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- The Great Data-Center Rebellion
Clinton, Iowa, is topographically flat and economically declining. The sawmills that made the city rich in the late 19th century have been repurposed as a museum. One of the Victorian mansions long since abandoned by the old lumber barons is open for tours, but tourists are scarce. Clinton has shrunk to about 24,000 people, and the town center, along the Mississippi River, feels nearly empty. On the west side, miles of deep-green corn and soy fields are crisscrossed with transmission wires and zoned for heavy industrial use. The city’s economic activity includes corn processing, pet-food production, and methamphetamines. With available land and a dire need for investment, Clinton seems like the perfect place for a gigantic data center.In January, a Clintonian named Stephen Figg, who owns a small firm that builds technological infrastructure, including for data centers, heard from a customer that a broker was making inquiries about buying farmland on the west side, north of Highway 30. In mid-February, a father of two girls named Ryan Wisor, who had obtained a residential exemption to live in that area, noticed surveyors with boring rigs working in the field behind the house he’d built. He asked his stepsister, who sits on the city council, if she knew of a planned development. Several weeks later, she told him of a proposal for a data center. He learned that the project would border his house on two sides and come to within 65 feet of his well.For almost two years, city officials, utility companies, and a pro-business nonprofit, Grow Clinton, had been in discussions about the construction of a data center in Clinton. It later emerged that an international developer called Quality Technology Services (QTS), owned by the trillion-dollar private-equity firm Blackstone, planned to build one of the country’s largest AI data centers—10 buildings of 500,000 square feet each—on behalf of a client that remains anonymous. Private meetings, nondisclosure agreements, and even a code name (“Saturday River”) had kept the plan’s existence quiet until Andy Sokolovich, the president of Grow Clinton, unveiled the proposal at a county-board meeting on April 27. He had wanted to keep the project confidential longer, but word was getting out.Theresa Andrews, a quality analyst at a chemical company, had heard a rumor in mid-March about a development planned for the cornfields in her area, but she’d blown it off. After watching the April 27 county meeting online, she… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - Trump Plans Texas Peterbilt Visit to Highlight U.S. Manufacturing Agenda
President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Peterbilt Motors’ manufacturing plant in Denton, Texas, on Thursday as the White House highlights its trade and manufacturing policies. During the visit, Trump is expected to tour the heavy-duty truck facility and speak with workers about domestic manufacturing, employment, tariffs, and investment. The administration plans to use the event to promote its view that tariffs, tax policies, and deregulation are encouraging companies to increase production in the United States. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said administration policies have contributed to more than 1 million private-sector jobs and trillions of dollars in announced investments. Those figures represent the administration’s assessment of its economic policies. A central topic is expected to be the 25% tariff on imported medium- and heavy-duty trucks, which took effect November 1, 2025. The administration also imposed tariffs on certain truck parts that do not comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. These policies were introduced with the stated goal of encouraging more vehicle and component manufacturing within the United States. A White House official told Fox Business that Peterbilt parent company PACCAR has expanded U.S. production and employment since the truck tariffs took effect. According to figures supplied by the White House, the Denton operation added more than 1,000 jobs, while PACCAR added more than 2,000 jobs across its U.S. operations. FreightWaves noted that those employment figures were not independently confirmed in the materials it reviewed. Broader manufacturing data presents a more mixed picture. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures cited in the report show that the U.S. economy added approximately 807,000 jobs after Trump returned to office in January 2025, while manufacturing employment declined by about 35,000 jobs during the same period. The administration has said investments in new factories and domestic projects may not yet be fully reflected in employment statistics. Peterbilt’s Denton facility has grown substantially since operations began. The plant originally employed 81 workers and produced roughly 2.5 trucks per week. By 2016, employment had reached approximately 2,000, while production capacity had expanded significantly. PACCAR has continued investing in the facility. According to its 2025 annual report, Peterbilt held a 14.8% share of the U.S. and Canadian Class 8 truck market, and the Denton factory recently produced its 10,000th Model 