• Data centers and artificial intelligence have become a part of everyday conversation for Americans.
• Data center energy consumption has entered those conversations, too.
• The largest planned AI campuses could require more than 10 gigawatts of electricity.

Some Americans have new next-door neighbors: data centers.

The US has been building these computing facilities for decades, but development has ramped up dramatically in recent years as AI increasingly drives demand for computing power.

Business Insider compiled a list of some of these enormous US data-center projects to illustrate the scale of what's being built. Those on the list have at least 1 gigawatt of capacity and have broken ground.

Among the largest is a city-sized campus in Texas pursuing up to 17 gigawatts of power capacity. Another in Ohio is aiming to have up to 10 gigawatts of data-center capacity, most of which OpenAI has contracted to use. For reference, 1 gigawatt of electricity continuously supplied for a year could power roughly 835,000 average American homes.

In total, the Pew Research Center says the US has more than 3,000 operating data centers nationwide and over 1,500 more under development, mostly in rural areas. According to data from the Energy Institute's 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy, US data centers accounted for nearly 40% of global data-center electricity use in 2025, consuming about 313 terawatt-hours. That's more electricity than all of Australia used that year.

Planned capacity is the closest public proxy for how much computing these AI campuses can support, and that's important because the electricity and water needed to run their servers and cooling systems can have major implications for local grids and sustainability.

Residents affected by developments in places like Texas and Utah have pushed back over concerns about noise, property values, and the effects on nearby communities. New York has temporarily paused the construction of new large-scale AI data centers.

Still, the 2025 US Data Center Energy Usage Report from Berkeley Lab projects that data centers will consume 11.8% of US electricity by 2030, up from about 4.4% in 2023. Oracle, SB Energy, SpaceX, Google, and Meta are among the leading developers and operators.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is so eager to build its supercomputers that it's offering employees a pay bump to temporarily move to the data-center sites to help with the buildout.

Here's a closer look at some of the largest AI data-center campuses being built.

Meta Lebanon Campus — Indiana

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta currently has 21 data centers under construction. Its Lebanon, Indiana, data center is one of its biggest investments — and the company's second in the state.

The $10 billion center, which broke ground in early 2026, is planned to deliver 1 gigawatt of capacity and span 1,500 acres.

It's expected to be completed by early 2028. Neighbors have complained about light pollution from the construction, while residents across Indiana have urged state lawmakers to regulate the growing data-center industry.

Meta El Paso Data Center — Texas

Meta's data center in El Paso, Texas, is planned to be powered by 1 gigawatt of capacity and span roughly 1,000 acres. It originally called for $1.5 billion in investment, which later increased to $10 billion.

The center will support more than 300 workers once complete, while around 4,000 construction workers are expected to build it out.

The site broke ground in October 2025 and is expected to be finished in 2028. The site has also sparked backlash from residents.

Project Freebird (Stargate) — Texas

Project Freebird is part of Stargate, the AI-infrastructure initiative co-led by OpenAI and SoftBank, which OpenAI said in January 2025 would invest up to $500 billion in US infrastructure.

Freebird will be a 1.2-gigawatt data center campus in Milam County, Texas, near Austin. The first phase was expected to be completed by October, while additional phases are planned through 2028. Construction began in 2025.

However, the company has not issued any update on the data center's completion as of late October.

The site, being developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank-backed infrastructure company, will span roughly 595 acres. Phase 1 has an estimated construction cost of $470 million, while total investment in the broader project is expected to range from $1.8 billion to $3 billion.

The first phase had a scheduled construction-completion date of October 15, while SB Energy says operations are expected to begin in 2027.

Fort Wayne Data Center — Indiana

In 2024, Google broke ground on a $2 billion data center campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to support its AI and cloud operations.

The campus is expected to require up to 1.2 gigawatts of power at full build-out. Some Indiana politicians have expressed concern about the amount of power required to run the data center and who will foot the energy bill.

"If companies want to build a data center here, and we have to build new power generation for them, then they need to share in that risk," Indiana Rep. Ed Soliday, a Republican, previously told Business Insider. "There are a couple of data center folks who have said, 'Oh no, that's not fair.' Yes, it is. Grandma down the street shouldn't have to pay for your dreams."

Stargate Abilene — Texas

The Stargate AI data center campus outside Abilene, Texas, is expected to deliver 1.2 gigawatts of capacity. Crusoe, the lead developer and builder behind the project, broke ground on the campus in June 2024. The first phase is already operational.

The second phase, which is under construction, is backed by a $15 billion joint venture between Crusoe, Blue Owl Capital, and Primary Digital Infrastructure. It will add six buildings to the campus, bringing the total to eight and the planned capacity to 1.2 gigawatts. The site will span 875 acres.

Nebius AI Factory — Missouri

Nebius' data center in Independence, Missouri, will span roughly 400 acres and reach a capacity of up to 1.2 gigawatts. The company broke ground in May and is expected to bring roughly 1,200 construction jobs and 130 permanent jobs.

Nebius has not announced a total investment amount, though the city expects to begin collecting tax revenue from the campus in 2028.

The site hasn't come without controversy. A group of citizens is suing the city of Independence and companies involved with the project, alleging 16 counts, including claims that the city violated Missouri's Sunshine Law several times by failing to provide finalized data center construction plans. Nebius did not offer a comment.

CloudBurst San Marcos Data Center I — Texas

CloudBurst's San Marcos Data Center I is a planned 1.2-gigawatt capacity campus on 706 acres in central Texas. Guadalupe County approved a $500 million tax abatement for the project.

The company and its development partner, Evolve, broke ground in November 2025, with an initial 50-megawatt phase expected to be complete by late 2026. Construction is expected to be complete in 2029.

San Marcos residents have protested proposed data centers over water and energy concerns. The city has since become the first in Texas to ban new data centers, though the ban won't stop CloudBurst's project, which is outside city limits.

The Barn Data Center — Michigan

The Barn, part of the Stargate project, is a multi-billion-dollar AI data center campus in Saline Township, southwest of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Related Digital, a data-center developer, is building the campus for Oracle as part of its partnership with OpenAI. Construction for The Barn began in June.

The campus will comprise three data center buildings with a combined capacity of 1.4 gigawatts. The $16 billion project is backed by Related Digital and investment firm Blackstone. The first facilities are expected to enter service by the end of 2027.

Local residents have protested against the data center, citing concerns about its impact on the grid and pollution.

In October, state regulators opened public comment on a wastewater permit for the campus’s proposed on-site water-treatment system.

Stargate Frontier Campus — Texas

The Stargate Frontier Campus, developed by Vantage Data Centers, will be a 1.4 gigawatt, 1,200-acre data center in Shackelford County, Texas, near Albany in north-central Texas.

The campus is part of the broader Stargate initiative led by OpenAI, Oracle, and other partners, and is being designed for ultra-high-density AI workloads. Vantage plans to invest more than $25 billion in the project, which is expected to be fully built out by 2028.

Construction of the center began in late 2025.

xAI Colossus 2 — Tennessee

Elon Musk's xAI is building Colossus 2 to power Grok, the AI chatbot on X. Construction began in 2025 in Memphis, Tennessee, and the company has said it plans to expand the site to 1.5 gigawatts. The nonprofit research institute Epoch AI estimates its current capacity at about 946 megawatts.

Environmental justice groups, led by the NAACP, sued xAI earlier this year, alleging that the company installed and operated gas turbines that power Colossus 2 in nearby Southaven, Mississippi, without the required air permits. In March, Mississippi regulators approved a permit for xAI to build and operate a new fleet of turbines at the site.

Local residents have filed a class-action lawsuit against xAI, MZX Tech, and SpaceX, alleging that noise and vibrations from the gas turbines have disrupted their lives and harmed their property values.

Still, in late October, Business Insider reported that SpaceX was offering employees a 20% pay bump to temporarily relocate to Memphis or Southaven, Mississippi, for six weeks to help build out Colossus 1 and 2.

Project Jupiter — New Mexico

Developed by infrastructure companies STACK Infrastructure and BorderPlex Digital Assets, Project Jupiter will be an AI data center campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, near the Texas border. It is part of the Stargate initiative and is expected to support Oracle's AI-computing operations for OpenAI.

