Technology

1. More dashing data centers
2. Nvidia’s rush out the gate
3. Food for thought
4. Europe’s AI clampdown
5. Estranged AI godfather

Data centers get a face-lift, and a new AI tool wants to refill your prescriptions.

Data centers are facing a public relations problem, which requires a public relations solution. Today we have a story on facilities taking on more tasteful facades — they could be mistaken for art museums to the unknowing eye — in response to dissent from neighboring communities they’re built in (read more about that below). But some are taking it further than appearances.

In our 2026 tech predictions, we wrote that data centers will increasingly be integrated into community spaces. Think gyms, parking garages, playgrounds, and restaurants attached to these server farms. Gensler, the architecture firm tapped to help with JPMorgan’s splashy new Manhattan headquarters, is already working on some of these projects, the head of its data center practice, Jackson Metcalf, told me this week. It’s not restaurants — that may have been a reach — but an existing project from data center developer Menlo Digital incorporates a community park, and Metcalf said similar integrations are expected in upcoming projects.

When I wrote about the rapid expansion of data centers last year, I expected community backlash to have a much more limited effect. I chose Goliath, if you will. But as it turns out, Goliath is facing bigger competition in its own weight class, and is willing to throw David a few stones if it means winning the fight that matters.

Extreme makeover: data center edition

Tech companies are swapping concrete bunkers for designer data centers. In response to community pushback over the buildout, they’re tapping architects to spruce up the facilities powering the AI boom, Rachyl reports.

For its part, Gensler says the number of its employees who work on data centers jumped by 40% in the last year. It is designing a data center in the Netherlands with vertical gardens. Another one in Phoenix, Arizona, has a rust orange facade that looks more like a modern art museum than metal warehouse — and comes with a two-acre community park. Facilities planned for Alberta, Canada, will use wood-colored exteriors to blend more seamlessly into the heavily wooded area.

Traditionally, data centers are large, rectangular buildings with little architectural flair. While the outrage around them has mostly centered on high energy and water usage, local protests have flared up by some neighbors calling the facilities “ugly” eyesores. That image has contributed to the fury around data center expansion across political lines. And municipalities have begun making demands regarding their appearances. “When we’ve seen municipalities push back, the clients are very, very willing to do what they ask,” said Gensler’s Jackson Metcalf.

Nvidia presses the gas

Is there any stopping Nvidia? CEO Jensen Huang previewed the company’s next generation of chips sooner than expected in Las Vegas this week, telling the crowds at the CES conference that “everyone is trying to get to the next frontier” of AI. The Vera Rubin chip — named after the astronomer who proved the existence of dark matter — can do significantly more computing with less power than its predecessor Blackwell, the most advanced AI chip to date. Nvidia also made the surprise announcement that it’s partnering with Mercedes-Benz to build the same kind of software that underpins Tesla’s autonomous driving technology. Elon Musk shrugged off the incursion into his lane — after all, the tech world is littered with companies like Apple that went hard on autos and failed. Few would have predicted a few years ago that Nvidia would outplay them.

Huang’s decision to pull forward production schedules and court new kinds of customers shows that the AI race is not slowing down. The approaching availability of chips in the US also shows why President Donald Trump may have been more amenable to allow the company to sell its less powerful H200 chips in China. Still, the faster arrival of new, more efficient chips will add to anxieties about the residual value of old ones, which underpin huge swaths of the AI economy (and CoreWeave’s entire business model). When Huang teased the Vera Rubin chips last year, he joked that he was the “chief revenue destroyer.”

In our opinion, those anxieties are a bit misplaced, as the insatiable appetite for these products, driven by “Jevons Paradox,” will put older chips to use for quite a while.

r/confessions and r/lessons

Fool me twice. Social media users were duped over the weekend with an apparently AI-generated, viral post claiming uncouth labor practices from an unnamed major food delivery company. Hundreds of thousands of users engaged with the content, and some news outlets gave credibility to the allegations, before several journalists revealed that additional evidence provided by the original poster was generated by AI.

