A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI data center in New Carlisle, Indiana, on October 2, 2025 (Noah Berger/Getty Images)

AI AI AI

What Amazon’s latest data center announcement says about AI right now

The first Amazon data centers in Louisiana will cost $12 billion and require a lot of preemptive defense.

Rani Molla

2/23/26 3:33PM

Another day, another Big Tech data center.

Today Amazon announced plans to spend $12 billion on its first data center campuses in Louisiana.

“Amazon’s $12 billion investment in northwest Louisiana will build next-generation data center campuses to support AI and cloud computing, ensuring opportunities for local communities,” Amazon Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer David Zapolsky said in the press release. “We’re creating hundreds of high-paying jobs and making substantial investments in local infrastructure.”

Like Meta — which unveiled a $10 billion data center in Indiana earlier this month and is already building a mammoth data center in Louisiana — Amazon’s announcement reads like the standard 2026 AI company template for data centers.

It’s bringing jobs! Amazon says the project will require 1,500 construction workers and 540 full-time employees to operate the facilities. As we’ve noted, for projects that cost this much, the long-term employment footprint is relatively small.

It’s paying for its own electricity! Tech companies have recently been put on notice by the White House over concerns they could pass grid upgrade costs on to local ratepayers, so releases now emphasize privately funded energy infrastructure.

It’s doing a lot for the community! Cue the STEM grants and infrastructure funds.

Why have these announcements become so rote? Because, as The New York Times recently wrote, AI has an image problem. Households are increasingly wary of its environmental and social impact, while investors are scrutinizing the enormous capital outlays required to build it.

We know from recent Big Tech earnings calls that AI demand isn’t slowing. But if the spending sounds confident, the messaging sounds defensive — a sign that the politics and economics of AI are getting more complicated.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5