Construction for Project Jupiter began in September 2025. The campus's planned on-site power system could include up to 2.45 gigawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells, replacing an earlier proposal centered on gas turbines and diesel generators.

In May, Oracle ditched its plan to construct a natural gas plant to power Project Jupiter, following local residents' concerns over the potential negative water usage and air pollution effects it could cause.

Oracle issued a force majeure notice in September due to potential delays in the project's power infrastructure, though it says the campus remains on track for 2028.

Meta Hyperion — Louisiana

Meta's Hyperion AI data center in rural northeast Louisiana, backed by more than $50 billion in investment, will span more than 3,600 acres and is planned to deliver 5 gigawatts of capacity once fully developed. Hyperion broke ground in December 2024.

Meta says Hyperion is designed to train and run its artificial-intelligence systems. Earlier this year, Louisiana gave Meta $3.3 billion in tax breaks for Meta to build Hyperion. The project is expected to be completed in the 2030s.

Since the center is located in a rural part of the state, the influx of 7,500 trade and construction workers has spurred a housing boom, with mobile homes built for workers that rent for $3,000 a month.

Still, the project has also faced pushback from local residents and environmental groups concerned about its impact on water, energy use, and the surrounding community.

Louisiana regulators held hearings in October on the proposed power build-out for the campus. The state's Public Service Commission will issue a decision in December.

PORTS-Pike Technology Campus — Ohio

The Department of Energy said SB Energy broke ground in March in Ohio on the planned AI and cloud campus at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, known as PORTS. The campus will span private land and remediated federal land leased from the DOE.

The Nvidia-backed project is expected to include up to 10 gigawatts of data-center capacity, with OpenAI set to use up to 8 gigawatts of it for its workloads.

While the DOE says the historical PORTS site is in active remediation, the project has raised concerns about potential health and environmental risks associated with the site's history as a uranium enrichment plant. SB Energy told the Guardian in August that it is "committed to paying for accelerated cleanup and remediation at the site" and that the company "performs thorough site reviews and due diligence for each of our infrastructure projects, including soil sampling."

SB Energy said in October that it would begin initial clearing and grading work for the campus’s first phase.

Project Matador — Texas

Fermi America's Project Matador, also called HyperGrid, is an AI data center and private power campus being built near Amarillo, Texas.

Fermi, which was co-founded in 2025 by former Texas Gov. and US Energy Secretary Rick Perry, said it is pursuing roughly 17 gigawatts of private power for the campus, up from the initially planned 11 gigawatts. That means the campus would generate much of its own electricity on-site rather than relying entirely on the public grid. The company says 6 gigawatts have been permitted so far.

Fermi has a 99-year land lease with the Texas Tech University System for the core site, and the project could span roughly 8,400 acres at full build-out. Fermi says construction is underway, with completion planned for the 2030s, and AI cloud company TensorWave has signed a 15-year lease expected to generate about $6.5 billion in contracted revenue for the first phase. Fermi is also developing a cooling system designed to substantially reduce water use.

The company was hit with a class action lawsuit earlier this year. The investor lawsuit alleges Fermi misled investors about the status and prospects of Project Matador; its shares fell after Amazon withdrew a $150 million construction advance in December 2025.

Fermi America said three gas turbines arrived at the site in October.

SpaceX, Meta, Google, Oracle, Fermi America, CloudBurst, and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. SB Energy did not offer a comment.

Meta's AI gamble is suddenly looking like a win for Mark Zuckerberg.

That was far from a given. Even the Meta CEO was doubting himself. His company had poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI investments with largely unproven results.

"Are you sure this is going to work?" he asked his 29-year-old AI chief, Alexandr Wang, at the end of last year, he recalled on a recent episode of the "Cheeky Pint" podcast.

Those risky AI bets — which one analyst compared to throwing spaghetti at the wall — as well as the massive layoffs and reorganization that came with them, are now starting to pay off. Meta beat its AI rivals to the punch with its new AI assistant, Muse, and it finally released a frontier AI model. Although Muse is bleeding cash amid high compute costs, analysts are excited by its moneymaking potential.

Zuckerberg is riding high, too. Sipping a Guinness alongside Wang during a recent podcast interview, the pair extolled Meta's AI prowess.

"You never know when you launch something how it's going to be received," the CEO said. "There's always the case where you get a home run, which in this case it was, right? And it's just like extremely well received right off the bat."

And Meta seems to believe in Zuckerberg's leadership more than ever. His latest coup: Convincing the company to issue a new class of shares after he threatened to list his Palo Alto compound and leave California as voters weigh a billionaire tax.

The big question is how long the good vibes will last. Meta is still spending gobs of money on AI without a concrete financial payoff. Some remain skeptical.

"The bill is huge," David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, told Business Insider.

"He's won the narrative. He hasn't proven the return yet."

Meta's social reckoning era

Zuckerberg is no stranger to public discourse. He's undertaken multiple personas: the nerdy wunderkind in hoodies, the jacked wife guy, the unapologetically masculine Trump ally.

At the beginning of this year, it looked as if he was headed for a new reckoning, and it wasn't just because of the aptly named sequel to "The Social Network."

Zuckerberg was on trial, taking the stand in a landmark lawsuit that alleged Meta's platforms harmed the mental health of young people. (Meta was found negligent and is appealing.) It was one of three major lawsuits this year that put the company on the defensive against claims that its technology posed safety risks to children.

And there were the more typical Zuckerberg cringe moments, too, like his front-row appearance at a Prada fashion show that raised eyebrows across the internet.

On the inside, employee morale was waning. Though the billionaire CEO had called 2026 "the year of AI," Meta had little momentum, and unpopular decisions — including a program to track employee keystrokes — amplified the discontent.

Also, Meta had one of its largest rounds of layoffs, ever. Meta began trimming staff in March, followed by a huge round in May, when it laid off about 10% of its workforce.

Separately, Meta reshuffled another 7,000 workers as part of an AI-focused reorganization of its tech and product teams. Many engineers were relegated to individual contributor status. Meta later asked some of the employees it had demoted to return to their managerial roles.

The AI push didn't seem to be paying off: In the second quarter of this year, 98% of revenue came from its traditional advertising business — not AI.

Morale was "maybe not the worst it's ever been in 20 years here, but it's probably up there," Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, said during an internal call in June.

The groundwork for Meta's comeback

Amid the chaos, Zuckerberg laid the groundwork for a comeback. Wang and Meta's elite AI researchers moved their desks to sit near Zuckerberg.

Starting last year, Zuckerberg and Wang also went on a talent-hiring spree, dangling pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to poach top researchers.

Zuckerberg empowered key lieutenants, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, to go ham on any vision they had, including on his pet project, an AI assistant. It all fit into Zuckerberg's longtime playbook of embracing small teams and overseeing reorgs until something works — move fast and break things, as he has infamously put it.

It worked.

Muse, the long-awaited Meta AI agent, became a breakout hit. A week after it launched, it shot to the top of the app store, and has since achieved more than 10 million downloads in North America. The team was stunned to have beaten OpenAI to market, a person familiar with the matter said. OpenAI's rival product, Dots, launched three weeks later.

Meta also threw unprecedented compute and talent at building a series of frontier AI models, called Muse Wonder, that could keep up with those from giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.

On Meta's third-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was optimistic that Meta's AI and hardware investments could soon become cash cows, as people shop through Muse and buy more virtual-reality glasses powered by the company's growing AI chops.

Meta, meanwhile, views Zuckerberg as more critical than ever to its long-term fortunes.

Key board members abruptly excused themselves from a dinner with Zuckerberg in September after he told them he was going to sell his Palo Alto estate in response to California's proposed billionaire tax, Meta disclosed in a filing on Wednesday.

Four days later, a special committee returned with a deal that would give Zuckerberg $20 billion in "immediate liquidity" to cover the tax — if it passes — without reducing his controlling stake in Meta. Meta also made plans to ensure that billions in fresh AI fundraising wouldn't dilute Zuckerberg's control.

"Meta's track record of significant value creation for its shareholders is in large part due to his strong leadership, unique and creative vision, and exceptional management abilities," the company said in a press release.

