• Mark Cuban says data center developers are using healthcare-style contracts to confuse communities.
• He said healthcare contracts are "so big and so long" that insurers "get to be contractual terrorists."
• Data centers, which are crucial for the AI boom, have become a hugely contentious issue across America.

Healthcare has long used complex contracts that can obscure who pays for what. Mark Cuban says data center developers are using a similar playbook.

"A lot of communities have been really dumb with the deals they've negotiated for data centers," Cuban said on an episode of "The A16z Show" released on Wednesday. "They've fallen for the contractual terrorism in a lot of cases."

Cuban, who co-founded Cost Plus Drugs, a company that sells generic medicines at a transparent markup, previously coined the phrase "contractual terrorism" while discussing healthcare.

On the A16z podcast, he said massive healthcare insurers and their subsidiaries use sprawling, opaque agreements to obscure costs and make it difficult for employers to know where their money is going.

Cuban said those contracts are "so big and so long" that insurers "get to be contractual terrorists" — a formulation he also applied to communities' data center deals.

His comments come as the data center boom has become a hugely contentious issue in communities across the US.

Residents living near facilities have reported incessant low-frequency hums, diesel smells, intrusive lights, construction disruption, pressure on water and electricity supplies, and the loss of trees and open land.

In Northern Virginia, the country's data center capital, local opposition has helped reshape elections, prompted lawsuits, and pushed residents to demand tighter noise and zoning rules.

A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 Americans from September found that 65% opposed building an AI data center in their local community, including 49% who said they strongly opposed it.

The ghost data center backlash

The race to build AI infrastructure has also produced far more announcements than operating facilities.

Aterio, which tracks projects through satellite imagery, permits, and other records, counted 8,268 announced US facilities as of October 20. But only 2,126 were active, and 861 were under construction.

Thousands more had just been announced, leaving local governments to negotiate consequential long-term agreements for projects that may never progress beyond a press release.

That is a risk Cuban has warned about.

In a series of X posts in September, he laid out a 10-point playbook for communities considering their first data center, arguing that every promise from a developer should come with a measurable limit, independent oversight, financial backing, and a remedy if it is broken.

Cuban's advice is to settle those questions before construction begins.

"Resolve it before granting the approval that spends the last of the town's leverage," Cuban wrote at the time.

• Charles Lamanna, head of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, just took over Office and Teams.
• Teams within his new combined unit have adopted flatter structures amid the rise of AI agents.
• He's also enforced a stricter RTO for senior staff, and offered employees relocation to major hubs.

Microsoft's head of the Copilot platform, AI agents, and now Office is making good on his promise to reshape how his teams work.

"The most important thing my team will do this year won't be any single product or feature we ship: instead, it will be changing how we work," Charles Lamanna, the new boss of this key Microsoft unit, wrote in August.

Lamanna has started requiring senior staff to work in offices four days a week, and he's offering relocation to major hubs, according to people familiar with the changes. Teams within his organization have also reorganized to a flatter structure removing middle managers in line with Lamanna's views about how agentic AI is changing engineering.

"We're rethinking where managerial layers are critical and where flatter structures can enable faster decision-making, clearer ownership and greater autonomy," a Microsoft spokesperson said.

The moves offer an early look at how Microsoft is reworking its software empire for the AI age. Lamanna, who already oversees the company's Copilot and AI agent platforms, now controls the Office productivity software and Teams workplace chat service that are used by millions of workers.

Lamanna took over those groups earlier in October when the previous boss, Ryan Roslansky, announced plans to leave at the end of the year. Roslansky was seen as a successor to Microsoft veteran Rajesh Jha, who retired in July. Roslansky and Lamanna were two of the three executives who made up the new Copilot leadership team.

The changes come as CEO Satya Nadella reshapes the company around AI. Microsoft has been consolidating responsibility for its AI products, and a wave of senior executive departures has made way for a new generation of leaders.

