Tag: technology

Meta to spend up to $65 bln this year to power AI goals, Zuckerberg says

Meta Platforms plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology.

As part of the investment, Meta (META.O) will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company — one of the largest customers of Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) coveted artificial intelligence chips — plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.

“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business.”

Zuckerberg expects Meta’s AI assistant — available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram — to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the “leading state-of-the-art model”.

Shares of the company were 1.6% higher in early trading.

Big technology companies have been investing tens of billions of dollars to develop AI-related infrastructure after the meteoric success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT highlighted the potential for the technology.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced that OpenAI, SoftBank Group (9984.T) and Oracle (ORCL.N) will form a venture called Stargate and invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure across the United States.

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How is Stargate’s $500B getting funded?

OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and the UAE’s MGX on unveiled a company on Tuesday that plans to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the U.S.

Why it matters: SoftBank is doubling down on its OpenAI bet, and it reduces OpenAI’s reliance on the infrastructure of Microsoft, its largest investor.

Context: The Stargate project will invest an initial $100 billion, with another $400 billion over the next four years.

Between the lines: A portion of the $100 billion is expected to be funded via third-party debt rather than equity, Axios has learned.

  • SoftBank will be responsible for raising the debt.
  • SoftBank and OpenAI are the largest equity investors in the first $100 billion in stargate yes, with Oracle and MGX also having contributed.
  • Similarly, the additional $400 billion is expected to be a mix of current investors, new investors, and debt providers.

OpenAI will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the business.

The big picture: SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son previously promised President Donald Trump that he would invest $100 billion in U.S. firms over the next four years. This is part of that promise.

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Trump highlights partnership investing $500 billion in AI

President Donald Trump on Tuesday talked up a joint venture investing up to $500 billion for infrastructure tied to artificial intelligence by a new partnership formed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank.

The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House. The initial investment is expected to be $100 billion and could reach five times that sum.

“It’s big money and high quality people,” said Trump, adding that it’s “a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential” under his new administration.

Joining Trump fresh off his inauguration at the White House were Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Larry Ellison of Oracle. All three credited Trump for helping to make the project possible, even though building has already started and the project goes back to 2024.

“This will be the most important project of this era,” said Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

Ellison noted that the data centers are already under construction with 10 being built so far. The chairman of Oracle suggested that the project was also tied to digital health records and would make it easier to treat diseases such as cancer by possibly developing a customized vaccine.

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‘Could Lead to Extinction Event’: Nicole Shanahan Issues Dire Warning Against Stargate’s AI-Backed mRNA Cancer Vaccine Rollout

The distribution of AI-driven mRNA cancer vaccines for individuals as part of President Donald Trump’s Stargate Project could lead to an “extinction event,” warns former RFK Jr. running mate Nicole Shanahan.

In an appearance on Megyn Kelly’s podcast Wednesday, Shanahan, a Silicon Valley attorney and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 running mate, called for a moratorium on experimental mRNA technology because they already raise health concerns since the long-term effects are not yet fully understood.

“What we need for the mRNA platform right now is a moratorium. It’s not ready for human use,” Shanahan said. “One of the reasons why is it delivers an inconsistent result in individuals.”

Shanahan went on to explain how 5% of those who received the experimental COVID-19 mRNA jabs during the plandemic didn’t get the expected results — instead, many ended up with “turbo cancers,” “blood clots” and other adverse side effects, and others were even harmed as a result of spike protein “shedding.”

“In order for our population to grow, to be strong, to be fully able-bodied, and for our human economy to thrive, we do need a moratorium on the mRNA for the time being,” she said.

Kelly added, “Until it’s not Russian roulette to take it.”

Shanahan pointed out that many engineers and pharmacological researchers working on the development of the mRNA tech are overlooking a fundamental truth about human biology: it can’t be programmed the way a computer system can.

“They think that you can program the human body as you program an AI system, as you program a computer system. And the trouble with that mentality is that nature…there’s an element to it that when you interject something like the mRNA vaccine, there’s a huge amount of stochastic randomness that can occur,” she noted.

“AI is a computer system. Human health is not,” she added.

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Trump throws his weight behind new generation of mRNA gene-therapy injections, for cancer and other diseases

OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle will be part of a public-private partnership with the Trump White House called Stargate.

The heads of the tech firms plan to invest up to $500 billion over four years, in building AI infrastructure across the United States. This means data centers. Massive buildings designed to collect and process data. Running these centers requires huge amounts of water and energy.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Larry Ellison of Oracle appeared at the White House on Tuesday afternoon with President Trump to announce the launching of Stargate.

Trump, standing with the three tech CEOs at the White House, said he would invoke “emergency declarations” to help speed up the Stargate project.

“I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations,” he said. “Because we have an emergency and we need a lot of help. We need energy generation and they will build their own.”

He said Stargate will build the infrastructure to power the “next generation of AI and this will include data centers. Massive facilities…These are big beautiful buildings.”

He said a team is already scouting the nation for sites on which to build new data centers, adding:

“This is to me a very big deal. It could lead to something that could be the biggest of all.”