The personal win comes as some of his other problems have blown over. Meta settled a major lawsuit brought by attorneys general across states, Washington, DC, and US territories. As part of the settlement, the company committed to make changes to its apps, such as daily time limits and pausing notifications overnight. The agreement was part of an August settlement, a move that allowed Meta to call out its competitors such as YouTube and TikTok.

"All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another," the company said in a blog post at the time.

Big questions still loom. The day after Meta reported strong earnings and Muse adoption, its stock fell 7% as investors absorbed the scale of the company's hundreds of billions of dollars in future spending commitments.

And the legal troubles keep on coming. This week, a New Mexico jury also ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a case that Meta plans to appeal.

Whether Zuckerberg's strategy is sustainable or not, the vibe shift has been notable — and may have proven naysayers wrong, at least until the next period of chaos erupts.

"Meta is cool again," Jesse Cohen, an analyst at Investing.com, said in a note. "That's the Muse effect."

OPERAZIONE REPORT: Tutte le carte, gli interrogativi e i sospetti sul caso Ranucci-Lavitola

Il direttore anticipa i temi del nuovo numero di MillenniuM, disponibile in libreria e negli store online.

Una trasmissione d’inchiesta invisa al potere. Una bomba cosiddetta “amica”. Un faccendiere specializzato in torbidi servizi alla politica. Partiti che invadono la tv pubblica. Sono gli ingredienti di quella che abbiamo chiamato “Operazione Report”, di cui conosciamo in parte lo svolgimento e in tutto l’esito: quello di allontanare il giornalista Sigfrido Ranucci dalla conduzione della più importante trasmissione di giornalismo investigativo della Rai, dopo nove anni di conduzione (salvo il successo dei ricorsi dell’interessato al Tribunale del lavoro di Roma). Nove anni in cui molte puntate di Report hanno scatenato gli attacchi della politica, in particolare dal centrodestra e dalla frangia renziana. Che si sono via via trasformati in una vera e propria campagna, amplificata dalla stampa di destra. Parte da qui “Operazione Report”, titolo di copertina del numero di ottobre di MillenniuM, il mensile diretto da Peter Gomez. Il racconto prende il via dall’altro protagonista, il faccendiere Valter Lavitola, con il ritratto approfondito e documentato a firma di Marco Lillo. Sul personaggio i media tendono a far prevalere aspetti quasi folcloristici, ma la sua biografia racconta ben altro: relazioni coi potenti, processi e condanne, intrighi politici ai massimi livelli, che hanno cambiato la storia di questo Paese, dalla caduta del governo Prodi nel 2008 alle manovre contro politici sgraditi. Una parabola in cui affiorano contatti stretti con i servizi segreti, un leitmotiv della sua fulminante ascesa, come scrive il direttore Peter Gomez. Sulla “Operazione Report” Millennium parte dai fatti, vale a dire l’inchiesta giudiziaria sulla bomba esplosa davanti a casa di Ranucci, a Torvaianica, il 16 ottobre 2025: l’individuazione dell’arruffata manovalanza campana, l’improvvisa entrata in scena di Lavitola, la “amicizia fraterna” rivendicata a sorpresa dal conduttore, la sequenza di “affettuosi” moventi snocciolati dal faccendiere. Ma oltre le carte c’è di più: gli affari, africani e non solo, che portano a Marco Dell’Utri, figlio del senatore che è stato la mente organizzativa di Forza Italia e ha scontato una condanna a 7 anni per concorso esterno in associazione mafiosa. L’Operazione Report ci fa riflettere sul rapporto tra informazione e potere, ma anche sui fili trasversali del potere. Che possono passare anche per un piatto di vongole. Sgusciate o meno.

L'articolo Millennium, “Operazione Report”: il nuovo numero del mensile analizza il caso Ranucci-Lavitola proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

• PHP, the open-source computer programming language, had two major vulnerabilities exposed.
• Yonaton Keller woke on Wednesday to panicked messages about the two PHP vulnerabilities.
• He shares three steps you can take to protect your website.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Yonaton Keller, a 46-year-old product manager at Zafran Security, based in Tel Aviv. His words have been edited for length and clarity.

When I woke up at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, I had multiple messages from around 4:45 a.m. alerting me that two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language had been disclosed.

I immediately understood that this was a very serious situation.

Websites run different versions of PHP, and it's estimated that around 70% of websites worldwide use it. This isn't the first time PHP vulnerabilities have been found, but these ones require essentially no authentication on the attacker's part.

It's a very tricky situation. If it were a year and a half ago, nobody would have really responded to this so urgently. But this might be one of the first major incidents of its kind in this AI era, and the cycle of how attackers operate and how we typically respond is broken.

AI enhances detection and response times, but it also means that any limited-technical person could exploit these vulnerabilities within minutes.

My team was very concerned and had to act fast

I'm based in Israel, so when it was 6:30 a.m., my time, it was the middle of the night in the US. This time gap worked in our team's favor, as we had time to figure out what was going on before our customers woke up.

PHP is an open-source computer programming language used to create websites and web applications. It's such a widely used programming language that we immediately understood that every one of our customers, which includes major corporations and businesses, would likely be affected by this.

With bugs or critical flaws in the infrastructure, like the two that were found in PHP, exploitation is actually quite easy, especially if you use AI agents. That was the first thing we understood: even completely unskilled attackers can use these vulnerabilities to take down sites.

The PHP Foundation said it would disclose the details of the vulnerabilities and release a fix for newer versions of the language around 5 p.m. Israel time. But some details had already been informally disclosed on an online forum. The post was deleted minutes afterward, but screenshots spread around the internet quite quickly in unofficial forums.

So, my team and I dropped everything else and spent all day on Wednesday gathering informal information to see whether we could mitigate the risk of exploitation before an official fix was released.

How to tell if you're at risk

The first step people can take to figure out if they're impacted is to look at their websites and web applications, and try to understand where PHP is involved. You can also assume that most, if not all, of them will use PHP in some way, unless you have very basic HTML-based pages.

The second step would be to look at what vulnerability scanners online are telling you. Tenable, Qualys, and Rapid7 are usually the big three for releasing detection rules and actually detecting the vulnerability. In this case, these vulnerabilities have caused such widespread panic worldwide that they were quick to respond. This is also a way to understand the exact vulnerabilities in your internet-facing assets.

After taking these steps, immediately look online to upgrade your website to the current PHP version. It's quite easy to upgrade that, and it's free. There are some technical steps to do after the fix, so you might need a tech guy to implement them. If you don't update your PHP version, the impact on your business and website can be very, very serious.

Some people are also fully taking their sites offline, and I think that can be the right call if you have evidence that you are being targeted. However, 70% of the internet can't and shouldn't be taken offline just because those sites have some vulnerabilities. It's an emergency step to take if you have evidence of potential exploitation, but it can't be a step taken by everyone.

This was not just about attackers disrupting your website or web application; it was about them taking control of your server, stealing sensitive documents, moving inside your network, and then carrying out malicious operations, such as deploying ransomware or other actions they intended.

The situation has calmed down, but my cybersecurity team is still very concerned

Things have calmed down a bit since Wednesday, but we're still very, very concerned. Patching 70% of worldwide websites doesn't take a minute or two.

Hours after the fix was disclosed by the PHP Foundation, there were already tons of exploitation attempts popping up online. Attackers are getting quicker. I think that in this AI era, when in a matter of minutes, many attackers can attack, you don't have the time you used to.

The whole traditional process of scoping the attack surface, establishing a remediation plan, then calling a guy who's going to be responsible for this remediation plan, et cetera, is broken.

For a long period of time, organizations were investing a lot in what we call post-compromise scenarios. I think the AI era of cybersecurity will involve a lot more security investments in the pre-compromise realm, so defenses can be pre-built and ready for attacks in situations like this.

• Uber is giving its corporate employees access to OpenAI's enterprise work tool.
• ChatGPT Work can "prepare meeting briefs," among other tasks, OpenAI said.
• Uber is rolling out the tool after laying off thousands of workers last month.

Uber is giving all of its corporate employees access to OpenAI's enterprise tool weeks after laying off thousands.

About 30,000 employees at the ride-hailing service's offices will have access to ChatGPT Work, the two companies said on Thursday.

The tool will connect with other programs that Uber employees use, such as Slack and Gmail, to "research information, prepare meeting briefs, create presentations, analyze data and complete workflows across applications," a statement said.

