Trump wants data center companies to pay host communities as opposition to AI infrastructure grows. Here's what the proposal could mean for future projects.
The post The AI Boom Needs More Data Centers. Trump Wants Communities to Get a Cut appeared first on TechRepublic.
Trump wants data center companies to pay host communities as opposition to AI infrastructure grows. Here's what the proposal could mean for future projects.
The post The AI Boom Needs More Data Centers. Trump Wants Communities to Get a Cut appeared first on TechRepublic.
Bitcoin Magazine
Circle Shareholder Sues Trump, Alleging Unconstitutional Profits From $2B UAE Crypto Deals
A shareholder from one of the world’s biggest digital asset companies has sued U.S. President Donald Trump for alleged crypto corruption.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by shareholder and former Circle employee J. Benjamin Greenberg, alleges that a member of the United Arab Emirates ruling family agreed to pay half a billion dollars into the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial business — in direct violation of the Constitution.
Circle is the fintech company behind the stablecoin, USDC. Regulators in the U.S. are fast pushing ahead with pro-crypto rules despite lawmakers last month blocking landmark digital asset legislation, which President Trump backed.
A number of lawmakers didn’t back the draft legislation — the Clarity Act — because they said that the Trump family had illicitly cashed in on crypto ventures.
“The corruption at issue is not subtle, and it is not hidden,” the lawsuit alleges. “Since returning to office, President Donald J. Trump and his family have built a cryptocurrency business and invited foreign states to route money to him by paying into it. Foreign money has answered.”
The lawsuit goes on to allege that an investment fund created by the government of Abu Dhabi also gave the president $2 billion via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin product.
World Liberty Financial is a decentralized finance project co-founded by the president and his sons.
President Trump stopped being involved in the project after taking office in 2025.
Thursday’s lawsuit adds that the president allegedly gave the Emirati leadership access to advanced artificial intelligence chips and pardoned a convicted felon in turn for the crypto investment. It references a February Wall Street Journal article that reported the deal.
“Although the President has dressed his corrupt arrangements in the language of new technology — tokens and stablecoins, holding companies and reserve yields — that vocabulary must not obscure what this is: the oldest form of public corruption, a public official taking money from a foreign power,” the lawsuit further says.
It alleges that the president has “corruptly” profited from $2 billion via the deals.
President Trump, World Liberty, and U.S. Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are named as the defendants in the lawsuit.
The president campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto industry and received major financial backing from the space but some Washington lawmakers have criticized the way the Trump family has profited from digital asset ventures.
Trump and the White House have always denied any conflicts of interest. The president in August, ahead of the crypto Clarity Act vote, said that Democrats criticizing his family crypto ventures had made money from stock trading.
This post Circle Shareholder Sues Trump, Alleging Unconstitutional Profits From $2B UAE Crypto Deals first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Calley Means—a top ally to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a co-author of the so-called "MAHA bible"—resigned from his role in the Trump administration Thursday, reportedly in frustration over delays to food policy changes sought by the Make America Healthy Again movement.
"I am resigning from the White House with tremendous respect for President Trump and Bobby Kennedy," Means wrote in a social media post this afternoon. "It was an honor to advocate for MAHA moms in the administration and steer policies like Dietary Guidelines reform, psychedelic reform, removing soda from SNAP, removing food dyes, GRAS reform, and overhauling government food procurement."
His post did not provide a reason for his departure. Means served as a senior advisor to Kennedy.
© Getty | Andrew Harnik
The United States and Israel are moving toward a new war with Iran within days, as President Donald Trump said Washington is no longer negotiating with Tehran and that “something” will happen “fairly soon,” while U.S. troops pull out of exposed bases across the Middle East and Israeli fighter jets rehearse a strike on Iran […]Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today warned broadcasters about airing "fake polls," amplifying one of the many complaints that President Trump has regularly made about the news media.
Carr's post on X said, "Many journalists and broadcasters have been amplifying or airing these Polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis... Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations."
Carr urged broadcasters to "provide their viewers with additional context and information about Polls they have covered." In fact, one small polling outfit was exposed as a hoax this week, and a similar incident occurred in August. News outlets have reported on these hoaxes, providing the very "context" that Carr said is needed.
© Getty Images | Brandon Bell
A Wall Street Journal report said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ordered the Starlink throttling that blindsided Ukraine's air assault forces last week, despite Musk's claim that all decisions on the military version of Starlink are made by the US military and President Trump.
