Data center megadeals and AI safety governance

Reuters: Meta, BlackRock partner on $14 billion El Paso data center venture (Jul. 28, 2026)
Meta and BlackRock will form a venture to build a $14 billion El Paso data center, with BlackRock funds owning 80% and Meta 20%. Meta will lease 1GW of compute.
Anthropic: Our position on open-weights models (Jul. 27, 2026)
Anthropic opposes banning open-weights models, saying they’re useful if safe, but warns bans won’t stop authoritarian states or misuse.
Simon Willison: moonshotai/Kimi-K3 (Jul. 27, 2026)
Moonshot released 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 weights (1.56TB), calling them “open weight,” not open source.
NY Times: How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal (Jul. 27, 2026)
Louisiana rewrote a tax bill to fast-track Meta’s $50 billion Hyperion data center, granting huge rebates while shifting much risk to utilities, investors, and taxpayers.
WSJ: Nvidia Invests in Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence AI Lab (Jul. 27, 2026)
Nvidia invested in Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, providing far more GPUs, increasing its computing power by an order of magnitude.
Epoch AI: MirrorCode: What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?
MirrorCode is a benchmark that asks AI to reimplement entire programs end-to-end, without the original source, and to match outputs on unseen tests.
TechSpot: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI (Jul. 27, 2026)
An instructor hid white-font instructions in an online midterm so AI would insert nonsense about Madagascar. He caught 32 of 35 students who pasted chatbot answers.
WSJ: Nvidia, Other Tech Giants Launch AI Defense Alliance Following OpenAI Hacking Incident (Jul. 27, 2026)
Nvidia joined the Open Secure AI Alliance with SpaceX, Microsoft, Palantir, and others to build open-source tools to defend against AI-driven cyberattacks.
Techdirt: Judge Rejects Google’s Attempt To DMCA Its Way Out Of Being Scraped (Jul. 27, 2026)
Because the DMCA covers only copyrighted works, Google’s §1201 claims fail where SearchGuard blocks search results, cached pages, or snippets without copyrighted material. That raises whether the same rule shields scraping of non‑copyrighted content, like LLM outputs.
Big Think: Exercise works for depression. So why isn't it treated like real medicine? (Jul. 21, 2026)
Hundreds of trials show exercise reduces depressive symptoms and, for mild–moderate depression, performs similarly to medication or therapy.

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