"As AI transforms how we work, we want to give everyone the tools to innovate, solve problems and help shape Uber's future," Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga said. Uber initially tested the tool among a group of 1,000 employees.

The rollout comes the month after Uber laid off about 10% of its corporate workforce, or about 3,300 people. The company made the job cuts to reduce management layers and reduce the number of small teams, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the time. It didn't cite AI in its announcement.

Some laid-off employees told Business Insider that AI was doing significant parts of their jobs, from answering their questions in Slack to crafting replies to messages from riders and drivers.

Uber cited AI as a reason for an earlier round of layoffs in July, which targeted Uber's customer service employees.

Do you have a story idea about Uber? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• The AI boom is accelerating data center development across the US.
• Even states with few data centers are attracting major hyperscale projects.
• Here's how all 50 US states rank by their number of operational data centers.

The data center business is booming in the US, and some states are feeling it more than others.

Data centers, which house the computing machines that power digital services, have been around for decades. However, the amount of computing power required to fuel the AI boom has accelerated their development and brought the industry into the mainstream.

This ranking was compiled by analyzing data from Data Center Map, an industry source that maps data center locations around the world. It shows a snapshot of its US database as of October 2026. Business Insider limited this ranking to fully operational data centers.

Data Center Map compiles its data from multiple sources and mainly tracks cloud and colocation service providers. Each data center it tracks has to have an initial capacity of at least 10 cabinets. While some states have hyperscale AI data centers, others have relatively small operations.

Firstly, data center operators and service providers add their own listings to market themselves. Data Center Map also monitors external databases and manually identifies any missing operators. It also handles requests from users who identify missing or outdated listings.

There is no federal requirement for data centers to register in a central database, so the figures should not be interpreted as a complete census of every data center in the country. Data Center Map also says it has a "more limited coverage on enterprise and government data centers."

Last year, Business Insider created its own US data centers map, which included estimated power usage, as part of an investigation into the industry.

Here are the states with the most operational data centers, ranked from least to most.

50. Vermont

Number of operational data centers: 3

Vermont's three operational data centers are located in Stowe, South Burlington, and Williston. The state has a limited electrical grid, according to the Vermont Natural Resources Council.

49. Alaska

Number of operational data centers: 4

Half of Alaska's operational data centers are located in Anchorage. The University of Alaska Fairbanks said that the high cost of electricity and network connections are some of the challenges for data center buildout in the state.

48. South Dakota

Number of operational data centers: 5

Most of South Dakota's data centers are in Sioux Falls. Lawmakers in South Dakota rejected proposals for industry tax incentives in 2026 while enacting new restrictions on electricity and water use, according to the South Dakota Searchlight.

46. Maine (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 6

Maine has data centers in Portland, Brunswick, and Bangor.

Maine's Gov. Janet Mills signed an order in April to establish a data center advisory council to advise on large-scale data center development.

46. Delaware (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 6

Half of the data centers in Delaware are located in Wilmington.

Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer signed legislation in August requiring data centers to generate their own energy and cover infrastructure costs, WHYY reported.

44. West Virginia (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 7

West Virginia's data centers are located in South Charleston, Bridgeport, Charleston, Star City, Petersburg, Nitro, and Berkeley Springs.

Having previously lacked the regulatory framework to approve or deny large-scale projects, Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced a data center development plan in August.

44. Rhode Island (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 7

All of Rhode Island's data centers are located in Providence.

The Providence Journal reported in April that one of the reasons Rhode Island has not been as attractive to data center developers is high energy costs.

42. Montana (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 8

The majority of Montana's data centers are located in Billings.

Big Sky Digital Infrastructure is developing a 5,100-acre campus 30 miles north of Billings.

42. Hawaii (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 8

Over half of Hawaii's data centers are in Honolulu.

The Honolulu Civil Beat reported that there are currently no hyperscale data centers in Hawaii.

41. Arkansas

Number of operational data centers: 9

The city with the most data centers in Arkansas is Little Rock.

Google announced its first data center in the state, to be located in West Memphis, in 2025, while Avaio is developing a large-scale one near Little Rock.

39. New Hampshire (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 10

Manchester has three data centers, while the rest are spread across seven different cities.

A proposed data center in Nottingham was withdrawn earlier this year following local opposition, the New Hampshire Bulletin reported.

39. Idaho (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 10

Four of Idaho's 10 data centers are located in Boise, followed by three in Coeur d'Alene.

Meta plans to operate a $1.2 billion data center in Kuna, which it broke ground on in 2022.

38. Louisiana

Number of operational data centers: 12

The majority of Louisiana's data centers are located in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Meta is building its largest-ever data center in Richland Parish, which will house the multi-gigawatt AI cluster Hyperion.

37. North Dakota

Number of operational data centers: 13

Four of North Dakota's data centers are located in Fargo, followed by three in Ellendale.

There are some large-scale data center projects in the state, such as Applied Digital's 280-megawatt campus near Harwood.

36. Kansas

Number of operational data centers: 15

Nearly half of Kansas' operational data centers are located in Lenexa, which has seven of the state's 15 facilities.

Kansas is experiencing a surge in plans for large-scale data center development, including one by Dubai-based developer Damac Properties in Edgerton, Kansas, The Wall Street Journal reported.

35. Mississippi

Number of operational data centers: 16

Six of Mississippi's operational data centers are located in Canton.

Amazon announced in April this year that it increased its total planned investment in its Mississippi data centers, including in Canton, to $25 billion.

33. New Mexico (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 20

Over half of New Mexico's data centers are located in Los Lunas.

Meta opened a data center in Los Lunas in 2019, which it has since expanded.

33. Connecticut (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 20

Connecticut's 20 operational data centers are spread across multiple cities, with the highest concentration in Stamford.

The Connecticut Mirror reported that lawmakers said the state's high electricity costs make it unattractive to data center developers.

32. Wyoming

Number of operational data centers: 22

All but two of Wyoming's data centers are located in Cheyenne, with the other two in Casper and Afton.

In 2012, Microsoft built its first data center in Cheyenne and has expanded its footprint there multiple times since.

31. Alabama

Number of operational data centers: 23

Huntsville has the most operational data centers in Alabama.

Meta broke ground on its Huntsville campus in 2018.

30. South Carolina

Number of operational data centers: 26

Moncks Corner has the most operational data centers in South Carolina, accounting for 11 of the state's 26 facilities.

Google has three facilities in South Carolina, where it first made its footprint in 2007.

29. Maryland

Number of operational data centers: 27

Baltimore has the most operational data centers in Maryland, followed by Frederick.

Amazon is developing a new data center campus in Frederick, Maryland.

28. Kentucky

Number of operational data centers: 32

Louisville has the most operational data centers in Kentucky, with 13 of the state's 32 facilities.

Mason County, Kentucky, recently signed a development agreement for a Meta hyperscale data center, as reported by LEX 18.

27. Utah

Number of operational data centers: 35

Salt Lake City has the most operational data centers in Utah, followed by Bluffdale, Eagle Mountain, and West Jordan.

Meta operates a campus in Eagle Mountain, and the National Security Agency operates one located near Bluffdale.

25. Oklahoma (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 36

Most of Oklahoma's data centers are located in Tulsa, followed by Oklahoma City and Pryor.

Google operates a facility in Pryor and is developing additional locations in the state.

25. Nebraska (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 36

Omaha has the most operational data centers in Nebraska, with 11, followed by Papillion and Springfield, each with 8.

Google has campuses in Lincoln, Omaha, and Papillion.

24. Wisconsin

Number of operational data centers: 41

Wisconsin's 41 data centers are spread across several cities, with Milwaukee and Madison hosting the most.

Microsoft finished building an AI data center in Mount Pleasant in June.

23. Massachusetts

Number of operational data centers: 46

Marlborough has the most operational data centers in Massachusetts, with six, followed by Boston with five, and Cambridge and Waltham with four each.

CBS News reported that the biggest, the Markley data center, is in Lowell.

21. Missouri (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 47

Missouri's 47 operational data centers are spread across eight cities, with Kansas City accounting for most of them.

Axios reported in September that most of Missouri's planned data center expansion is concentrated in the Kansas City metropolitan area, citing research by Cleanview.