Larry Ellison talked about combining the forces of AI and mRNA gene therapy to create a “cancer vaccine.”

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US creates strongest-ever armor material with 100 trillion bonds per cm²

Aresearch team led by scientists at Northwestern University has developed the first-ever two-dimensional mechanically interlocked material with high flexibility and strength. In the future, this could be used to develop lightweight yet high-performance body armor and other such tough materials, a press release said. 

It was in the 1980s that Fraser Stoddart, then a chemist at Northwestern University, first introduced the concept of mechanical bonds. Stoddart then expanded the role of these bonds into molecular machines by enabling functions like switching, rotating, contracting, and expanding in multiple ways and using them to develop interlocked structures, which also won him the Nobel Prize in 2016. 

Researchers have been working on developing mechanically interlocked molecules with polymers for decades but have failed. “In organic chemistry, it is pretty straightforward to form so-called “medium-sized rings” that are 5-8 atoms around. But such rings are too small to thread another molecule through them,” explained William Dichtel, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University in an email to Interesting Engineering.

“In our paper, there are new rings formed at each repeat unit of the 2D structure, which are 40 atoms around,” added Dichtel. This was achieved using an innovative and novel approach that even questioned assumptions about how molecules react

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The Technocratic Blueprint

“Humanity will attempt to overcome its limitations and arrive at fuller fruition,” declared Julian Huxley in 1957, coining the term “transhumanism.” By 2022, Yuval Noah Harari would announce its dark fulfillment: “Humans are now hackable animals. The whole idea of free will… that’s over. Today we have the technology to hack human beings on a massive scale. Everything is being digitized, everything is being monitored. In this time of crisis, you have to follow science. It’s often said you should never allow a good crisis to go to waste, because a crisis is an opportunity to also do ‘good’ reforms that in normal times people would never agree to. But in a crisis, you have no chance, so you better do what we – the people who understand – tell you to do.”

Like Truman Burbank in ‘The Truman Show,’ we inhabit a world where reality itself is increasingly engineered. And like Truman, most remain unaware of the extent of this engineering until shown the patterns. But unlike Truman’s physical dome with its obvious cameras and artificial sets, our manufactured environment operates through sophisticated technological systems and invisible digital constraints. The mechanics of this reality engineering – from media manipulation to social programming – were explored in detail in our previous analysis. Now we turn to the driving force behind this manufactured world: technocracy, the system of control that makes such reality engineering possible on a global scale.

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China’s new microwave weapon challenges US tech dominance

A new energy weapon has emerged in Beijing’s arsenal. HPM (High-power microwave), which uses microwaves, can affect electronics on a large scale, such as in drones, disrupting their operations without causing visible damage.

The Chinese solution is based on Stirling engines, which allow for the efficient conversion of thermal energy into mechanical energy, potentially generating electromagnetic pulses similar to those produced by atomic bomb explosions. The efficiency of this solution reaches – according to Chinese sources – 96.6 percent.

This weapon was developed by a team from the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, and it can target not only drones but also military aircraft and satellites.

HPM also allows for precise energy focusing and adjustment of the effective range. The pulse it emits is similar to those accompanying nuclear explosions.

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China plans to build enormous solar array in space — and it could collect more energy in a year than ‘all the oil on Earth’

Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous, 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves.

The project, which will see its components lofted to a geostationary orbit above Earth using super-heavy rockets, has been dubbed “another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth.”

The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze river in central China, is the world’s largest hydropower project and generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. According to one NASA scientist, the dam is so large that, if completely filled, the mass of the water contained within would lengthen Earth’s days by 0.06 microseconds.

The new project, according to lead scientist Long Lehao, the chief designer of China’s Long March rockets, would be “as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.”

“This is an incredible project to look forward to,” Long added during a lecture in October hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), as reported by the South China Morning Post. “The energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth.”

Despite recent advances in the cheapness and efficiency of solar power, the technology still faces some fundamental limitations — such as intermittent cloud cover and most of the atmosphere absorbing solar radiation before it hits the ground.

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‘Project Pandora’: DoD Experiments to Control Human Behavior with Microwave Radiation

A declassified collection of documents confirms the U.S. military, in league with the State Department and CIA, conducted experiments investigating the “potential of exerting a degree of control on human behavior by low level microwave radiation.”

The documents comprise a cache of operational procedures, research summaries, appendices, administrative notes, and memorandums outlining ‘Project Pandora.’

Project Pandora was a Cold War-era U.S. research initiative led by ARPA (now DARPA) to investigate the biological and behavioral effects of low-level microwave radiation, including its potential for surveillance, psychological influence, and non-lethal weaponization, with experiments involving animals, and human testing.

It was suggested at one section of the cache that Pandora would include the use of “various basic wave forms” on “biological tissue,” including a “program that might look at possible behavioral implications from the point of view of a weapon or interrogation device.”

Such a program was to “be handled on a SECRET level.”

The cache document has resurfaced amid bombshell reports that the Pentagon approved the use of directed-energy weapons (DEWs) on American citizens, as well as speculation that DEWs were used in relation to the recent Los Angeles fires.

The resurfaced document confirms the DoD has been developing such technology for decades.

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