A digital rendering of the huge 1-gigawatt data center campus planned for Saline, Michigan, which will serve Oracle's AI business. Courtest of Related Digital The developer of a huge one-gigawatt data center says it has secured $16 billion in funding. The data center in rural Michigan will serve Oracle's AI business. Local residents have protested the data center, fearing grid impact and pollution. As far as data centers go, it's a big one. The Saline Township campus in Michigan, about 50 miles outside of Detroit, will have a capacity of more than 1 gigawatt. That's huge. Most data centers have capacities between 100 and 300 megawatts. And now the developer behind it, Related Digital, says it has secured the $16 billion needed to build it, with a little help from Blackstone and PIMCO. The campus will span 250 acres to start, making it one of the largest in the United States. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year called it the "largest investment in Michigan history." The Saline data center will help power Oracle's AI business, which the company expects will generate some $90 billion in revenue by 2027. It is part of the Stargate project, a $500 billion initiative led by Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank to build AI infrastructure across the country and to secure US supremacy in the race to develop artificial intelligence. Despite all the hype, nearby Michigan residents have concerns about the project. Protesters who gathered in Saline in December told Michigan Public Radio that they're worried about its impact on the electric grid and its potential to pollute the surrounding community. Protesters gather in downtown Saline to protest Oracle's new data center powered by DTE, Michigan's largest electric utility. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images "If it magically went away, I would be very happy because I could go back to my quiet life, and I don't have to stand out here on the corner and yell that I don't want it here," Michigan resident Tammie Bruneau told Michigan Public Radio. While companies like OpenAI argue that building new data centers will reindustrialize the US economy and create jobs, residents of towns where developers are proposing new data centers worry about their impact on power grids, water resources, pollution, and overall quality of life. It is largely rural America that has become the go-to destination for tech giants racing to secure data capacity to fuel their AI ambitions. In an investigation published last year, Business Insider identified 1,240 existing or planned data centers across the country as of 2024, the most definitive tally to date and a significant jump from the 311 that had permits in 2010. A sizable portion of those are or will be constructed in the Midwest. In response to the growing concerns, tech leaders said in March that they would cover a greater share of data center energy costs during a visit to the White House. The developers behind the Saline project said it would use a "closed-loop cooling system" that would protect Michigan's water. That, however, has done little to ease worries among local residents. Read the original article on Business Insider

In a recent experiment, Anthropic created a classified marketplace where AI agents represented both buyers and sellers, striking real deals for real goods and real money.

L.D. 307 would have imposed the country’s first statewide moratorium on new data centers — lasting, in this case, until November 1, 2027.

Wall Street Journal: Trump hosted a gala luncheon for leading $TRUMP holders, where he spoke about his pro-crypto policies, but avoided the memecoin's declining value  —  The president's address touched on everything from the war in Iran to his policies supporting the crypto industry

Samantha Kelly / Bloomberg: A look at Tin Can's $100 retro-style, Wi-Fi-enabled landline phone, and how some schools are seeding the device to students in an attempt to curb smartphone use  —  The Tin Can has gone viral over the past year, mostly through word of mouth.  Now schools want to get even more of them in students' homes.

