Monday August 17, 2026

The people objecting to data centers are going to lose, and the reality is that they are not completely wrong, but being right has never been the deciding factor.

The British knitters around Nottingham lost this same argument in 1811. Machines arrived in their workshops turning out cheap goods that undercut their wages. They responded by smashing the frames, and Parliament made the act a capital offense. The word Luddite survives from that period as the insult thrown against technology objectors, and it is about to get a lot of use.

Roughly forty billion dollars of proposed data center capacity died on local opposition in the first quarter of this year alone, which is more than all of last year combined, and the complaints behind those votes are not manufactured. Power bills are rising in the counties that host these facilities. Water is being drawn from places that do not have it to spare. A community looking at all of that and voting no is behaving rationally.

The problem is what happens next, and following a recent community hearing in a southern state, someone put it more plainly than any analyst has. Keep the data center out of our town and it simply goes to the next town over. National demand for compute does not care which county says yes, so a local moratorium does not remove the facility, it relocates it. Every town acting in its own obvious interest produces an outcome where the facility lands on whoever is least equipped to fight it.

So the compute still gets built, and all the opposition really changes is the price and the address. Both of those are tradeable. Every canceled project pushes the next one toward jurisdictions that will pre-approve it, toward behind-the-meter generation that never touches a ratepayer bill, toward water sourcing that does not compete with a town, and toward siting remote enough that nobody shows up to object at all.

The frames went in anyway, and so will the servers. What the Luddites should teach an investor is not that the objectors are foolish, because they were not then and they are not now, but that opposition has never once decided whether something gets built. It only ever decided where it got built and who got paid to build it there.

◾ President Trump signs EO authorizing cyberattacks by private companies (White House)

◾ SpaceX $SPCX closes $60B Cursor AI acquisition (SEC Filing)

◾ PayPal $PYPL in talks to sell itself to Stripe, Advent group (WSJ)

◾ President Trump to meet crypto, AI and prediction market CEOs Thursday (CoinDesk)

◾ Hackers steal data on 678,000 French taxpayers (Reuters)

◾ Ireland launches first national anti-money laundering strategy (Department of Finance)

◾ OCC approves conditional bank charter for World Liberty Trust Co (OCC)

◾ India orders Meta $META to disclose accounts tied to sexually explicit ads (Adgully)

◾ NASA Administrator confident Artemis 3 flies in 2027 (Spaceflight Now)

◾ Ukrainian missiles hit Russian space facility in Samara (Zelenskyy)

◾ US adds surveillance sensor to Japanese QZSS constellation (SatNews)

◾ US selects D-Orbit USA, Firefly Aerospace $FLY and Katalyst Space for satellite disposal study (SpaceNews)

◾ NASA to host US 250 aerospace airshow in November (NASA)

◾ Financial updates:

• Payward Q2’26: Revenue $508M +17% y/y | aEBITDA $23M (Payward)

• Solana Company $HSDT Q2’26: Revenue $2.5M | Op loss $32.7M | Net loss $30.3M | Cash $3.6M (Globe Newswire)

• Sidus Space $SIDU Q2’26: Revenue $583K -54% y/y | Op loss $5.7M | Net loss $4.8M -15% y/y | aEBITDA loss $5.1M +29% y/y | Cash $166.5M (Sidus Space)

• Anthropic forecasts $190 - $200B in 2028 revenue (Reuters)

• OpenAI: Enterprise revenue now greater than consumer (CNBC)

◾ Alphabet $GOOGL holds 7.2% of SpaceX $SPCX (SEC Filing)

◾ RedotPay delays US IPO over Binance suit (Bloomberg)

◾ Chainalysis sues US government over $95M ICE contract awarded to TRM Labs (crypto.news)

◾ Paragon Space cuts 77 jobs after Northrop Grumman $NOC ends HALO contract (MLQ.ai)

◾ Cboe $CBOE seeks SEC approval for 3x bitcoin and ether ETFs (SEC)

◾ World Liberty Financial delays token for Trump branded Maldives resort (Bloomberg)

◾ Binance gave Russia user details supporting terrorism-financing charges (Reuters)

◾ SafePal discloses data breach affecting ~40,000 user wallets (Reuters)

◾ Galaxy $GLXY to provide crypto trading for Israel’s Bank Leumi (PR Newswire)

◾ Binance to stop processing HTX / Huobi transactions (Binance)

◾ Stripe to buy OpenRouter for $7B+ (Bloomberg)

◾ Nvidia $NVDA in talks to invest $3B in SB Energy (The Information)

◾ $HIVE signs $350M AI cloud agreement (Newsfilecorp)

◾ Microsoft $MSFT merges Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot into single app (Microsoft)

◾ Alibaba $BABA selling Lingxi Games for $2B+ (Reuters)

◾ Mattel $MAT launches studio to develop games based on IP (GamesIndustry.biz)

◾ Apple $AAPL proposes new fees on purchases made outside App Store (TechCrunch)

◾ Netflix $NFLX closing Night School and Moonloot gaming studios (Game File)

◾ Amazon $AMZN hands Throne and Liberty publishing to NC (GamesIndustry.biz)

◾ Meta $META patents facial recognition cameras that detect actions (Patentlyze)

◾ Apple $AAPL selling ads in US Maps app (Apple)

◾ Meta $META donating 15k Ray-Ban AI glasses to assist visually impaired in Ireland (Meta)

◾ SpaceX $SPCX launches two flights from East and West coasts within 38 minutes (Spaceflight Now)

◾ Virgin Galactic $SPCE delays start of commercial suborbital flights to Q1'27 (Aviation Week)