"Span of control"

Lamanna's expanding responsibilities make him a key player in this leadership transition, giving him oversight of Microsoft's flagship workplace software and the AI tools that could change how customers use its products.

Recently, the Teams unit now under Lamanna reorganized by increasing the "span of control" for managers in engineering, according to two of the people familiar with the changes.

This refers to the number of employees who report to each manager, and it's become common for tech companies to flatten engineering organizations like this in the AI era, as coding tools and agents write more software.

The reorganization included converting managers to individual contributors, the people said. The idea is that agentic coding capabilities mean Microsoft needs fewer managers, according to one of the people. The team will now have a ratio of one manager per 12 individual contributors.

"Agentic coding capabilities have changed every level of the engineering function," Microsoft's spokesperson said. "Software engineers are no longer hand-assembling every line of code. Instead, they are now designing and directing the 'agentic coding machine' that helps build the product."

As AI makes it easier to build software, skills like making sound technical decisions, designing systems, ensuring quality and security, and understanding customer needs become more valuable.

"At the same time, some tasks that traditionally required managerial coordination, such as managing handoffs and orchestrating work across teams, become less central," the spokesperson said.

Other teams have implemented similar restructuring, the spokesperson confirmed.

RTO and relocation

Lamanna has also started reshaping where employees work. Last week, Lamanna's Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) organization offered select US employees the option to relocate to offices at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters, San Francisco, or New York, according to three people familiar with the plans.

The people who spoke with Business Insider for this story asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.

Lamanna has also asked employees at the "partner" level and above — some of Microsoft's most senior staff — to start working in physical offices at least four days a week. The companywide standard is three days a week.

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• NATO has provided new details about its AI model for predicting Russian drone strikes on the front lines.
• Called Initiative 13 or Model 13, it works for about 31 miles behind the line of contact.
• The AI gives commanders a map showing the next day's expected Russian drone activity.

A new NATO artificial intelligence model gives Ukraine's forces a frontline map of where Russian drone activity is expected the next day, per the alliance's innovation center.

The system, called Initiative 13 or Model 13, "turns an array of disparate data into a clear map of expected activity" for commanders to plan their next day of operations, a spokesperson for NATO's Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Center, or JATEC, told Business Insider.

Business Insider reported on Ukraine's announcement of the program earlier this month, but JATEC is now providing new details on how it works.

Initiative 13 covers areas 5 to 50 km, or roughly 3 to 31 miles, of Ukrainian territory behind the line of contact, and divides that space into geographical cells, per JATEC.

"For each cell, the system determines the expected intensity of strike and reconnaissance activity of UAVs, the level of threat, the trend of its change, and the range of possible values," its spokesperson said.

The map shows a forecast for the next day, helping commanders to highlight risk areas so they can better deploy their forces and equipment, they said.

They added that the AI model is trained on battlefield data and considers previous Russian drone activity, what types of drones were used, when and how they were deployed, weather conditions, terrain, and distance to the line of contact.

"Initiative 13 does not replace data from the current situation and commander's decisions," the JATEC spokesperson added. JATEC is NATO's joint organization with Ukraine, based in Poland, that aims to glean lessons and innovations from the war.

Ukraine's defense ministry said in mid-October that Initiative 13, which it called Model 13, was "ready for integration into the Armed Forces of Ukraine's situational awareness systems."

The AI model, it said, could predict Russia's drone strikes with "high probability."

Kyiv's forces use a battlespace management system called Delta, which feeds data from the front lines onto an interactive map that commanders can access via laptop, phone, or tablet.

The drone-predicting AI was developed by Ukraine's forces and NATO's Allied Command Transformation, with support from JATEC.

Ukraine's defense ministry said in its initial announcement that another AI model, dubbed No. 32, for planning artillery deployments was also in the works but is still in prototype stages.

Artificial intelligence has increasingly been making its way into Ukraine's war, from helping mid-range attack drones identify and strike targets to sending uncrewed ground vehicles to autonomously complete supply runs.

• Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke converted his underused wine cellar into an AI server room.
• Lütke's AI assistant researches topics and pulls together his Fitbit and calendar data.
• Lütke used heart rate data to identify his most stressful meetings and told the people involved.

The Shopify CEO didn't have enough wine to fill his cellar, but he had plenty of uses for an AI system.

Speaking with Alex Heath on an episode of the Sources podcast released on Wednesday, Tobi Lütke said he consulted his “inner 16-year-old” before converting the underused room into a home for computing hardware.

"So now I have a rack cellar, and it has like one of those GB300s from Dell in it," Lütke said. "So it is actually fully training models."

The GB300 refers to Nvidia's Grace Blackwell Ultra computing platform, which Dell has built into powerful computers designed to develop and run AI models.

Lütke said the setup allows him to run AI locally, working with sensitive information he can't send to an outside lab. The agent researches topics, prepares briefings, and gathers data about his daily life, he said.

“I think it's probably the most compelling product I've ever encountered in my life," Lütke said. "It runs a script that sort of makes a collection of all sorts of things, including my Fitbit data, and, you know, obviously has my calendar."

"It has a little app. It knows my geolocation," Lütke added. "For my hobby, I do a lot of health-style analysis, but then given that I have all this data, like I have heart rate data for, you know, for this, and I figured out who my most stressful meetings are with."

Tech bosses are finding increasingly personal uses for AI. Business Insider previously reported that Google CEO Sundar Pichai uses agents to follow internal discussions and computing usage. Apple CEO Tim Cook uses AI to summarize emails, while OpenAI's Sam Altman has turned to ChatGPT for parenting questions.

Lütke has also pushed employees to put AI to work. In a memo made public in April 2025, he said that all Shopify teams must demonstrate why they can't achieve their goals with AI before hiring new employees.

Asked by Heath whether he told the people he discovered were stressing him out, Lütke said: “Yeah. Totally.”

"It's like: here's the funniest thing I just find out — guess what?" Lütke said. "And then they didn't think it's nearly as funny."

• Microsoft lowered its 2026 capex forecast to $170 billion, down from $175 billion.
• CFO Amy Hood cited delays in third-party capacity as Wall Street scrutinizes returns on AI spending.
• Azure revenue jumped 48%, beating expectations, while Microsoft's headcount fell 2%.

Microsoft reduced its forecast for capital expenditure, a rare move in an industry that mostly continues to splurge more on huge AI investments.

The software giant said capex for the 2026 calendar year will be $170 billion from a previous forecast of $175 billion.

Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood gave the forecast on the company's fiscal first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

She said Microsoft was expecting new capacity to arrive from third-parties, but some of these "GPU-as-a-Service contracts" have been delayed until the second half of the fiscal year.

This likely refers to other providers of AI cloud services that use Nvidia GPUs to run their offerings. Microsoft has partnered with some outside providers to meet rampant AI demand.

Hood's comments could refer to a recent spate of AI data center project delays, which have mostly been caused by a lack of electricity, along with local opposition.

The CFO said Microsoft expects capex to accelerate in the second half of its fiscal year, as the delayed capacity kicks in.

Wall Street has become increasingly concerned the huge investments cloud companies are making to expand AI infrastructure. Microsoft last quarter kept its forecast unchanged, notable as many cloud giants have been steadily increasing their AI spending forecasts.

Overall, Microsoft reported $92.3 billion in revenue, up 19%, for the fiscal first-quarter ending Sept. 30. Azure cloud revenue was up 48% to more than $33 billion, surpassing Wall Street expectations.

Microsoft share were up about about 3% in after-hours trading following the earnings call.

Earlier this week, Microsoft offered a buyout to more than a quarter of its workforce. A Microsoft spokesperson told Business Insider on Wednesday that the company expects 5% of eligible employees at most to accept the buyout.

"We expect very few people to select this offer because of the growth opportunities here at Microsoft," Hood wrote in an internal memo viewed by Business Insider. Microsoft's headcount slipped 2% during the fiscal first quarter, the company reported.

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