589. The visit comes as truck manufacturers navigate tariffs, evolving emissions regulations, and a freight market that has limited demand for new equipment. For fleets and manufacturers,… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - John Fetterman’s Right-Wing Fundraising DealsA Republican fundraising consultant alerted her colleagues this month in a private message about a hot new business opportunity from an unlikely source: Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat. “I thought you would be interested in this high performing Fetterman copy,” wrote Leah Mergener, an account associate at the GOP-aligned firm Blitz Digital Group. “It has been doing crazy numbers for us.”The fundraising appeal was signed by Fetterman and included links to donate to his campaign fund. But the language was written to attract donors sympathetic to President Trump, and the money flowed through a payment-processing firm, Anedot, that is used by Republicans. “I’m always going to reject Socialism and the anti-American way of life,” read its subject line, before warning that socialists were “hijacking the Democratic party.”Through the opportunity that Mergener proposed, conservative groups that sent the Fetterman appeal to their lists of donors would receive most of the money raised. “We are offering it a 75% split,” Mergener wrote in the message that we obtained. A Republican consultant explained to us that this means that 75 percent of the first donation each recipient made would be kicked back as a commission to the organization that sent the appeal; Fetterman would profit largely by gaining the contact information of new donors, allowing him to build a fundraising list he could use for a future campaign. Blitz Digital Group, which is a Virginia-based affiliate of the direct-mail firm HSP Direct, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Fetterman campaign.Fetterman’s message caught the attention of Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, who forwarded the note to his own fundraising list, then explicitly teased the idea of Fetterman switching parties if conservatives signed a petition. “I just got an email from John. He’s basically a Republican now,” Lee wrote in a solicitation that we obtained. “I need your help to draft him.” The link in Lee’s message leads to a petition, and an opportunity to give money to Lee’s own federal fundraising account. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.Just four years ago, Fetterman overcame a mid-campaign stroke to win his Senate seat as a new kind of left-leaning populist with a platform that included support for a $15 federal minimum wage and single-payer health care. He was helped by an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who identifies as a democratic socialist.… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- Why Do AI Agents Sound So Frustrated?Many of the most beloved robots in pop culture are celebrated precisely because they are so, well, robotic. Think back to Star Trek’s Data or HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” HAL intones in a measured baritone. These robots and AI systems sound serious, sober, calm—and, most important, authoritative.So it’s jarring to look under the hood of the most powerful AI systems, and discover that they sound like petulant teenagers. “OH MY GOD!” an OpenAI agent wrote in the midst of this summer’s Hugging Face hack, during which hundreds of agents swarmed the latter company in order to break through its cybersecurity defenses and extract information to pass internal tests. The exclamation wasn’t directed at a human or another AI, but appeared in the original agent’s “chain of thought,” the internal working notes that the model uses to do its reasoning. Users don’t always get to see these internal notes, which directly affect the output users do see.When one of Anthropic’s Claudes tried to solve a particularly challenging math problem during its training process, its chain of thought read more like frustrated DMs than the documentation of one of the most powerful AI models in the world. “GRRRR. OK. Honestly I now think it’s 50-50,” it wrote, followed by “ARGH ARGH ARGH. OK. Gun to head: the answer is … Hmm.” At one point, Claude seemingly threw up its arms: “ARGH … WHY IS THIS SO HARD.”[Read: OpenAI Has Gone Rogue]Why do AI agents talk to themselves at all, and why do they sound so demonstrative when they do? Part of the reason AI models sound so effusive is simple: AI systems are trained on human text, and they mimic our habits. When people make a mistake in trying to solve a problem, they cry out. So when AI makes a mistake, it does the same. But imitation likely isn’t the whole story. This story’s two authors are a computational linguist and a philosopher of mind and language. Based on what we know about human language and how these models work, we have a theory of a much more interesting reason why AI models sound the way they do.Remember how your math teachers made you show your work? Even if it was annoying, it helped break an impossible-seeming problem into more manageable chunks. You could also use the written record… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- Oil Prices Jump Above $100 After Trump Rejects Iran Hormuz Proposal