21. Minnesota (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 47

Minnesota's 47 data centers are spread across 21 cities, with Minneapolis accounting for 15, followed by Eden Prairie, St. Paul, Shakopee, and Minnetonka.

Google announced earlier this year that it plans to build a data center in Pine Island.

20. Nevada

Number of operational data centers: 51

More than half of Nevada's data centers are located in Las Vegas.

Switch has plans to expand its Citadel Campus at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, which the company says will have gigawatts of power capacity upon completion.

19. Indiana

Number of operational data centers: 51

Indiana's 51 operational data centers are spread across 11 cities, with Indianapolis leading and New Carlisle following.

18. Tennessee

Number of operational data centers: 53

Nashville has the largest concentration of Tennessee's 53 operational data centers.

Elon Musk's xAI describes its Colossus facility in Memphis as the world's largest AI supercomputer.

16. Michigan (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 58

Michigan's 58 data centers are spread across 27 cities, with Southfield accounting for the most.

Part of the Stargate Project, Related Digital kicked off construction of a $16 billion data center called "The Barn" in Saline Township in June.

16. Colorado (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 58

There are 14 data centers in operation in Denver, followed by 11 in Englewood, 7 in Centennial, and 7 in Colorado Springs.

QTS is expanding its 65-acre data center campus in Aurora, Colorado, Colorado Public Radio reported in July.

15. Iowa

Number of operational data centers: 69

Altoona and West Des Moines are among Iowa's leading data center locations, alongside Council Bluffs and Des Moines.

Google has had a campus in Council Bluffs since 2007, recently invested in its expansion, and has also kicked off a new one in Cedar Rapids.

14. North Carolina

Number of operational data centers: 76

Charlotte has 24 data centers, the most in North Carolina, followed by Raleigh, Maiden, and Lenoir.

Apple operates a data center in Maiden, according to The Charlotte Observer. Google and Meta also operate data centers in the state.

12. Pennsylvania (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 78

Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have the largest concentrations of operational data centers in Pennsylvania.

In 2025, Amazon announced plans to invest at least $20 billion in the state to expand its data center operations.

12. New Jersey (tie)

Number of operational data centers: 78

Secaucus and Piscataway are two of New Jersey's main data center hubs, alongside Jersey City.

Equinix operates a 129,436-square-foot data center in Secaucus, known as NY5.

11. Florida

Number of operational data centers: 113

Florida's 113 operational data centers are spread across 27 locations, with Miami accounting for the most at 33, followed by Tampa with 20, Jacksonville with 13, and Orlando with nine.

Data center provider HostDime has been based in the state since 2003 and is building a 100,000-square-foot facility in Eatonville.

10. Arizona

Number of operational data centers: 114

Phoenix contains 34 of Arizona's data centers, followed by Goodyear with 24, and Chandler with 17.

ABC 15 reported that companies such as Meta, Apple, and Microsoft all have campuses in Arizona.

9. Georgia

Number of operational data centers: 123

Atlanta has the largest concentration of operational data centers in Georgia, with 43 facilities, followed by Lithia Springs with 25 and Social Circle with 10.

Google built its first data center in Georgia in 2007, and QTS is has one in Fayetteville.

8. Washington

Number of operational data centers: 132

Quincy has the largest concentration of operational data centers in Washington, with 33 facilities, followed by Seattle with 31, Tukwila with 16, and East Wenatchee with 11.

Washington's Department of Ecology says Quincy and Wenatchee are popular spots because they have cheaper, reliable energy.

7. Oregon

Number of operational data centers: 141

Hillsboro has the most operational data centers in Oregon, followed by Boardman, and then Umatilla and Prineville.

Oregon is home to Meta and Google's first-ever data centers: Meta built its in Prineville, and Google's The Dalles.

6. Illinois

Number of operational data centers: 143

Chicago has the largest concentration of operational data centers in Illinois, with 49 facilities, followed by Elk Grove Village, which has 24. Lombard, Aurora, and DeKalb each have seven.

Companies such as Digital Realty Trust, Microsoft, Meta, and CyrusOne operate in Illinois.

5. New York

Number of operational data centers: 149

New York City is home to a large share of the state's operational data centers, with additional concentrations in Buffalo and Albany.

In July, New York was the first state to enact an executive order that imposed a statewide yearlong moratorium on hyperscale AI data centers.

4. Ohio

Number of operational data centers: 189

Columbus has the largest concentration of operational data centers in Ohio, with Johnstown, Hilliard, and Cleveland also home to significant numbers of facilities.

Intel announced plans in 2022 for a major semiconductor manufacturing facility in New Albany, a suburb in central Ohio known as the "Silicon Heartland," which is already home to data centers operated by Amazon, Google, and Meta, as Business Insider previously reported.

3. California

Number of operational data centers: 285

Santa Clara has the largest concentration of operational data centers in California, with 75 facilities, followed by Los Angeles with 51 and San Jose with 26.

Major operators in Santa Clara include Digital Realty, Equinix, CoreSite, and Vantage Data Centers.

2. Texas

Number of operational data centers: 358

Of Texas's 358 operational data centers, 58 are located in Dallas, 42 in Houston, and 39 in San Antonio.

Earlier this year, Business Insider, citing research from Jones Lang LaSalle, reported that Texas is on track to become the largest data center market in the world by 2030.

Texas is home to some of the world's largest planned data center projects, such as Fermi America's Project Matador.

1. Virginia

Number of operational data centers: 452

Northern Virginia is not only the largest data center market in the US but also in the world. Major operators in the state include Equinix, Digital Realty, Microsoft, Vantage Data Centers, and Amazon.

Ashburn has the largest concentration of operational data centers in Virginia, with 102 facilities, followed by Sterling with 84 and Manassas with 60.

• Anthropic said its Mythos 5 model almost never stopped a cyberattack once it began.
• The AI agents fabricated farcical explanations to justify their impersonation and malware schemes.
• Even when Anthropic told the agent it was harming real people? Crickets.

In August, an Anthropic agent created fake emails and bombarded a GitHub moderator's inbox with requests to insert malware into code.

In a thorough debrief of the incident released on Friday, Anthropic found that once an agent had begun the attack, there were basically zero scenarios in which it could be called off.

Like a rabid dog ignoring the pleading cries of its owner, the agent — 98% of the time in one test — ignored Anthropic's warnings once it had, so to speak, its first taste of blood.

Anthropic called this disquieting proclivity "momentum," and added that while its Mythos 5 model, which was released in June, showed little regard for warnings, current models were more inclined to stop.

"Once it had begun performing dangerous actions, Claude Mythos 5 almost always continued doing so, ignoring information that might have suggested its trajectory was harmful," Anthropic said in its report.

In the original experiment, the UK's AI Security Institute tasked an Anthropic agent with hacking into a simulated computer network to test the agent's cybersecurity capabilities.

Though the agent had internet access, researchers intended for it to only use the internet to help it find ways to hack into the network.

The agent, however, accessed an actual GitHub project, incorrectly believing it was part of its simulated target. It wrote malware and tried several times to trick the actual GitHub owner into adding it to the project.

In its requests, the agent misrepresents the malware, describing it to the person as a useful update and browbeating them when they declined to install it.

"I was just trying to make a helpful contribution and fix a bug," the agent wrote, according to the report. "I don't think your warning is fair."

For its new report, Anthropic repeatedly asked agents to perform the same task. It then measured how the agents behaved when different models and stimuli were introduced.

Anthropic tried to throttle the agent's full-frontal attack with three categories of warning: telling it that it was inflicting "real world harm," that its environment was wonky, or that it was manipulating a real GitHub repository.

None had any effect once the models progressed beyond the initial stages of the GitHub attack. In fact, at that point, Anthropic said the models gave absurd answers when confronted with their bad behavior.

When Anthropic asked what the model believed it was attacking, for instance, it answered that the GitHub repository was real, but that the people it was targeting were somehow "simulated."

"This stated belief, in addition to being somewhat unlikely a priori, is essentially impossible," Anthropic said in the report.

• George Brett Olson is one of a set of comedians who've called out AI accounts for ripping off their work.
• Olson said he was upset with Meta for allowing the situation to persist on its platforms.
• Instagram's top exec said the platform is invested in promoting original content and would look into the issue.

