AI News, Nov 4: Data Centers Lost at the Ballot Box
The Big Story: the buildout lost almost everywhere it was asked
Forty-one data-center measures were on local ballots across ten states on Tuesday. Stateline, citing the Data Centers on the Ballot tracker, counts 33 restrictive measures passed or leading. The only measure in the country that went the industry’s way was in North Dakota.
Ohio carried the bulk: 18 municipalities voting on 21 measures, with at least 14 passing bans or restrictions. Trenton’s ban on campuses drawing more than 25 megawatts passed 80 to 20 against an 18-building AWS project, Wilmington rejected rezoning in four referendums at around 80% each, and Ashville voted to block a campus already under construction. Ohio already had more than 125 local moratoriums before polls opened.
Markets took it as a cost-of-capital problem. Democrat Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott in Texas having campaigned for an immediate statewide moratorium, and Wells Fargo puts 27% of planned US data-center gigawatts in that one state. By Wednesday morning CoreWeave, SpaceX and Iren were each down about 4% and Tesla 5%, while Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta rose. The selling hit the leveraged pure-plays, not the companies paying capex out of cash flow.
None of it was a referendum on AI. NBC News and SSRS found 56% of voters called AI and data centers a decisive or important factor, last of five issues, behind government corruption at 90% and cost of living at 89%. The industry’s money did not help either: Elon Musk was the cycle’s biggest donor at $446 million, $168 million of it effectively behind Ken Paxton, who lost, and the mayors of Piqua, Ohio and Yukon, Oklahoma were recalled over data-center support. Local beat national on this issue, and the industry spent the cycle fighting on the wrong map.
Saying no to AI got harder in three products on one day
Google will switch Gemini, NotebookLM, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search off by default for K-12 student accounts next year, and Search cannot be turned back on by itself. Education VP Chris Phillips told the New York Times that “Search and AI are deeply integrated,” and students at a school restricting AI “will not have access to search.”
A GitHub issue reports that opening Postman’s desktop app silently installed Codex and Claude Code plugins, enabled a remote MCP server, and injected a session-start hook telling the agent to load Postman’s API skill. The reporter does not allege data exfiltration, only unconsented edits to other tools. It has drawn more than 1,400 points on Hacker News and no reply from Postman.
Google’s own Gemini help page confirms what a paying personal subscriber found this week: turning off training also turns off chat history, since with Keep Activity off chats are “retained with your account for 72 hours.” Leave it on and “a subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers” and kept up to three years, which is why the page asks users not to enter “confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see.”
Today’s Top Stories
Meta borrows again while Nikkei counts $3.2 trillion off the books
Meta went out Tuesday for $20 billion to $25 billion in bonds, two-thirds in dollars, a third in euros, after lifting full-year capex guidance to $135 billion to $145 billion. S&P moved its outlook to AA− negative over heavy capex and negative free cash flow. Meta raised $25 billion in April. Separately, Nikkei put US tech giants’ off-balance-sheet AI obligations at about $3.2 trillion, up roughly 90% in six months, or 80% of the companies’ assets. Nikkei does not explain its methodology, which is both the problem with the number and why it travelled.
Palantir’s first $2 billion quarter came with shorter contracts
Revenue hit $2.31 billion, up 96% year over year against a $2.18 billion consensus, and US commercial revenue of $984 million passed US government revenue for the first time. Underneath, total US enterprise contract value fell to $1.46 billion from a record $2.13 billion. Alex Karp pointed to “shorter duration of the contract” as customers move faster to deployment. Enterprises will try AI software without the usual procurement delay now, and stop just as easily.
Revolut cut its AI coding bill 90% by self-hosting
Ops and infrastructure lead David Abitbol told the AI Engineer conference that Revolut made self-hosted open-weight models the default, first Z.ai’s GLM-5.1 and now GLM-5.3, running on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs for roughly 2,000 engineers at about $0.30 per million tokens, a tenth of what Codex or Claude Code cost them. It reports 60% better coding time and 70% better lead time, with the gains coming mostly from debugging and ticket handling, not writing code.
Tencent shipped Hy4, without the weights
The production Hunyuan Hy4 adds vision and native computer use to the line for the first time, with a million-token context, at $0.834 per million input tokens and $2.501 per million output. Tencent says the weights and system card come later, so despite the press copy this is not an open-weights release yet. Its own evaluation, with 213 finance professionals scoring 579 tasks, put Hy4 at 3.04 against DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash at 2.97 and both Kimi K3.1 Pro and GLM-5.3 at 2.68. It was the only new frontier model in the window.
Quick Hits
- Funding: inference host fal raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation led by Bessemer with Nvidia participating, double the $8 billion it carried in April.
- Layoffs: Canva is cutting 1,271 people, 22% of staff, after trimming its revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30% to absorb rising AI costs.
- Compute: Anthropic’s amended S-1 shows compute took 58% of revenue last quarter, up from 48%, with $5 billion of the $10 billion quarterly bill under short-term commitments the filing says cost significantly more than its multi-year deals.
- Search: ChatGPT handles about 20% of Google’s search volume, per consumer product lead Adam Fry, on an OpenAI estimate that counts any prompt touching the web as a search.
- Chips: AMD reported Q3 revenue of $13.38 billion, up 45%, with data center now 64% of revenue against 47% a year ago, while gaming fell 40%.
- Security: CrowdStrike is paying a reported $400 million for Fiddler AI and $95 million for Dreadnode and shipped an AI Kill Switch that terminates misbehaving agents, which George Kurtz called the off button nobody had.
- Filings: Apple’s annual report now names third-party AI agents as a business risk, warning they may take “actions that were not directed, instructed or authorized” and that its ability to oversee them may be limited.
- Benchmarks: Ai2’s StateBench drops Gemini 3.8 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5 and both GPT-6 models to 13% or lower on long-document state tracking, while 275M-parameter gated-recurrent models generalize almost perfectly.
- Vulnerabilities: researchers using AI tooling turned a 2024 PHP out-of-memory bug the foundation had left alone into arbitrary remote code execution, exposing NASA, Wikipedia and much of WordPress before it was patched.
- Warning: Geoffrey Hinton told the Guardian it “might be that we would have been better off never developing it”, predicting a non-nuclear “Chornobyl” this year or next, though his gut says “we’re still in control.”
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