We’ve repeatedly warned that AI-generated misinformation will become too difficult to discern as the tools become more advanced. The post, coupled with fake photos of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro that spread over the weekend, made that clear.

But the initial post also had a profound impact because it reinforced a widely held belief (and with good reason) that algorithms are secretly screwing consumers over, prompting some of the largest food delivery targets to actively go on defense.

AI detectors and communications with Uber revealed the scheme, but there will come a time when verifying the authenticity of documents will be much more difficult for journalists (and lawyers, bankers, law enforcement, government officials, and so on). It’s a growing problem that will likely need to be solved by the same industry building the models in the first place.

Europe targets Grok, TikTok

Europe is clamping down on AI-generated material on social media platforms that it says violates its laws. The move thrusts Europe back to the center of AI regulation after pressure from Big Tech and the US set it up for a watered down approach.

The EU and UK are looking into Elon Musk’s Grok model for allowing users to create “suggestive and explicit” images of minors, multiple media outlets report. The platform introduced a “spicy” mode last year and has marketed the AI as an edgier, less restrictive alternative to mainstream chatbots — though Musk said anyone using the service to generate child sexual material would “suffer the same consequences” as if they uploaded it themselves. The issue has drawn attention from other governments as well, including India and Malaysia.

The European Commission is also looking into AI-generated misinformation spreading on TikTok encouraging Poland to withdraw from the EU, at the request of the Polish government, according to an official. The representative said the content violates the social media app’s guidelines by not being labeled as AI-generated and suggested TikTok does not adequately monitor AI content, undermining Europe’s social media laws.

The instances allegedly violate Europe’s long-established rules against child sexual material and disinformation rather than its new and more contentious AI Act. Still, a win for European regulators could draw support for its original, stricter approach to managing AI at a time when its trajectory is in flux.

LeCun slights Meta’s Wang

Yann LeCun lashed out this week at Meta, his former employer, calling the company’s new superintelligence leader, Alexandr Wang, “inexperienced.” At the heart of the outburst — a rare occurrence at the upper echelons of the world’s most valuable companies — is a disagreement about the future of AI.

LeCun, who’s considered one of the godfathers of AI for his breakthroughs in academia, doesn’t believe that scaling large language models will lead to superintelligence or artificial general intelligence — something he’s argued since the beginning of the ChatGPT era. And his opinion is more or less consensus at this point. It’s rare to find anybody who believes building bigger and bigger GPU clusters will somehow lead to a magical AI god.

What LeCun gets wrong is the notion that it really matters whether LLMs are the path to superintelligence. Meta giving its new AI team the “superintelligence” label is really just marketing. It’s clear that LLMs, with all their significant flaws, are here to stay.

The irony of the AI “boom” is that it might actually slow down the pace of AI breakthroughs relative to the last decade, when the most brilliant academics in the field were given immense resources and permitted to immediately make their discoveries public.

Meta just needs to get very good and very fast at scaling LLMs — not because they are the path to superintelligence but because it’s now table stakes for all of the tech giants.

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Dose of AI. Utah is the first state to more formally test how well AI can assess medical situations through a partnership with health-tech startup Doctronic that uses AI to prescribe refills for patients with chronic conditions, Politico reported. On the platform, patients select from a list of prescriptions they previously received and answer clinical questions. If the AI determines a refill is appropriate, it sends a prescription directly to their pharmacy. Humans will oversee the early days of refills, but the system will eventually function autonomously, unless the AI escalates an issue to a human doctor.

State lawmakers say the practice will improve access to health care, lower costs, and reduce delays, freeing up doctors to do more important work. While commonly abused pain management and ADHD drugs are excluded from the service, concerns remain that patients struggling with addiction could manipulate the system to receive medications, and that it could miss warning signs a human doctor would catch. The regulatory framework for new AI services is patchy, with approvals largely happening at the state level. Doctronic is discussing approvals with several states, it said.