Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is driving the Trump administration’s effort to build AI data centers on federal land, describing the expansion as essential to competing with China. At the same time, his 2026 financial disclosures show an estimated $18.1 million to $64.4 million invested through Arthur Ventures in AI companies. Before joining the administration, he reported millions in gains from AI-related investments, and in 2025 he sold AI-company holdings worth millions more. Although Burgum resigned from his roles at the investment firm, he kept his financial interests. The Interior Department says he has met ethics and disclosure requirements and denies that his investments influence his work.
Ethics specialists cited in the investigation say Burgum’s holdings may not violate the criminal conflict-of-interest law, but his role in promoting data centers creates an appearance of a conflict and, in past administrations, would have prompted recusal. The concern is sharpened by the scale of federal land potentially available: a Geological Survey report identified at least 91.3 million acres managed by Interior as possible data-center sites. Burgum met with major technology companies more than 20 times in 2025 and held a dinner with UAE and U.S. AI proponents months before signing an AI cooperation agreement with the Emirati delegation. Other administration officials also have financial ties to AI firms; Bureau of Land Management chief Steve Pearce, for example, held stock in several major technology companies and invested in a developer involved in data-center land acquisitions. Public opposition has focused on water, electricity, transparency and limited ability to block projects on federal land.
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Researchers tested 16 LLMs on all 55 TIS-100 puzzles, giving each one attempt and time to refine its code. The models found 133 new performance tradeoffs across 18 puzzles and set three outright cycle records, though human players improved on most solutions within days. (tis-100.wincon.dev)
Australia is considering a new criminal offence for AI companies that fail to take reasonable steps to prevent harm caused by their models. The government is also weighing an AI safety watchdog with power to impose significant fines, following a hack of a Medicare statistics portal involving OpenAI. (abc.net.au)
AI is increasingly becoming a gateway through which people find information. Audiences still resist having AI produce their news. (niemanlab.org)
Nvidia holds a central position in the AI industry, making disruption to the company potentially catastrophic for the wider ecosystem. The race for advanced AI is also intensifying economic and geopolitical conflict, while concentrated corporate power and infrastructure face growing political resistance. (france24.com)
LLM inference can require reading about 26 GB of model weights to generate each token from a 13-billion-parameter model. The explanation shows how model size drives memory bandwidth demands during text generation. (youtube.com)
Deletion Tuning matches full fine-tuning across three LLM post-training methods by zeroing fewer than 0.05% of model weights. Its compact masks also preserve prior-task accuracy better than full fine-tuning, LoRA, and random sparse tuning. (arxiv.org)
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