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A small Pennsylvania town is pushing back hard against a wave of data center development. Archbald, home to just seven thousand residents, has six AI data centers proposed within its borders — a footprint equivalent to fifty-one Walmart Supercenters spread across a seventeen square mile area. Four of the town's seven council members have resigned amid the fight, a sign of just how deeply the community is divided over whether the infrastructure boom serves locals or simply consumes them.
Meanwhile, the question of who AI serves is also playing out inside Google. More than six hundred employees have signed an open letter asking CEO Sundar Pichai to reject contracts with the US Department of Defense, calling the company's military AI work unethical and dangerous. The letter uses stark language — that human lives are already being lost — and it puts Google's leadership in an increasingly uncomfortable position between government revenue and internal dissent.
On a different frontier entirely, a startup called Neurable is betting that brain-computer interfaces belong in everyday consumer products. The company, which specializes in non-invasive neural data collection, is now licensing its technology to third-party hardware makers and expects a wave of new devices within the next year or two — raising real questions about what happens to the data your headphones collect from your mind.
That's where the stories stand today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
