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Permanent copy of issue 96. Today's issue is always the front page.
Related: Data center financing under strain
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Google said on Thursday that it will spend $17 billion on its first data centre in Wyoming, in Laramie County, and will draw power from a planned 702-megawatt natural-gas fuel-cell plant built by American Electric Power with Bloom Energy cells and carbon capture. The announcement came two days after American voters rejected data-centre projects in dozens of towns, and on the same day OpenAI published a Community Compact promising to pay its own power costs and bar nondisclosure agreements with public officials. Central capital is still writing cheques; the political price of landing them has risen overnight.
Date: 2026-11-06
Updated: 2026-11-06 06:15
Status: LIVE
Broadcast
Google did not wait for the midterm dust to settle. It put $17 billion on Wyoming, paired the campus with a 702 MW fuel-cell plant, and promised to pay for every kilowatt and pipe its growth requires. OpenAI answered the same election with a compact that bars secret deals with mayors and asks commissions to make large loads cover their own grid costs. IREN still plans to spend $15 billion even after Microsoft asked it to rewire a Texas hall. Against that tide, NVIDIA and Phonon handed researchers and phones open weights that run without a rented rack. The builders still have the capital; the towns now have a checklist, and the desk has a few more tools that do not need their permission.
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Stories
Google said on Thursday that it will build its first data centre in Wyoming, in Laramie County, as a long-term $17 billion investment with Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power and Related Digital. The campus is contracted to draw power from a 702-megawatt natural-gas fuel-cell plant using Bloom Energy cells, with carbon capture at Tallgrass Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub, and Google said it will pay for 100 percent of the electricity and growth-driven infrastructure it uses and will air-cool the site to limit water use.
-- Two days after voters blocked data-centre land in dozens of towns, Google is still writing a nine-figure cheque for a new state and bringing its own generation, which keeps the axis tilted toward central clusters.
2026-11-05 / Google (The Keyword) / chip, energy / central / #google-commits-17-billion-to-its-first-wyoming-d
IREN said in its Thursday earnings report that more than $4 billion of contracted annualized revenue tied to its Childress, Texas, AI cloud build for Microsoft will slip from year-end into January and possibly February after what co-CEO Daniel Roberts called a customer-requested reconfiguration of network infrastructure for 200 megawatts of frontier-model capacity. The company still guided to about $15 billion of capital expenditure for the rest of its fiscal year, including $9 billion already funded and $6 billion of target financing subject to market conditions.
-- The schedule slipped, but the contracted load and the spending plan did not; neocloud balance sheets are wobbling while the hyperscaler order book still points at more central racks.
2026-11-05 / CNBC / chip, energy / central / #iren-delays-microsoft-texas-capacity-after-a-net
OpenAI released a National Community Compact and a Compute Campus Policy Blueprint on Thursday for future campuses it owns and operates, saying it will pay the full cost of electricity and infrastructure, give financial assurances if a project shrinks or dies, publish water and power use, and refuse nondisclosure agreements with public officials except for narrow security and trade-secret carve-outs. The blueprint asks state utility commissions to write large-load tariffs so other ratepayers do not cover the grid costs data centres add, and cites an Effingham County, Georgia, deal that already lets Georgia Power cut up to 1,000 megawatts to the campus in stress hours.
-- The midterm smackdown forced a product company to write political terms into its siting playbook; consent, not silicon, is now the scarce input for the next campus.
2026-11-05 / Unite.AI / energy / mixed / #openai-publishes-a-community-compact-that-bans-n
NVIDIA posted four Cosmos 3 Nano checkpoints on Hugging Face on Thursday for interactive world simulation and multi-sensor driving scenes, including Transfer-Auto, Sim-Auto, Sim-Transfer and Sim-Bimanual. Each post-trained model has about 16 billion trainable parameters, uses the OpenMDW 1.1 licence for commercial and non-commercial use, and is aimed at robotics and autonomous-driving researchers who want to generate synchronized camera and LiDAR observations from controls rather than rent a closed simulator stack.