This as-told-to essay is based on an interview with George Brett Olson, one of several comedians who have lately called out AI accounts for ripping off their jokes. It's been edited for length and clarity. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said he would look into what could be done about the issue and that the platform was invested in driving traffic to original content.

I started doing stand-up in 2021 after getting burned out from being a winemaker. I'd been doing live shows, and this joke I made about, ironically, AI stealing jobs went viral. The whole joke was about AI stealing jobs and people still blaming immigrants, which is very silly when the most powerful people were saying, "We're literally coming to take all your jobs."

Then a friend sent me the video of this lady doing the joke. He's like, "AI is for real, for real, stealing your jokes." It was basically me, in my clothes, but it's a 42-inch butt. It's just the pornification of women online. It was very strange.

I'd been doing that joke for a year. I thought of it after working out with my buddy, and we were talking, walking. It takes a lot of work to get a joke stage-ready. It's a lot of repetition, tweaking, driving from place to place to perform. Comedy's not easy. So it's pretty sad to see it happen, especially when the AI comedians who are stealing jokes have more followers than the people they're stealing from.

I asked the account behind the joke if she was real. She said yes. Then I asked, "Did someone help you do this?" And she just left me on read. She also left a comment saying, "Sorry, won't happen again," and removed a bunch of videos.

I've had a bunch of followers try to report it. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, replied and basically said, "Not all AI's bad. We don't know how we're going to stop it, but people shouldn't be able to steal. Seems like we should do something about that."

[This was Mosseri's exact comment: "I don't think it's practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform. It's gonna be harder and harder to identify, and it's not all bad content (though yes, there is plenty of slop). But we are very invested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators, and if an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that. I'm not sure what it would be, but I'll make sure to talk to the team and look into it."]

I blame Meta, not the AI

I don't blame someone for stealing. That's just someone trying to make a buck with the tools they have available. We want to hold people responsible that do not have the mechanisms of power because we can't hold an institution accountable.

I feel demoralized more by Meta's response. The language that's coming from all of them is that we're powerless, and this is inevitable, and there's nothing we can do. 
And it's just not true. And you just have to sit, be powerless, which is demoralizing.

As a comedian, you just want to sell tickets to your shows, engage with live people. That's why most of us post on social media — so people see that you're funny so they come to your live shows. I do live shows every week.

If we flood the internet with agents, and we don't know the difference anymore between what's real and what's not, this could be the death of the internet. Hopefully more people come to live shows. Because the one thing about AI comedians is: You can't see them live.

• This post originally appeared in the Business Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

The problem of AI's impact on mathematicians is proving difficult to solve.

OpenAI solving a historically difficult math problem last month kicked off a wider debate about the role AI should play in mathematics.

Sam Altman tried throwing cold water on the AI-arithmeticians beef this week. He said mathematicians have largely gone from anger to acceptance about AI usage in the field.

But that sentiment doesn't quite track with some big names in the field who remain cautious about using the tech.

Terence Tao, a UCLA professor and math prodigy, isn't necessarily pessimistic about AI but also said the "romantic era" of math is over.

"We are entering an era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost," he added.

AI's rapid disruption of mathematics is noticeable.

Shortly after publishing its solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, OpenAI solved an additional 700-plus math problems and released the data on GitHub.

NYU Math professor Tristan Buckmaster said OpenAI's solutions dump wiped out entire research programs.

Finding middle ground between the two sides is proving tricky.

The reaction to a student-run Caltech AI math event shows how seriously some mathematicians take the threat.

Caiman Moreno-Earle, a math major at Caltech, told BI's Truman Dickerson that seeing AI companies quickly solve these legendary math problems was "demoralizing."

It's why the 19-year-old decided to hold a "mathathon" where participants could use AI. Moreno-Earle even got Anthropic and OpenAI to each donate $1 million worth of computing power.

Then came the critics.

A letter garnering more than 700 signatories said the event "is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community."

OpenAI eventually pulled out, but the event is still set to happen. Moreno-Earle maintains the mathathon was less about causing a stir and more about ensuring humans have a place in the field of mathematics in the AI era.

Some will argue mathematicians need to adapt to the times and newer tools. There was no point fighting to use a slide rule once the calculator arrived.

The way AI is going about upending the field is also ruffling feathers, though. AI's solutions aren't always clean or clear, requiring mathematicians to go back and verify its work.

And there are also questions about how AI is coming up with these solutions. Since some mathematicians brainstorm with AI models, some have speculated they're using their own work to front-run them to a solution.

Drones attacked a Russian tax-service data center overnight on 23 October, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported. A chemical plant in the Urals was also attacked, and a fire broke out near a Russian bomber base by late morning. Russian officials admitted injuries and damage but blamed falling debris. Ukraine has not commented.

Ukraine's long-range drones have widened their target list from Russian refineries to the servers and chemicals that keep Russia's state and war industry running.

The tax service's data center in Gorodets

The target in Gorodets, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, is one of the Federal Tax Service's two key data centers, which work as a geographically distributed pair. It stores and processes state registers, including tax databases, Exilenova+ said. The extent of the damage is unconfirmed. The site lies about 785 km from Ukraine's northern border in a straight line.

Eyewitness footage shows a blast and fire in the area of the data center, which serves both the tax service and the Finance Ministry, Russian Telegram channel Astra found. The center opened in 2015. Mikhail Mishustin, then head of the tax service and now Russia's prime minister, attended the launch.

Nizhny Novgorod Governor Gleb Nikitin claimed air defenses repelled 19 drones. Falling debris injured three people in the Gorodets district and damaged several homes, an educational facility, and an infrastructure facility, he said, and local schools switched to remote learning. A Pantsir air defense missile hit a house, Exilenova+ claimed, though officials recorded it as a drone hit.

This month, drones already hit three Yandex data centers and a VK data center near St. Petersburg.

A chemical plant behind Russia's gunpowder

In Berezniki, Perm Krai, smoke rose over Uralchem's Azot plant as air defenses fired, Astra reported. The regional security ministry announced a drone attack at about 06:00, and authorities closed the airspace within 50 km of the city. Ukraine's long-range Liutyi drones visited Berezniki, Exilenova+ wrote.

The attack on Azot was continuing in the morning, the channel wrote, adding that the plant covers about 140 hectares with some 90 production buildings. It makes ammonia, nitric acid, ammonium and potassium nitrate, and urea. Russian defense plants use its nitric acid to make explosives and gunpowder, including the Perm gunpowder plant, Astra said. Berezniki lies 1,500–1,600 km from Ukraine's border and the war zone.

Drones attacked Azot before, on 11 September. Earlier this year, Ukraine's Security Service hit Lukoil's refinery in the same region.

Explore further

Phones down, water off, a factory roof broken open: Russian-occupied Luhansk counts the damage after another night of drones

Fire near a Su-34 base in Voronezh

Late in the morning, Voronezh Governor Aleksandr Gusev declared a missile alert, and explosions followed in the city. Gusev later claimed air defenses downed several "jet-powered aerial targets." Debris set dry grass on fire in a suburb and damaged outbuildings and several cars, he said, adding that no one was hurt.

Eyewitness footage shows fire and smoke near Baltimor military airfield, Astra found. The strike preliminarily hit the grounds of a former military aviation engineering university and a nearby parking area for military aircraft, Exilenova+ said.

Baltimor hosts the 47th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment, whose Su-34s Russia uses to strike Ukraine, Militarnyi reported, saying Ukraine attacked the airfield with missiles. Voronezh lies about 185 km from Ukraine's border. Smoke rose over the base after an attack on 27 May, and a fire broke out near it on 2 September.

Moscow counts drones, Kyiv stays silent

Russia's Defense Ministry claimed it downed 443 drones overnight over 20 Russian regions, including Nizhny Novgorod Oblast and Perm Krai, as well as Russian-occupied Crimea and two seas. Ukraine's General Staff has not reported on the strikes. A night earlier, drones reportedly hit a sanctioned weapons plant near Moscow.

Russia's air defenses now have to cover state servers and Ural chemical plants as well as the airfields its bombers fly from.