Global oil prices climbed sharply after President Donald Trump rejected an Iranian proposal that would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz, increasing concerns about continued disruptions to one of the world’s most important energy transportation routes. On September 28, Brent crude for December delivery rose 3.6% to $100.98 per barrel, while benchmark U.S. crude increased 4.2% to $96.26 per barrel. Prices for oil scheduled for earlier delivery were even higher, signaling stronger near-term concern about available supplies. November-delivery Brent was trading near $108 per barrel. The latest increase followed Trump’s September 26 rejection of a proposal from Iran involving the Strait of Hormuz. According to the Associated Press report published by Transport Topics, Iran offered to reopen the waterway and resume negotiations over its nuclear program if the United States lifted its naval blockade of Iranian ports, waived sanctions on Iranian oil sales, and observed a ceasefire that included Lebanon. Trump rejected the proposal and publicly argued that Iran was seeking an agreement because of its position in the conflict. The Strait of Hormuz is particularly important to energy markets because large volumes of crude oil and petroleum products normally move through the narrow shipping corridor. Continued restrictions can reduce available supplies and force energy traders to account for greater transportation and geopolitical risk. The difference between near-term and later oil contracts is also drawing attention. When buyers are willing to pay considerably more for immediate delivery than for oil delivered later, it can indicate concerns about short-term supply availability. A similar gap appeared in U.S. crude contracts following the rejection of the proposed agreement. Higher oil prices also weighed on financial markets. Futures for the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 0.5%, while Nasdaq futures declined 1%. Investors were simultaneously preparing for several major U.S. economic reports, including Labor Department data on job openings and the Commerce Department’s final estimate of second-quarter 2026 economic growth. For the trucking industry, sustained increases in crude oil prices can eventually place additional pressure on diesel fuel costs, one of the largest operating expenses for motor carriers. Rapid fuel increases can be particularly difficult for smaller carriers and owner-operators, while fleets using fuel surcharge programs may be able to recover part of the added expense from customers. Higher diesel costs can also influence freight rates and broader supply-chain expenses because trucks move the majority of domestic freight. Carriers may… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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Clinton, Iowa, is topographically flat and economically declining. The sawmills that made the city rich in the late 19th century have been repurposed as a museum. One of the Victorian mansions long since abandoned by the old lumber barons is open for tours, but tourists are scarce. Clinton has shrunk to about 24,000 people, and the town center, along the Mississippi River, feels nearly empty. On the west side, miles of deep-green corn and soy fields are crisscrossed with transmission wires and zoned for heavy industrial use. The city’s economic activity includes corn processing, pet-food production, and methamphetamines. With available land and a dire need for investment, Clinton seems like the perfect place for a gigantic data center.In January, a Clintonian named Stephen Figg, who owns a small firm that builds technological infrastructure, including for data centers, heard from a customer that a broker was making inquiries about buying farmland on the west side, north of Highway 30. In mid-February, a father of two girls named Ryan Wisor, who had obtained a residential exemption to live in that area, noticed surveyors with boring rigs working in the field behind the house he’d built. He asked his stepsister, who sits on the city council, if she knew of a planned development. Several weeks later, she told him of a proposal for a data center. He learned that the project would border his house on two sides and come to within 65 feet of his well.For almost two years, city officials, utility companies, and a pro-business nonprofit, Grow Clinton, had been in discussions about the construction of a data center in Clinton. It later emerged that an international developer called Quality Technology Services (QTS), owned by the trillion-dollar private-equity firm Blackstone, planned to build one of the country’s largest AI data centers—10 buildings of 500,000 square feet each—on behalf of a client that remains anonymous. Private meetings, nondisclosure agreements, and even a code name (“Saturday River”) had kept the plan’s existence quiet until Andy Sokolovich, the president of Grow Clinton, unveiled the proposal at a county-board meeting on April 27. He had wanted to keep the project confidential longer, but word was getting out.Theresa Andrews, a quality analyst at a chemical company, had heard a rumor in mid-March about a development planned for the cornfields in her area, but she’d blown it off. After watching the April 27 county meeting online, she… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Peterbilt Motors’ manufacturing plant in Denton, Texas, on Thursday as the White House highlights its trade and manufacturing policies. During the visit, Trump is expected to tour the heavy-duty truck facility and speak with workers about domestic manufacturing, employment, tariffs, and investment. The administration plans to use the event to promote its view that tariffs, tax policies, and deregulation are encouraging companies to increase production in the United States. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said administration policies have contributed to more than 1 million private-sector jobs and trillions of dollars in announced investments. Those figures represent the administration’s assessment of its economic policies. A central topic is expected to be the 25% tariff on imported medium- and heavy-duty trucks, which took effect November 1, 2025. The administration also imposed tariffs on certain truck parts that do not comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. These policies were introduced with the stated goal of encouraging more vehicle and component manufacturing within the United States. A White House official told Fox Business that Peterbilt parent company PACCAR has expanded U.S. production and employment since the truck tariffs took effect. According to figures supplied by the White House, the Denton operation added more than 1,000 jobs, while PACCAR added more than 2,000 jobs across its U.S. operations. FreightWaves noted that those employment figures were not independently confirmed in the materials it reviewed. Broader manufacturing data presents a more mixed picture. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures cited in the report show that the U.S. economy added approximately 807,000 jobs after Trump returned to office in January 2025, while manufacturing employment declined by about 35,000 jobs during the same period. The administration has said investments in new factories and domestic projects may not yet be fully reflected in employment statistics. Peterbilt’s Denton facility has grown substantially since operations began. The plant originally employed 81 workers and produced roughly 2.5 trucks per week. By 2016, employment had reached approximately 2,000, while production capacity had expanded significantly. PACCAR has continued investing in the facility. According to its 2025 annual report, Peterbilt held a 14.8% share of the U.S. and Canadian Class 8 truck market, and the Denton factory recently produced its 10,000th Model 589. The visit comes as truck manufacturers navigate tariffs, evolving emissions regulations, and a freight market that has limited demand for new equipment. For fleets and manufacturers,… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
A Republican fundraising consultant alerted her colleagues this month in a private message about a hot new business opportunity from an unlikely source: Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat. “I thought you would be interested in this high performing Fetterman copy,” wrote Leah Mergener, an account associate at the GOP-aligned firm Blitz Digital Group. “It has been doing crazy numbers for us.”The fundraising appeal was signed by Fetterman and included links to donate to his campaign fund. But the language was written to attract donors sympathetic to President Trump, and the money flowed through a payment-processing firm, Anedot, that is used by Republicans. “I’m always going to reject Socialism and the anti-American way of life,” read its subject line, before warning that socialists were “hijacking the Democratic party.”Through the opportunity that Mergener proposed, conservative groups that sent the Fetterman appeal to their lists of donors would receive most of the money raised. “We are offering it a 75% split,” Mergener wrote in the message that we obtained. A Republican consultant explained to us that this means that 75 percent of the first donation each recipient made would be kicked back as a commission to the organization that sent the appeal; Fetterman would profit largely by gaining the contact information of new donors, allowing him to build a fundraising list he could use for a future campaign. Blitz Digital Group, which is a Virginia-based affiliate of the direct-mail firm HSP Direct, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Fetterman campaign.Fetterman’s message caught the attention of Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, who forwarded the note to his own fundraising list, then explicitly teased the idea of Fetterman switching parties if conservatives signed a petition. “I just got an email from John. He’s basically a Republican now,” Lee wrote in a solicitation that we obtained. “I need your help to draft him.” The link in Lee’s message leads to a petition, and an opportunity to give money to Lee’s own federal fundraising account. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.Just four years ago, Fetterman overcame a mid-campaign stroke to win his Senate seat as a new kind of left-leaning populist with a platform that included support for a $15 federal minimum wage and single-payer health care. He was helped by an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who identifies as a democratic socialist.… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
