Technology & innovation
Some Democratic leaders are calling for limits on data centers after the midterms. The Nasdaq fell more than 5% on Thursday, wiping out more than $2 trillion in market value.
In the CNBC Voter Poll, 56% of voters said AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in their vote, and 65% of those voters chose a Democrat for Congress.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari said pausing AI development should be a top priority for the House Democratic majority on Day 1.
Texas Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who won the governor’s race, has pledged a moratorium on all data center approvals until the legislature passes protective laws.
Texas is home to 27% of planned data center capacity, according to Wells Fargo.
Chip stocks led the decline, with Nvidia down 8% and Advanced Micro Devices down more than 14%.
Read more via CNBC, NPR
CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC she does not think the midterms dramatically changed anything for the company.
Voters backed restrictions or rejected pro-development measures in all but one of 41 local ballot measures across 10 states.
OpenAI published a policy blueprint on Thursday with commitments for its company-owned and operated data centers.
Friar said OpenAI continues to look at a 2027 public debut after confidentially filing its prospectus in June.
If the midterm means more focus on data centers and communities, we’re going to keep doing the work to get into those communities and to build trust with them.”
Read more via CNBC
Protesters broke into a Microsoft data center construction site in Amsterdam on Friday, the first of two days of rallies.
Activist groups announced actions in 16 countries on Friday and Saturday, organized by the Stop Dirty Data Centres coalition.
The coalition wants major construction paused until governments set clearer rules, and says it is not calling for existing data centers to close.
Campaigners say the facilities strain electricity and water supplies, compete with housing and threaten climate goals.
A Google project in Finland faces a criminal probe over land clearances, and Microsoft pulled out of a UK project hit by infrastructure delays.
AI, of course, is a super important technology and we need to have our own capacity.”
Read more via Reuters
Binance says the theft of more than $6 billion was a months-long campaign that included fake recruiters, a fake HR representative and a fake CEO. The FBI attributed the theft to North Korea, which denies it.
A hacker posing as a project director contacted a Binance engineer through a legitimate job-hunting platform in September and set up two rounds of interviews.
Near the end of the second interview, the engineer was told to download an “assignment” onto his work computer that contained malicious code.
In June, a different engineer had downloaded a tampered installer for a popular AI coding tool, which exposed the names of colleagues on the wallet team.
On October 20, the attackers used the compromised laptop and an internal AI tool to take control of two more engineers’ computers.
Binance says it is covering all customer losses.
We’ve identified dozens of other job interview compromises that have led to wallet compromises.”
Read more via Tom’s Hardware, Yahoo Finance, The Hacker News
Entry-level postings that mention AI have nearly tripled since early last year, even as junior vacancies shrink.
Adzuna figures show entry-level postings mentioning AI have almost tripled since the start of last year, while junior vacancies are down by a quarter since January 2025.
Indeed data show one in six entry-level vacancies in banking, legal, software development and other highly exposed occupations now mentions AI, double a year ago.
Almost one million 16 to 24 year olds in the UK are neither working nor in education or training.
Indeed senior economist Jack Kennedy said most of the demand comes from a small number of large employers and has offset only a third of the declines in other entry-level postings.
Most jobs still only require basic skills, such as prompting ChatGPT and using AI alongside Excel.
If you’re entering the jobs market and you’re looking for an office-based job and you don’t have AI skills, the current climate is even worse than during the Great Financial Crisis.”
Read more via Bloomberg
SaaStr, an events company for software businesses, has three full-time employees. An AI “superagent” has been its vice president of marketing since March.
The company has not backfilled roughly 10 positions, including its chief financial officer and a four-person marketing team.
SaaStr says only 8% of its invoices have been late since agents took over, down from 56% when humans handled them.
SaaStr is now looking for two people to manage the agents.
Users say human oversight is still mandatory, because agents can miss the nuances of human communication.
The startups using these agents were already operating with very small head counts.
I’ve seen startups that claim that they can replace an entire company with a set of AIs with no humans at the front. We’re not there yet, and I don’t think that’s a world that I want to live in anyway.”
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
A robot lab in Shanghai runs DNA experiments with almost no human hands. The system, called AutoDNA, is run by a team of AI agents that design and carry out an experiment from one simple prompt, and humans step in only to refresh supplies and service hardware. Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University tested it by having it detect a cancer-linked mutation and encode a famous quote, often misattributed to Stephen Hawking, in DNA. (Nature)
Almost nobody is letting AI agents place their orders. Uber said only four rides were ordered through an AI agent during its busiest week in October, and only 500 Uber Eats orders out of roughly 320 million trips and orders. DoorDash’s CEO said agents have generated several hundred orders on a platform that handled nearly 1 billion in the third quarter. (TechCrunch, Ars Technica)
The few that do shop are not very good at it. Visa told 22 AI agents to buy a TV, a laptop and a hair appliance, and the overall success rate was around 57%. (Fortune)
Zillow’s CEO says house hunting is not a chore to hand off to a robot. Jeremy Wacksman told investors that searching for a home is the fun part, and that Zillow is not seeing meaningful traffic from AI platforms, with about 80% of its traffic coming directly. (GeekWire)