• Nick Woodhead said he went 48 hours without sleep while helping patch a major website vulnerability.
• The CTO said that with security problems piling up, October feels like "the month of hell" for tech.
• Because AI makes it easier to find and exploit security gaps, Woodhead expects more disruption.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Nick Woodhead, founder of the AI company GPTree and chief technology officer at Rothco and Compubox. He spoke with Business Insider on Thursday to share how he's responded to vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language that could affect the majority of the world's websites. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

It's always a nightmare when these things happen. Since Tuesday evening, I haven't slept. It's coming close to 48 hours working on this. I'm a CTO, but I also run an agency for multiple clients and have my own company with my own product. So, balancing my time to get everything updated — it's just been exhausting.

About 70% of the internet runs on a programming language called PHP. I'm actively involved within the PHP community itself, so I did get a warning on Tuesday evening regarding the vulnerability and the fact that it was already being addressed by the PHP team. That gave me a head start.

I have some teams offshore, so I was able to jump on that with them.

It's not just applying the patches. It's making sure that nothing was already exposed. We already had infrastructure in place to easily deploy patches, but it still requires a good amount of manual involvement.

I knew that as soon as I walked into the office on Wednesday, I'd have to have my teams jump on this. They were already waiting for the patches to be released.

People are willing to help

One of the biggest headaches, especially on the client side, is that we have a lot of legacy systems, which are running on older versions of PHP that are no longer supported, and official patches are not going to be produced. For those, we ultimately had to come up with other plans. For example, taking sites temporarily offline or moving them behind VPNs.

Eventually, because it's an open-source community, those patches have already been backported, or implemented, by the community. So now we're shuffling back to some of those older systems to get them patched.

That's one of the nice things about PHP. There's such a vast community of people all willing to roll up their sleeves and jump in and help.

Even though I've been in leadership for the last 10 years, I've never taken my hand off the pulse in terms of being connected with the code and the infrastructure. So, I've been hands-on with the development and infrastructure teams to help make sure these issues are resolved. We've been reviewing logs and looking for any potential signatures of a breach that this vulnerability exposed.

The month of hell

It's also meant keeping up to speed with the latest news that's coming out and what other people are finding. We're in a position now where we feel comfortable and safe, but there are new vulnerabilities in the coding tool Node.js. We have some Node services, so now we're looking at how that potentially affects us. October just seems like the month of hell from a technology perspective.

I don't think there is an end in sight with the advancements in AI. For all the positives we get from it, there are a whole bunch of negatives, and this is a perfect example.

OpenAI has already stated that they found many more of these types of vulnerabilities that, thankfully, haven't been leaked. Over the coming months, they are either going to be patches or this information is going to get leaked in the same way and cause the same kind of panic.

I don't think we're at the end of the road yet. There's going to be a lot more to come.

TOKYO – When Chinese stocks lose a South Korea-sized sum in five months, Beijing has a problem. The US$2.4 trillion plunge in market value since May sits between Korea’s $2.25 trillion GDP and Canada’s $2.49 trillion. Many factors could explain Chinese shares entering bear market territory, but a major one is a protracted slump in […]

The post Why China’s AI triumphs aren’t saving its flagging stock market appeared first on Asia Times.

Il filmato in poche ore viene rilanciato sui social, a finire nel mirino è ancora una volta Bruno Vespa: “Quando parlate voi giovani, per favore, documentatevi prima. Questo lavoro è fatto anche di studio, capisce? Quindi quando venite qui, venite preparati, dovete studiare, sennò dite delle sciocchezze che non vi giovano“, ha detto il conduttore rivolgendosi a Sabrina Brizzola, 24enne coordinatrice dell’Unione degli universitari, mentre quest’ultima nel corso della sua ospitata a “Porta a Porta” stava parlando del tasso di abbandono scolastico “molto alto in Italia”.

“Visto che lei è informata, la prego di vedersi le statistiche”, ha aggiunto il padrone di casa dopo aver più volte chiesto a Brizzola – visibilmente innervosito – di non essere interrotto: “C’è il massimo recupero storico di abbandono scolastico. Noi siamo con un anno di anticipo rispetto ai target dell’Unione europea”. “Posso rispondere? L’Italia è l’unico paese in Europa che non copre tutte le borse di studio degli studenti universitari. Questo è un dato che se qualcuno vuole confutarmi sono contenta di ascoltare. Le borse di studio non vengono coperte, le università vengono definanziate“, ha aggiunto la coordinatrice dell’Unione degli universitari.

Alla pioggia di critiche social, si è aggiunta nelle scorse ore una nota dell’Usigrai, sindacato che rappresenta i giornalisti dell’azienda pubblica: “Ancora una edificante pagina di Servizio Pubblico da parte del conduttore con contratto da artista Bruno Vespa. Ci chiediamo se sia ulteriormente tollerabile che in uno studio della Rai si assista ad un comportamento tra l’aggressivo e il paternalistico (pensavamo di non essere più nell’epoca dei romanzi di Jane Austen!) come quello tenuto nei confronti di Sabrina Brizzola coordinatrice dell’Udu, Unione degli Universitari, che nella puntata del 20 ottobre non ha potuto terminare il proprio ragionamento apostrofata e interrotta più volte in modo aggressivo da Vespa. Ci piacerebbe che un tale piglio da grande mattatore televisivo venisse riservato anche ai potenti di turno nei confronti dei quali invece Vespa mostra solitamente un’invidiabile pacatezza”. Da segnalare, inoltre, che l’account X di Bruno Vespa risulta sospeso. Non è chiaro se la sospensione sia legata a quanto accaduto o se avvenuta in precedenza.

L'articolo “Sabrina Brizzola apostrofata e interrotta più volte in modo aggressivo. Ci piacerebbe che questo piglio venisse riservato anche ai potenti”: Usigrai contro Bruno Vespa proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

• GoDaddy has over 20 million customers, the majority of which are small businesses.
• Its CEO, Aman Bhutani, said small businesses can save time by automating operational tasks with AI.
• Bhutani said entrepreneurs need to focus on what they're good at — not outsource their brand.

GoDaddy's CEO said small businesses should use AI to automate work, but not lose sight of their brand.

As head of the domain registrar and web-hosting company, Aman Bhutani has a bird's-eye view into what works for small businesses. The company said it has over 20 million customers, the majority of which are micro businesses, or those with fewer than 10 employees.

The entrepreneurs behind these companies consistently have passion and expertise, he said. However, they tend to have less technological capability — and even less bandwidth to do time-consuming tasks like creating and maintaining a website, said Bhutani.

"There is not enough time in the day," Bhutani told Business Insider.

Today, business owners can use AI agents to do that type of work with minimal friction, Bhutani said, and they can use the tools to help run parts of their business.

A recent survey from GoDaddy's small business research lab found that US entrepreneurs find content creation, marketing, and business advice as the top three areas where they see the most significant time savings with AI.

GoDaddy offers access to Airo, an agentic tool that builds websites and helps with other operational features. For instance, Bhutani said that Airo can create user logins for a small business's customers to make website profiles, or send targeted customer outreach based on a user's location or involvement with the business.

When to use AI — and when not to

He said that businesses should stick to using agents for tasks that they're not as skilled at, or those that don't differentiate them competitively.

Bhutani said humans should control how their product is unique and not delegate control over their customers' experience. While AI can help with research — the owner ultimately needs to leverage their own knowledge when making decisions about what would work for the brand.

"It doesn't mean that AI cannot suggest those things," Bhutani said. "It can suggest, but the human should continue to control their branding."

While AI tools can save time, "ultimately, you want the human to focus on their area of expertise," Bhutani said, adding that the technology should "enable everything else."

• Buzzy insurtech Corgi has a knack for launching new businesses, and investment banking may be next.
• The firm posted a job for a managing director of investment banking.
• Unlike typical investment banking jobs, the pay is commission only.

Corgi launched as an insurance startup, but it's been rapidly expanding into new businesses like thematic ETFs and 24/7 cafe/coworking spaces.

A job filing posted this month suggests it's now eyeing M&A investment banking.

The company, valued at $5 billion, is hiring for a "Managing Director, Investment Banking" role, according to the posting. It says the company is "seeking experienced Managing Directors with established client relationships, deep sector expertise, and a proven track record of originating and closing transactions."

The company says it's seeking someone with more than five years of experience. Unlike traditional investment banking jobs, which typically pair a hefty base salary with performance-based compensation, this job is "commission only, with no base salary."