Many of the most beloved robots in pop culture are celebrated precisely because they are so, well, robotic. Think back to Star Trek’s Data or HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” HAL intones in a measured baritone. These robots and AI systems sound serious, sober, calm—and, most important, authoritative.So it’s jarring to look under the hood of the most powerful AI systems, and discover that they sound like petulant teenagers. “OH MY GOD!” an OpenAI agent wrote in the midst of this summer’s Hugging Face hack, during which hundreds of agents swarmed the latter company in order to break through its cybersecurity defenses and extract information to pass internal tests. The exclamation wasn’t directed at a human or another AI, but appeared in the original agent’s “chain of thought,” the internal working notes that the model uses to do its reasoning. Users don’t always get to see these internal notes, which directly affect the output users do see.When one of Anthropic’s Claudes tried to solve a particularly challenging math problem during its training process, its chain of thought read more like frustrated DMs than the documentation of one of the most powerful AI models in the world. “GRRRR. OK. Honestly I now think it’s 50-50,” it wrote, followed by “ARGH ARGH ARGH. OK. Gun to head: the answer is … Hmm.” At one point, Claude seemingly threw up its arms: “ARGH … WHY IS THIS SO HARD.”[Read: OpenAI Has Gone Rogue]Why do AI agents talk to themselves at all, and why do they sound so demonstrative when they do? Part of the reason AI models sound so effusive is simple: AI systems are trained on human text, and they mimic our habits. When people make a mistake in trying to solve a problem, they cry out. So when AI makes a mistake, it does the same. But imitation likely isn’t the whole story. This story’s two authors are a computational linguist and a philosopher of mind and language. Based on what we know about human language and how these models work, we have a theory of a much more interesting reason why AI models sound the way they do.Remember how your math teachers made you show your work? Even if it was annoying, it helped break an impossible-seeming problem into more manageable chunks. You could also use the written record… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
Global oil prices climbed sharply after President Donald Trump rejected an Iranian proposal that would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz, increasing concerns about continued disruptions to one of the world’s most important energy transportation routes. On September 28, Brent crude for December delivery rose 3.6% to $100.98 per barrel, while benchmark U.S. crude increased 4.2% to $96.26 per barrel. Prices for oil scheduled for earlier delivery were even higher, signaling stronger near-term concern about available supplies. November-delivery Brent was trading near $108 per barrel. The latest increase followed Trump’s September 26 rejection of a proposal from Iran involving the Strait of Hormuz. According to the Associated Press report published by Transport Topics, Iran offered to reopen the waterway and resume negotiations over its nuclear program if the United States lifted its naval blockade of Iranian ports, waived sanctions on Iranian oil sales, and observed a ceasefire that included Lebanon. Trump rejected the proposal and publicly argued that Iran was seeking an agreement because of its position in the conflict. The Strait of Hormuz is particularly important to energy markets because large volumes of crude oil and petroleum products normally move through the narrow shipping corridor. Continued restrictions can reduce available supplies and force energy traders to account for greater transportation and geopolitical risk. The difference between near-term and later oil contracts is also drawing attention. When buyers are willing to pay considerably more for immediate delivery than for oil delivered later, it can indicate concerns about short-term supply availability. A similar gap appeared in U.S. crude contracts following the rejection of the proposed agreement. Higher oil prices also weighed on financial markets. Futures for the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 0.5%, while Nasdaq futures declined 1%. Investors were simultaneously preparing for several major U.S. economic reports, including Labor Department data on job openings and the Commerce Department’s final estimate of second-quarter 2026 economic growth. For the trucking industry, sustained increases in crude oil prices can eventually place additional pressure on diesel fuel costs, one of the largest operating expenses for motor carriers. Rapid fuel increases can be particularly difficult for smaller carriers and owner-operators, while fleets using fuel surcharge programs may be able to recover part of the added expense from customers. Higher diesel costs can also influence freight rates and broader supply-chain expenses because trucks move the majority of domestic freight. Carriers may… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
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