Economics
Nebraska built the audit the industry usually avoids, closed one tax incentive, and gave data centers until September 30 to answer. The returns arrived with the water, power and refund figures blacked out as trade secrets. Google's three Nebraska entities expect $117.6 million back.
Economics
The NDA cost Amazon little and cost counties the power to price water, power and tax terms before they voted. Microsoft dropped the same clause in March; a House committee asked on September 30 why Amazon hadn't. It answered two days later — and wouldn't say if the promise covers contractors.
Economics
Georgia forgoes $2.5 billion a year for data centers its own audit says would have been built anyway. One Mississippi county is repaying a $215 million loan taken out for Amazon — and its school district discloses none of it.
Economics
Nvidia added $150 billion to its repurchase program on Monday. Alphabet and Meta spent nothing on buybacks in the first half of the year — they issued debt and equity instead, and Alphabet's free cash flow went negative.
Economics
Seven bills end the socialized transmission costs that put data center grid upgrades on California households. The stringency — and the number — was deferred to a commission that will hear the same lobbying.
Economics
Agents draw 136 to 600 times the power of a chat prompt. The interconnection requests and rate cases behind the buildout were sized against the smaller number — and the labs selling the compute still publish no per-prompt figures.
The Signal
Palo Alto Networks has spent approximately $29 billion in 2026 assembling five security acquisitions that together constitute the permissioning layer for enterprise AI agents. The company that governs agents is governed by nothing equivalent — and nobody is asking the question.
The Signal
Anthropic released Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 — the same model, two permission tiers. The split is governance architecture, not product differentiation. And the monitoring relationship persists regardless of where the data lives.
Economics
Alphabet's Q2 2026 was its first negative free cash flow quarter since its 2004 IPO. Three of the four major hyperscalers now have capex exceeding operating cash flow. The AI buildout is no longer internally funded — and that changes what the urgency to deploy actually is.
Economics
The threat to fire Powell is not primarily a political story. It is an economics story about what markets price when central bank independence is genuinely uncertain — and what the erosion of that premium does to the AI buildout.
Economics
Saudi Arabia committed $40B to US tech. The war has created competing claims on that capital. The AI buildout has a supply-side problem it didn't model.
Economics
Section 122 tariffs face two simultaneous clocks: the July 24 statutory expiry and active legal challenges that may produce a ruling first. For AI infrastructure planners, neither is a reliable floor.