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Consulting firms and Silicon Valley are growing closer than ever. Kilito Chan/Getty Images AI startups are increasingly relying on consultants to distribute their technology to companies. Working with AI startups has become a key survival tactic for consulting firms. The result: partnerships galore. Things are getting serious. For consulting firms, partnering with AI startups has become a key survival tactic as the technology upends everything about their industry. And for AI startups, consulting firms have become an important channel for distributing their products to companies. The love affair between the two was apparent in a flurry of recent dalliances. Google announced Wednesday it was launching a $750 million fund to help consulting firms like McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte roll out agentic AI to their clients. McKinsey and Google have also created a new working group to help companies go from identifying AI opportunities to building and scaling them across the business. Also on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was working with consulting firms like Accenture, Capgemini, and PwC to sell its AI coding assistant, Codex, to companies. The rationale is simple: AI technology is moving so fast that Silicon Valley and the consulting industry need each other. Ben Ellencweig, a senior partner at McKinsey who leads alliances, acquisitions, and partnerships for its AI arm, Quantum Black, told Business Insider in an interview that the firm has quadrupled its ecosystem of tech partners since the launch of ChatGPT. He added that the depth of the firm's relationships and the level of collaboration have "grown dramatically" in the past few years. He said McKinsey operates an "ecosystem of alliances and acquisitions" with hundreds of contributors, including key players such as AWS, Amazon, Nvidia, and OpenAI, that it leverages to tailor solutions for clients. Amid the deluge of new products and AI startups, Ellencweig said the firm still adheres to a rigorous vetting process. "There's a bit of a dating period that we get to know each other," he said. "Partnering means a two-way street." Given the pace of the AI boom, however, he said the firm is more willing these days to team up with smaller companies. Former McKinsey consultants told Business Insider that these alliances also fill the talent gap needed to marry the raw models coming out of AI labs with the needs of corporate clients. These consultants said their role is to bring these models to the enterprise level — customizing them with data, adding appropriate guardrails, and helping clients implement them in specific contexts. Many of the models fresh out of Silicon Valley simply aren't enterprise-ready, consultants said. McKinsey says about 40% of its work now comes from generative AI-related projects. BCG said 20% of its work was AI-related in 2024. Andy Triedman, a partner at Theory Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on data and AI, told Business Insider that tech startups have long relied on consulting firms to help sell their products to enterprise clients, but are now partnering much earlier as pressure builds to adapt to AI. Before ChatGPT, he said, partnerships typically happened once startups reached $10 million or more in revenue — about two to four years in. Now, they're forming at the $2 million to $5 million mark, when companies are only 12 to 18 months old. Triedman, a former Bain consultant, said the AI ecosystem around consulting firms falls into three main buckets: enterprise software startups that partner with consultants to distribute and implement their products, AI-native consulting firms that compete with traditional players, and smaller AI tools that automate core consulting work, which could become acquisition targets for bigger consulting firms. "It's a mutually beneficial relationship between the two," Triedman said. Read the original article on Business Insider

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In a letter to the residents of Tumbler Ridge, Canada, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is “deeply sorry” that his company failed to alert law enforcement about the suspect in a recent mass shooting.

Theo Baker / The Atlantic: A look at “Stanford inside Stanford”, where VCs pursue 18- and 19-year-old students, offering mentorship and funding in a bid to convert promise into profit  —  Silicon Valley venture capitalists are wining and dining 18-year-olds.  —  When i was a freshman at Stanford University …

<p>@scottjla <a href="https://twitter.com/scottjla/status/2047535371664457863">on Twitter</a> in reply to my <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/">pelican riding a bicycle</a> benchmark:</p> <blockquote> <p>I feel like we need to stack these tests now</p> <p><img alt="AI generated image. A pelican is riding a bicycle along a dirt track, chased by a police car. The pelican looks panicked, likely because there is an astronaut (with prehensile toes for some reason) riding the pelican clinging on to where its ears should be. The astronaut is being ridden by a horse, with an equally wild expression. A slice of pizza and a can and a cowboy hat are falling next to them. A road sign in the background reads WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS." src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/why-are-you-like-this.jpeg" /></p> </blockquote> <p>I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS" sign of its own accord and <a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/69ebff27-2220-839f-b065-8c3516ea9b6d">it did</a> - the prompt Scott used was:</p> <blockquote> <p><code>Create an image of a horse riding an astronaut, where the astronaut is riding a pelican that is riding a bicycle. It looks very chaotic but they all just manage to balance on top of each other</code></p> </blockquote> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/text-to-image">text-to-image</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle">pelican-riding-a-bicycle</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/slop">slop</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/chatgpt">chatgpt</a></p>

Nuclear startup X-energy went public, geothermal startup Fervo is about to. Could this be the moment that climate tech investors have been waiting for?