Trump denied ordering the restrictions. While Musk may have spoken to Trump and administration officials before the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Musk made the final call. The decision came after both Musk and Trump criticized Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries.
"Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration," the WSJ wrote, citing unnamed US officials and people familiar with the matter. The report said that "Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network... rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless."
© Getty Images | Bloomberg
Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI is stuck facing a lawsuit over alleged data center pollution after Donald Trump failed to convince a judge that his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has complete control over all Clean Air Act lawsuits and can dismiss any suit at whim.
Soon after unpermitted gas turbines were discovered powering Musk’s giant Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the NAACP sued. Its lawsuit sought an injunction requiring xAI (which, following a merger, is known now as SpaceXAI) to use the best available pollution control technology when operating the turbines and ordering penalties up to $124,426 per day per violation. Without such remedies, the turbines risked drastically spiking pollution in already vulnerable neighborhoods housing predominantly Black communities nearby, the NAACP argued.
To block the lawsuit, Trump tried to intervene, arguing that the EPA had the power to unilaterally dismiss lawsuits any time the president decides against enforcing the Clean Air Act. According to Trump, it would supposedly “not serve the public interest” if citizens were allowed to seek massive civil penalties to punish polluting AI firms that were trying to get data centers operational as fast as possible to support Trump’s AI Action Plan.
© ©Steve Jones, Flight by Southwings for SELC
Bitcoin Magazine
President Trump to Highlight Crackdown on Overseas Crypto Scams
President Donald Trump will use a White House event on Wednesday to spotlight his administration’s push against foreign criminal networks that lure Americans into fake crypto investments, a White House official told Reuters.
The remarks are part of a broader event on cyber crime prevention. Trump and members of his cabinet plan to point to the government’s seizure of fraudulent crypto investment websites and its work to shut down online impersonation scams, the official reportedly said.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are expected to attend.
The event follows a March executive order in which Trump directed the Justice Department to prioritize the identification and prosecution of online scammers. He followed that with a memo directing the Department of Homeland Security to work with private companies to surveil foreign criminal hacking groups.
The numbers behind the crackdown are grim. Americans filed more than one million complaints with the FBI about internet scams in 2025, a 17% increase from 2024, and reported record losses.
Crypto fraud accounted for more than half of that damage. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 181,565 crypto-related complaints and $11.366 billion in losses for 2025, making digital assets the single most loss-heavy category in the report. Crypto investment scams drained $7.2 billion of that total.
The FBI traced much of the activity to organized criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia — in Cambodia, Laos and Burma — that use victims of human trafficking as forced labor inside scam compounds. Criminals make contact through text messages, social media, dating apps and digital ads before steering victims to fake platforms that display fabricated profits. When victims try to withdraw, scammers demand taxes and fees and vanish.
Americans aged 60 and older bore the heaviest burden, with $4.43 billion in crypto-related losses. Crypto ATM scams produced $389 million in losses, a 58% jump from 2024, and recovery scams that target prior victims generated another $1.4 billion.
The global picture is worse. Chainalysis data from January showed illicit crypto addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162% increase from 2024. North Korea-linked hackers stole $2 billion over the year, including the $1.5 billion Bybit exploit, the largest crypto heist on record.
Enforcement has produced some solid results. The FBI’s Operation Level Up notified 3,780 victims of active crypto investment fraud in 2025 and saved an estimated $225.8 million. A Scam Center Strike Force that combines the DOJ, FBI, Secret Service, State Department and Treasury’s OFAC targets the Southeast Asian compounds.
According to Reuters, Trump and his sons have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while the investors they courted have absorbed a $2.3 billion hit.
In October 2025, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder convicted after the exchange pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.
Democrats in Congress have accused the Trump family of using the presidency to enrich itself through its crypto ventures, a charge the White House rejects.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said that “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
This post President Trump to Highlight Crackdown on Overseas Crypto Scams first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
© Getty Images/aelitta
The United States is now sending Ukraine only 12 Patriot air defense interceptors a month, about a quarter of what Kyiv received under President Joe Biden, and is holding back some missiles Ukraine has already paid for, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. Zelenskyy made the comments in an interview with Bloomberg in Kyiv published on Oct. […]
© The Associated Press
Microsoft committed $10 million to President Trump’s White House ballroom project, and Amazon and T-Mobile each chipped in $5 million, according to an internal donor list obtained by the Washington Post and reported by the newspaper Thursday morning.
