, called the industry network "largely a non-factor". [14]

Political scientists study what campaign money can buy: here $4.8 million did not save Darline Graham. [30]

A big poster for a school election will not rescue a candidate the class has already gone off.

Chris Lehane, who runs global affairs at OpenAI, published an essay on what US politicians should do about AI. [31]

He compares AI's power to reshape the economy to the New Deal, the US programmes of the 1930s. [31]

His essay lists 5 priorities, including worker protections, education, AI safety and data-centre building. [31]

Kate Brennan of the AI Now Institute says it marks a shift from OpenAI's push last year for fewer rules. [31]

Public relations teams call this getting ahead of the story: OpenAI published its plan straight after the vote. [31]

A pupil who hands in their own punishment idea before the head speaks often gets a lighter one.

TechCrunch notes that many of the proposals would also spread AI use and support building, which helps OpenAI. [31]

A conservative AI group, Alliance for a Better Future, says AI policy helped Democrats win. [32]

Its memo says fully backing Donald Trump's light-touch AI rules would be a mistake for future Republican candidates. [32]

Its advisers include the Heritage Foundation, a big US conservative think tank. [32]

The memo says that if Republicans change course, AI can be an asset for them in 2028. [32]

Pollsters call this issue salience: the memo says AI moved "up the issue grid" too fast for Republicans to notice. [32]

Everyone may dislike school dinners, but it only matters the day it decides who wins the council vote.

Waymo, Google's sister company that runs driverless taxis, will end its exclusive deal with Uber in January 2028. [33]

The deal covers Austin and Atlanta, 2 US cities where riders can only get a Waymo through Uber's app. [33]

Waymo will then offer those rides through its own phone app, as it does elsewhere. [33]

Waymo's co-chief Tekedra Mawakana called the rider's experience "a little bit of a crapshoot". [33] Riders never know whether a robot or a person will come. [33]

Uber says it still plans to host Waymo cars for as long as both firms agree. [33]

Hours later Uber argued that its app gets robotaxis about 30% more trips a day than rivals' own apps. [34]

Uber plans around 2,000 robotaxis on the road in 2027, using its own and other firms' cars. [34]

Economists call an app like Uber a two-sided market: it brings riders and cars together and takes a marketplace fee. [34]

Waymo said it wants its own relationship with the rider. [33] Its own app avoids that fee, but Waymo must find riders itself. [34]

A baker selling through a big shop reaches more people, but a stall of her own keeps the customers.

Uber's 30% figure is its own. [34] Uber also told Bloomberg it was Waymo's idea not to offer a direct robotaxi choice. [33]

Whether Waymo's cars stay on Uber's app after 2028.

The Register says Waymo will stop letting Uber users book them. [34] Uber told TechCrunch it still plans to host them for as long as both firms agree. [33]

Australia's High Court ruled that Uber must pay AU$81 million in state payroll taxes, about US$57 million. [34]

The court found that the fees Uber pays its drivers are effectively wages. [34]

The case covered 1 Australian state, but all 6 charge payroll tax. [34]

Courts elsewhere are aware of this court's decisions, The Register says, which could mean more trouble for Uber. [34]

Labour lawyers ask whether a worker is really an employee: the court treated what Uber pays its drivers as wages. [34]

Calling your weekly chores 'helping out' does not stop your pocket money being pay for them.

Uber says only 4 rides were ordered by an AI agent in its busiest week of October. [23] An AI agent is a program that acts for you. [23]

Uber and Uber Eats handled around 320 million trips and orders that Halloween week. [23] Just 500 Uber Eats orders came through an AI agent. [23]

Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi described "very limited traction" so far. [23]

AI firms sell agents as the next way to shop, and investors value Instinct, one agent start-up, at $10 billion. [23]

Researchers call this the adoption curve: Uber's chief says agents are at a "very, very early" stage. [23]

Uber's chief, Dara Khosrowshahi, is waiting for more people to follow: "we hope that there will be more traction". [23]

When a school brings in a new app, a handful of pupils use it for weeks before anyone else does.

This is one company's count in one week, so it says little about agents elsewhere. [23]

AMD expects about $17 billion in sales in the last quarter of 2026. [35] Intel's own forecast is $15 billion to $16 billion. [35]

AMD and Intel are the 2 main makers of x86 chips, the design that runs most PCs and servers. [35]

It would be the first time AMD has outsold Intel, Tom's Hardware reports. [19]

AMD's data-centre sales rose 97% to about $8.5 billion in the quarter just ended. [35]

Data centres now bring in 64% of AMD's sales. [19]

AMD's sales for PCs and games fell 8%, so its rise rests on data-centre buyers. [35]

Analysts call this a shift in market share: AMD's data-centre sales nearly doubled while Intel forecasts almost no growth. [35]

The biggest shop on the high street can lose its lead when a new estate is built somewhere else.