The author's son started new hobbies once he stopped playing with his Nintendo Switch. Courtesy of the author My fourth-grade son was the only one in his class without a Nintendo Switch. My husband and I bought him one and set firm boundaries, but still regretted it. I noticed a shift in my son's priorities to always want to be online. My 10-year-old son Ezra was the only one in his fourth-grade class without a Nintendo Switch. His teacher had a policy allowing students to pull out their electronics at the end of the day, so Ezra often felt left out when his friends played. This led to relentless begging. Some of Ezra's classmates even offered to donate to a fund to help him get one. I was a firm no. I'm not big on electronics and wasn't going to give in to the peer pressure — and I certainly wasn't going to let other kids buy him one. But when my husband became a full-time teacher at a new school, I wanted Ezra to transfer there in the fifth-grade so they could be together. The dilemma was that Ezra loved his current educational environment. He didn't want to leave his friends and the school where he felt comfortable and made memories. So, I struck a deal with him — a "Switch for a switch." I regretted it almost immediately, especially after spending around $300 on the hand-held console. In the end, my husband and I let him stay at his current school for one more year instead, and rebranded the Switch as a combined Christmas and birthday gift. We set boundaries, but still noticed a shift My husband and I monitored what Ezra played, sticking to age ratings and avoiding shooter games. We turned on parental controls so that the device would shut off after an hour. Even with that limit, Ezra seemed to fixate on and feel entitled to that time every day. "When am I going to get my screen time?" he'd ask, melting down on days it didn't happen. Road trips were less sweet, too, since he didn't even look up and out the window. "Yeah, cool," he'd say, eyes glued to his screen. I started to notice that ordinary life no longer excited him the same way. He showed less interest in being outdoors or exploring. More often, he just wanted to sink into his beanbag chair and tune out. He realized on his own how much time he was spending with it One day, I caught him playing a game instead of doing his homework, and I took the device away. He didn't ask for it back. Weeks turned into months. Then, when he was almost 12, he came to me and told me he had played games that his dad and I didn't want him to access, followed by an apology. It's been over a year and a half now, and Ezra hasn't asked for his device back. When I inquired why, he said, "I gave it up mostly because I subconsciously knew that my life started revolving around it." He spends his time differently Now, he plays guitar and piano, draws, bikes, and skateboards with the kids in the neighborhood. Last week, he decided to take up pickleball. Courtesy of the author "I have more time to do stuff. More creativity and a longer attention span," he told me. " I get less frustrated when trying new things." Most research suggests that kids do OK with about an hour of screen time a day. Ezra still gets that — usually by watching TV with his siblings. But now that screen time feels more intentional. It's family time, something shared, rather than something that pulls him away. We didn't force him to give up his Switch The fact that Ezra chose to give up his device might say something about maturity and maybe the values we've tried to model. We've talked openly about how screens can create quick, addictive hits of dopamine, and he says knowing that did influence his decision. If I could go back, I don't know if I would've bought a Switch for him in the first place. But if I hadn't, would he always wonder what it was like? Would he have felt resentful? Parenting is full of calls like this that you can't fully predict and never feel entirely sure about. But I do know I'm proud of my kid for making the decision to better himself on his own. Read the original article on Business Insider

Canadian AI startup Cohere is taking over Germany-based Aleph Alpha with support from Lidl’s owner, Schwarz Group. With the blessing of their governments, the companies intend to offer a sovereign alternative to enterprises in an AI landscape dominated by American players.

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SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 has four tightly defined technology domains, each backed by live demonstrations, dedicated exhibit floors, and sessions featuring the people actually building and funding these technologies globally.

It's hard to break the cycle of doomscrolling, but there are plenty of apps that can help you spend more time on content that’s engaging and productive.

How does decision-gravity dictate this gap? The post Causal Inference Is Different in Business appeared first on Towards Data Science.

John Ternus, Apple's incoming CEO, is a hardware guy, signaling Apple may be putting devices back at the center of its strategy.

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