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Microsoft's ambitions to build a one billion dollar AI data center in Kenya are running into a hard physical reality. The Kenyan government says meeting the facility's power demands would require shutting down roughly half the national grid. It's a striking illustration of how the infrastructure appetite of modern AI is colliding with the limits of developing economies — and it raises serious questions about where, and for whom, this technology actually gets built.
On a different kind of infrastructure challenge, a project on GitHub is proposing an open architecture multi-beam electron beam lithography system aimed at sub-ten nanometer chip manufacturing. The pitch is sovereign chip capability — meaning nations could theoretically build advanced semiconductors without depending on tightly controlled foreign supply chains. It's early and thinly sourced, but the ambition alone tells you something about how anxious the world has become about who controls the tools that make the tools.
And over on Hacker News, a user is sounding the alarm about Mindie dot dev, accusing the platform of scraping email addresses from public profiles to send unsolicited promotional messages. It's a familiar story — a startup harvesting community goodwill for growth hacks — but it's a useful reminder that your public presence online is rarely as private as it feels.
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