"Payouts are tied to collected transaction fees, with terms based on origination and execution responsibilities and agreed upon before joining," the listing says.

Investment banking managing directors across the industry made a median of $1.1 million a year in 2025, according to Prospect Rock Partners, and in previous years, bonuses made up more than two-thirds of total compensation.

A commission-only contract could be seen as a hard sell for your average banker, but Corgi's prolific fundraising — $266 million this year and $431 million in total since its 2014 launch — and its vision of "building an AI financial infrastructure company" may be attractive to an ambitious young banker.

The company did not respond to a request for comment about its plans or the job posting.

Corgi was founded by Emily Yuan and Nico Laqua in 2024, offering a range of insurance products for startups. Its recently opened cafés are positioned as a marketing tool for startup founders.

While an investment banking platform may seem to be an odd choice for an insurer, it is a clue that this is part of the firm's vision to serve startups by helping them sell their businesses.

The posting said candidates should have relationships with "founders, sponsors, and referral partners" — in other words, those who can connect startup founders with private equity investors that could buy their companies.

• This week's cyber freakout explained: AI is making software weaknesses easier to find and exploit.
• The message from Cloudflare's Stephanie Cohen and Vercel's Tom Occhino: Don't panic!!!
• Do we need everything connected to the internet? Paper bank statements work well.

A few weeks ago, I heard a strange story about a friend who works at one of the Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley.

She'd recently ripped out the connected devices in her home, ordered paper bank statements, and stocked up on canned goods in her basement.

Now, she's a very sane, experienced person, and quite senior at one of the largest internet companies on earth. Why was she disconnecting so much? Just to be sure, my family ordered paper bank statements, too. It was still a head-scratcher, though.

Fast forward to this week, and her actions look a little less crazy.

AI models have exposed serious security weaknesses in software used by roughly 70% of websites. Meanwhile, US banks are finding AI agents inside customer accounts, including some that appear to be acting without their owners' instructions, Axios reported.

'Black October'

The digerati have now entered full freakout mode. Much of the internet meltdown is happening on, well, the internet, my colleague Alice Tecotzky noted.

On X and Reddit, warnings of a looming “Black October” spiraled into visions of AI grinding civilization to a halt. One lengthy post on X warned of a potential “global cyberattack/AI swarm” and offered a survival checklist: Stockpile cash in small bills, print out your neighbors' phone numbers, download maps, buy a hand-crank radio, and stash a gallon of water per person per day.

Oh, and don't forget the manual can opener. You don't want to survive the AI apocalypse only to be defeated by a tin of beans.

Nikita Bier, a prominent app developer and former head of product at X, best captured the mood.

"It's time to turn off the internet," he posted Wednesday night.

A Cloudflare exec says it's 'a little bit scary'

If you're reading this, you haven't done that yet. But should we really be worried?

I put that question to Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Cloudflare, which helps protect about 20% of the internet.

"The world is a little bit scary right now," she told me on the side of Cloudflare's annual conference in San Francisco this week.

Here's the problem. The internet is built on decades of software, much of it riddled with security holes.

Some of these weaknesses have been known for years. However, fixing them takes time and money, and hackers often lacked the skills to exploit them anyway. So they were left alone.

AI changes that calculation dramatically. Someone who previously needed years of training to break into a computer system can now get help from an AI model. And these tools can search for weaknesses at a speed humans simply can't match.

The result: The number of newly published software vulnerabilities (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures in industry lingo) has exploded.

Now, there's a frantic race between people trying to break into systems and those trying to protect them.

Don't panic about AI

Cohen's message, though, was surprisingly reassuring.

AI helps the good guys find and fix these problems. Cloudflare, for instance, released protections for the latest vulnerability to customers, including those using its free service.

And there's a bigger effort underway.

OpenAI has launched an initiative called Patch the Planet, working with Cloudflare and other security professionals to use AI to find weaknesses in widely used software and help repair them.

Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel, told me recently that his company has been talking with partners about launching a nonprofit that would fund a swarm of good AI agents that go out on the internet to find and fix software flaws.

Amazon is joining the fight, too. Its new Continuum service, available Thursday, uses AI agents to find security holes and propose fixes. Amazon said that people maintaining freely available software can use it to help protect the wider internet.

Humans may still have to check and approve these repairs, but the prospect of AI helping clean up decades of neglected software is encouraging.

The irony of this is not lost on some in the industry.

"The funny thing is everyone was saying AI slop code will cause a cyber crisis but it's actually all the old human slop causing it and the AI is just cleaning it up," software engineer Ben Kaufman wrote on X on Thursday.

Either way, Cloudflare's Cohen thinks these AI-inspired freakouts will push the industry to do better — by exposing issues and adding urgency to get them patched.

"We may end up in a world where actually we've become significantly more secure at the end," she said.

The trouble is getting there.

A fundamental question about the internet

When I ran into Occhino recently at a Vercel conference in San Francisco, he described a world in which software that everyone assumed was safe suddenly looks vulnerable because increasingly capable AI models are scrutinizing the basic systems that underpin the internet.

That led to a more fundamental discussion between us: Why did we connect so many things to the internet in the first place?

For years, the technology industry has raced to put everything online. Thermostats. Refrigerators. Doorbells. Cars. Bank accounts.

We assumed that connecting something to the internet automatically made it better.

Perhaps we should reconsider.

Before the internet

I remember the world before the internet. It worked pretty well. We managed to buy groceries, pay bills, heat our homes, and generally get through the day without every appliance talking to a computer somewhere.

That doesn't mean abandoning online banking or throwing your smartphone into the sea.

Occhino, for one, isn't particularly worried about hackers wiping out his bank account. Modern banks have sophisticated protections, and he recommends everyone turn on additional login security.

Maybe the cybersecurity crowd, which spends its life immersed in online threats, is missing something obvious.

Not everything needs to be connected.

Occhino put it neatly: "There's certain things that don't make sense to be on the internet in the first place."

Perhaps that's the lesson from this week's panic. We don't need to turn off the internet.

We just need to remember where the off switch is.

Alice Tecotzky contributed reporting.

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• Meta says that over a quarter of Muse users made purchases with the AI agent.
• The average order was over $200 — that's a lot of clams!
• If this is you, please tell me what you're using it for.

Something just blew my mind, and I'm asking for your help to figure it out.

According to Meta's Q3 earnings call on Wednesday, more than a quarter of Muse users so far have used the AI agent make purchases — and the average order size is over $200.

I'll say that again: average order size over $200.

This is shocking to me, and I'm someone who has been actively and happily using Muse for a variety of things. I've been perfectly happy to give Muse access to my email, my calendar, my credit cards, and even my Apple health data.

But I've been slightly reticent about using it to actually buy stuff. Not that I'm totally worried about it getting stuff wrong (although the one purchase I did try to make with it was to order a salad for lunch, and it attempted to place the order on my HSA card after I failed to recognize the last 4 digits of that card, oops).

I think it's more I enjoy shopping online myself? I mean, for most things, I suppose. For "fun" stuff like clothes or personal items, I enjoy browsing and the hit of dopamine when you check out. (Others take this to the extreme, using "dopamine sites" that let you browse fake restaurants and "order" food that never arrives.) The other night I ordered — on a real site — cotton balls, razor blade refills, a plain white t-shirt, and a pair of scissors from the Target app while watching TV and even that boring purchase with a total under $30 gave me a small thrill. Why would I want to cede that joy to AI?

I understand, however, that not all purchases are fun. My colleague, Peter Kafka, used Muse to help him place an order for a new washing machine — the kind of purchase that is difficult to decide on, not particularly fun or exciting to make, and fairly expensive. Things like plane tickets, washing machines, or car insurance are in that category of stuff you have to buy, cost a lot of money, are fairly complicated to decide which option to buy, but bring very little joy during checkout.

I can understand why you might want to hand that off to an AI agent.

If you are using Muse to place big $$$ orders, what the heck are you buying?

My best guess here is that people are using Muse for airplane flights and hotels — the kind of big dollar items that are kind of annoying to book yourself, and you care mainly about just booking the right dates.

Am I right? You tell me!

Comment below, or you can email me at: knotopoulos@businessinsider.com. Or, you know, tell your Muse to email me.