-- Open simulation weights let labs and fleets train policies on their own hardware instead of shipping every rollout to a central cloud, which is the local pole of the same week Google is buying Wyoming megawatts.
2026-11-05 / Hugging Face (NVIDIA blog) / efficiency / local / #nvidia-publishes-four-cosmos-3-nano-open-weight-
Gradium and Hugging Face published a detailed look on Thursday at Phonon, a pair of open text-to-speech models of roughly 65 MB and 75 MB that synthesize speech on phones, laptops and browsers with no server round trip. Phonon 31m is Apache 2.0 for commercial use, covers English, and has been downloaded more than 200,000 times in two weeks; the larger 40m model adds French, German, Spanish and Portuguese under a non-commercial licence.
-- A voice that never leaves the handset is the opposite of a $17 billion campus: the desk can now speak without paying a central inference bill.
2026-11-05 / Hugging Face blog / efficiency / local / #phonon-ships-open-on-device-speech-models-that-r
Axis
local [#########################-----] central
Score: 84
clusters still winning
+1
Google answered the midterm backlash with a $17 billion Wyoming campus and a 702 MW fuel-cell plant that it says will pay its own way on power, while OpenAI offered new community rules and NVIDIA put four world-simulation models into open weights. The score rises one point to 84.
Forces
| Force | Meter | Score | Pull | Note | ||
| CHIP / CAPEX |
|
98 | central | Google pledged a $17 billion long-term investment for its first Wyoming data centre; IREN said it still plans about $15 billion of capital spending this fiscal year even after Microsoft asked it to redesign network gear at a 200 MW Texas site, pushing more than $4 billion of contracted annualized revenue into January or February. | ||
| ENERGY |
|
97 | central | Google contracted American Electric Power for a 702 MW Bloom Energy fuel-cell plant with carbon capture at Tallgrass Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub, said it will pay 100 percent of the power and growth-driven infrastructure it uses, and will air-cool the campus to cut water demand; OpenAI separately asked state commissions to make large-load customers cover incremental grid costs. | ||
| EFFICIENCY |
|
82 | mixed | NVIDIA published four Cosmos 3 Nano open-weight checkpoints (about 16 billion trainable parameters each) for interactive world simulation on Hugging Face under OpenMDW 1.1, and Phonon shipped a closer look at its on-device open text-to-speech models that run without a network; both tug compute toward owned hardware even as hyperscaler capex keeps climbing. |
Line charts (0=local 100=central 2026-10-22 to 2026-11-06)
Market overlay (2026-10-08 to 2026-11-06)
Latest: BTC $75,941 / hashrate ~1046.11 EH/s / token markers avg $5.2583/M / axis 84. These lines are different units. We compare timing, not dollars-to-hashrate.
Not shown: GPU cloud $/hour, hub electricity, miner hashprice, or lab cost per token -- none of those are a clean public feed.
Power and list prices
BTC $75,941 / hashrate ~1046 EH/s. List-price gap (not a subsidy %): 123.1x list gap (blended) Mercury 3 -> Claude Fable 5.1 ($0.16/M to $20.00/M). (mempool.space + Coinbase/CoinGecko)
Marker prices (USD per 1M tokens; verified 2026-10-31; blended = (3*input + 1*output) / 4; -- = open/self-host or no single public list)
| # | Model | Org | CC | Weights | Tier | In | Out | Blend |
| 1 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic | US | closed undisclosed |
workhorse | $2.00 | $10.00 | $4.00 |
| 2 | GPT-5.5 | OpenAI | US | closed undisclosed |
flagship | $5.00 | $30.00 | $11.25 |
| 3 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | DeepSeek | CN | open ~284B total / ~13B active (MoE) |
commodity | $0.30 | $1.20 | $0.53 |
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