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Issue 260 · October 7, 2026 · 5 min read

Google locks up 3.6 gigawatts of power as the AI race turns into an electricity race

The companies building AI spent the week buying power, memory, and chip capacity at record scale. The binding constraint is no longer software, it is electricity and the physical plant to run it.

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Inside this issue

The Big Story

Google signs a 3.6 gigawatt power deal with Constellation, paying for new nuclear capacity. What happened and why it matters to your business, in plain English.

The Research

3 new research findings, translated into plain terms:

  • AI agents can run a job 657 times cheaper, and usually get worse doing it
  • Web-browsing AI can be trained to resist instructions hidden on pages
  • A survey of methods that let AI reuse knowledge without re-reading it

The Money

What Micron (MU) and Amazon Web Services did with their money this week, plus the five-day move in the AI stocks.

The Discourse

What Mark Cuban, the investor and entrepreneur, Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor who studies how AI is used at work, Gary Marcus, a longtime AI skeptic and researcher, and Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT said on X this week, and where the consensus is forming.

The Rules

3 government moves on AI worth knowing: federal, state, and global.

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