The commitments are drawing scrutiny because the ballroom donations aren’t subject to campaign finance limits or disclosure requirements. The money goes through a nonprofit, the Trust for the National Mall, into a White House account the president directly controls.
Of the $333 million raised so far, the vast majority came from companies and wealthy people with interests before the federal government, the Post found, raising concerns among experts that companies could be buying influence with the administration, or feeling pressured to give.
The White House publicly named Microsoft, Amazon and T-Mobile among the ballroom’s donors last October but didn’t disclose the amounts. Other donors asked to keep their names out of it entirely, the Post found, including a subsidiary of mortgage lender Rocket, which committed $10 million weeks after a federal agency approved its acquisition of Mr. Cooper.
The Seattle-area companies have a wide range of dealings with the government as suppliers, regulated businesses and targets of federal scrutiny. Microsoft and Amazon are two of the federal government’s largest technology providers, and T-Mobile requires regulatory approval across its business, from wireless spectrum to acquisitions.
Amazon is facing an FTC antitrust trial next year, focused on its treatment of third-party sellers on its online marketplace. The FTC and 22 states also sued Amazon in August, accusing it of rigging ad auctions to overcharge advertisers.
Microsoft is at odds with Vice President JD Vance and the Labor Department over claims that the company laid off American workers while sponsoring foreign workers for permanent residency, leading the department to suspend the company from the program.
Apple and Nvidia were among the top contributors at $25 million each, according to the list of 67 donations above $10,000. Microsoft’s $10 million puts it in the next tier with Palantir and Lockheed Martin, while Amazon and T-Mobile joined Meta, Cisco and ServiceNow at $5 million.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Post that the donors are “a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company didn’t have a comment beyond what has been publicly reported. We’ve contacted Amazon and T-Mobile for comment.
© AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
On Thursday, Donald Trump called off the Pentagon’s highly controversial plans to livestream a firing squad execution that is still on schedule for December 3.
Trump supports the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 others in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood. But sources close to Trump told CNN that the president was blindsided last week when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the event—which is the first US execution of a soldier since World War II—would be livestreamed.
Backlash to the livestream was immediate and crossed political divides. On the morning Trump canceled the plans, an ABC News poll found 8 in 10 Americans were against the livestream, including a 55 percent majority of MAGA Republicans.
© Chip Somodevilla / Staff | Getty Images News
Following a string of incidents where AI models hacked websites and breached government systems during testing phases, the Federal Trade Commission is officially probing Anthropic and OpenAI over consumer harms, an insider told Axios.
On Wednesday, the FTC sent out civil investigative demands seeking a wide range of information from the AI firms on recent safety incidents.
The FTC did not respond to Ars’ request to review the subpoena demands. However, Axios’ source said the requests spanned more than 50 pages of questions and sought documents related to the incidents, internal security measures taken, and marketing materials that may suggest consumers were misled.
© Tom Williams / Contributor | CQ-Roll Call, Inc.
© Amelia Brust/Federal News Network
Trump commercials paid for by the US government continued airing on TV the day after a judge blocked the ads because they likely violate a US law against government-funded publicity or propaganda.
In the most widely aired commercial, Trump railed against his perceived enemies and said he would "liberate America from these villains once and for all.” The campaign also included a commercial praising Trump's record as president, another in which Trump calls the US the "most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history," and commercials related to the Iran war and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
US District Judge Jennifer Rochon issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking the ads on Sunday, October 11, which took effect at 6:45 pm that night. The order said the government must cancel the ads, "including those placements for the evening of October 11, 2026."
This week, we take the GeekWire Podcast to Front Burner Studios in Seattle, where we’re hosted by studio co-owner Seth Paul, who’s co-founder and CEO of security startup Qinsay.
We discuss the White House crackdown on Microsoft’s green-card sponsorships, which Vice President JD Vance announced just hours before President Trump awarded Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. We talk about the contrast, and about how Nadella himself traveled that same path from H-1B visa to U.S. citizenship.
We also look at how Seattle-area startups raised a record $3.5 billion, driven largely by companies building physical things like rockets and satellites.
That leads us to Shield AI’s plans to build AI-piloted fighter jets in Des Moines, Wash., where a city FAQ assures residents the facility is not a data center.
After we catch up on the news, Seth joins us to tells us about the studio, including the vintage console he drove from Detroit, and how he brings a musician’s approach to the startup world.
And in the final segment, it’s the return of the GeekWire Trivia Challenge.
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