You're tuned in to Tech Beat. Here are the stories shaping the day.
In Kansas, a teacher named Lux Claridge was arrested at a public zoning meeting after applauding a speaker who opposed a gigawatt-scale data center project. Police dragged the thirty-seven-year-old out and charged him with disorderly conduct. The commission approved the project anyway, raising serious questions about civic space and the infrastructure land rush.
On the quieter side of that infrastructure boom, Seagate is reporting that AI is giving hard drives an unexpected second life. Cloud operators are buying high-capacity spinning storage at record rates as AI applications generate and retain enormous volumes of data. Datacenter demand now accounts for roughly ninety percent of the company's exabyte shipments, a striking reversal for a technology many had written off.
And in Mississippi, NASA is converting contractors into civil servants at its Stennis Space Center, part of a deliberate push to rebuild in-house technical expertise. Ray Williams, a supervisor of test support operations, is among the first sworn in under the administrator's directive. It's a quiet but consequential bet that deep institutional knowledge belongs inside the agency, not outside it.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