Both figures are forecasts, and it is AMD's own chief, Lisa Su, saying its suppliers will keep up. [35]

Chinese tech firms ordered about $70 billion of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips, Bloomberg's sources say, according to Tom's Hardware. [21]

The buyers include ByteDance, owner of TikTok, and Alibaba and Tencent, 2 big Chinese internet firms. [21]

Only some tens of thousands, roughly 1%, will arrive over the next few months. [21]

The RTX Pro 5500 has no US export limit, unlike Nvidia's top AI chips, so it can ship to China. [21]

Nvidia is expected to deliver about 700,000 by the end of 2027. [21]

China is racing the US to build better AI models, and these chips are central to that, Tom's Hardware says. [21]

Economists call this excess demand: orders went from $35 billion to $70 billion, far beyond what Nvidia can make. [21]

When a shop has a few new consoles and a long queue, most people go home without one.

The figures come from unnamed sources, so the true size of the order cannot be checked. [21]

Most of Qualcomm's chip sales come from phones. [17] The Verge puts phone sales down around 20% on 2025. [20]

Its phone chip sales fell 26% to $5.14 billion last quarter, even after it raised prices in September. [17]

Qualcomm now forecasts $5 billion of data-centre sales by the end of 2027 and $15 billion by 2029. [20]

It expects data centres to reach about 30% of its business eventually. [20]

Chief executive Cristiano Amon said of data centres: "We don't have a demand issue; it's a supply issue." [17]

Economists call this a demand shock: rising memory costs force phone makers to raise prices, and fewer people buy. [17]

When one big family books every table in a café, the regulars eat somewhere else.

The $15 billion is the company's own forecast, against about $650 million expected in the first quarter of 2027. [20]

Chip makers such as AMD and Qualcomm are moving more of their business towards those buildings, so these local votes now reach their plans too. [19][20]

Dearer memory is passed on in the price of a new phone. [17]

Chen Ching-wen, who runs memory maker Team Group, says the shortage will get worse until the end of 2027. [16]

He expects supply and demand to balance only in the second half of 2028, or later. [16]

A contract price for 16GB of DDR5, a PC memory chip, rose from $8.70 to $48 in about a year. [16]

He warned that some buyers could reach a point where "even money can't buy goods". [16]

His own firm has contracts but still cannot get enough, so it pays 30% to 50% more for spare stock. [16]

Buyers call the two prices spot and contract: Team Group has contracts, but tops up at the higher spot price. [16]

A train ticket booked in advance costs less than the one bought on the platform.

A shortage raises what its stock of memory sells for. [16]

How long memory stays short.

Team Group says 2028 or later, but it sells memory, and we read no independent forecast. [16]

Google has explained why its London cloud site lost power on 20 October, hitting Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail and Revolut. [36]

An underground cable feeding the site broke while its second power line was switched off for repairs. [36]

Batteries carried the site for about 5 minutes, as designed. [36] The generators never got the signal to start. [36]

The controller still read the power as healthy, though both lines were dead, Google says. [36]

Banks and a national mail service depend on one site's backup working on the one day it is needed. [36]

Safety engineers call this a latent failure: the flaw sat unseen in Google's controller until that emergency. [36] Its settings were not made for both lines being down. [36]

A smoke alarm with a dead battery looks fine on the ceiling until the night there is smoke.

Google has since reprogrammed the controller and says it has tested its changes. [36]

For about 2 years UK officials said AI could add £400 billion to the economy. [37]

AI minister Kanishka Narayan has now told parliament the figure came from a 2023 report commissioned by Google. [37]

The UK government's own central estimate is £120 billion by 2030, in a range of £55 billion to £140 billion. [37]

Narayan called even that newer assessment "hugely uncertain". [37]

Ministers had the lower estimate since at least November 2025. [37] An agency was still printing the old one months later. [37]

Statisticians ask who paid for a number: here Google commissioned the study ministers used to calm job fears. [37]

A sweet maker's survey saying children need more sweets is worth reading twice.

The minister did not withdraw the £400 billion or say it was wrong, Wired reports. [37]

A very large number, such as the £400 billion the UK kept quoting for AI, is hard to argue with, which is why it gets repeated long after its source is forgotten. [37]

Whether either UK figure for AI is right.

The firm behind the £400 billion now says it assumed faster adoption, and the minister's own range runs from £55 billion to £140 billion. [37]