Voters rejected data centers in 40 of 41 ballot measures this week1. Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer, says the company keeps building anyway2. Money and ballots are reading the same week differently.
Ten stories carried real weight this week. Three turn on money. Two turn on a vote. The rest show where researchers, regulators and rivals moved while the money kept flowing, whatever voters decided at the polls.
Voters Reject Data Centers, OpenAI Presses On
Ten states voted on data centers this week, and 40 of 41 measures rejected them1. Ohio alone carried 21 of those votes. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called the results a turning point. "The revolt against data centers was one of the top issues of the 2026 election," he said3.
Voters Added Data Center Limits in 40 of 41 Ballot Measures
Nov. 3, 2026 midterm ballot measures on data centers, by outcome, one cube per measure
Each cube is one ballot measure. Magenta cubes added a limit or restriction on data centers; the single gray cube, in Harwood, North Dakota, kept industrial projects free of new review.
Sources: Al Jazeera [1]; The Next Web [14]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Added a data center limit | 40 |
| Kept its existing review | 1 |
| Whole | 41 |
Sarah Friar heard the same results. She chose different words. OpenAI's chief financial officer told CNBC, "If the midterm means more focus on data centers and communities, we're going to keep doing the work to get into those communities and to build trust with them"2.
DeepMind's Agents Crack an Old Lock
Google DeepMind turned its own AI agents loose on old encryption this week4. The agents found a way to forge signatures 1,600 times faster than the previous method. Those forged signatures ride on 1024-bit RSA keys, a standard most companies stopped trusting years ago. A second trick cut the cost of factoring a whole batch of those same keys by 30 times, DeepMind said.
Modern 2048-bit keys stayed safe throughout the test. DeepMind's own reading is blunt. The hard math problem behind old RSA keys turned out softer than researchers once assumed.
Security teams now have weeks instead of years to find the next weak spot an agent can find first. The lab that spots a cryptographic weakness first also gets to publish the fix first.
Meta's Supercluster Trains Its First Model
Meta confirmed Prometheus, its Ohio supercluster, trained Muse Wonder, the company's first frontier model5.
IREN Delays Microsoft, Plans $15 Billion More
Microsoft's delivery from IREN slipped this week6. The delay traces to a network design change at IREN's Childress, Texas site. IREN still plans to spend $15 billion more before the end of its current fiscal year. Shares in IREN, Nebius and CoreWeave all fell the same day, on investor worry that other delays would follow.
Eminem's Publisher and Elvis Sue Suno
Eight Mile Style sued Suno for more than $41 million this week, the Detroit Free Press reported7. The publisher controls the rights to 269 Eminem songs, built over a career that began in Detroit. Elvis Presley's estate filed its own suit the same week, saying Suno lets fans clone his voice. Suno already blocks prompts that name an artist, but Eight Mile Style says fans route around that filter with style terms instead.
Suno raised money in June at a $5.4 billion valuation7. Two lawsuits in one week now test how much of that value rests on music the publishers call unlicensed.
Muse Learns to Talk Back
Meta rolled out real-time voice and an expressive avatar for Muse across the United States this week8. A user can interrupt the avatar mid-sentence. It reacts with its own expressions while it listens. Meta plans to bring the same voice to its AI glasses next.
The feature runs on mobile, web and Mac, with hundreds of voice choices. A viewer can keep the avatar beside the chat or switch to a full screen. Meta's own engineers call the voice and the avatar one streaming system. A single model carries both the words and the delivery.
Colorado's Law Meets the Task Force
The Justice Department's challenge to Colorado persists, after a lighter law replaced its AI Act in May9.
Netflix's Dubbing Actor Finds His Voice Cloned
Matti Klemm dubs Jason Momoa and Mahershala Ali into German. He says Netflix trained AI systems on his voice, skipping his consent and his pay10. His union, the Association of German Voice Artists, backed his claim this week. "We urgently need a precedent because this affects the entire creative industry," Klemm said.
Netflix says its AI use follows the law. Klemm's case tests that claim in a German court.
Two Anthropic Staffers Land at OpenAI
Anthropic lost two Claude Code staffers to OpenAI within a day of each other this week11. Austin Lau built Anthropic's growth function alone for nearly ten months. Cat Wu led product for Claude Code before her move, and will now run product for OpenAI's core tools. Four people have posted similar exits from Anthropic since Oct. 24, as its IPO timeline slips.
austin lau@helloitsaustinlots of news breaking these days so I may as well sneak mine in if anyone cares and share that I recently joined @OpenAI 🫡
my time at Anthropic was a fever dream in the best way possible. got to help build the growth function, work alongside some really really talented people,…
Lau called his time at Anthropic "a fever dream in the best way possible" on X12. His next line named the one thing OpenAI's kitchen beats: the snacks.
Gemini Gets a Longer, Cheaper Video Clip
Google's Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash became generally available this week13. Clips now run 15 seconds, up from 10. The price for a 720p clip fell 30 percent, to about seven cents a second. Anyone with a Google account can use it inside Google Vids free of charge.
What to watch
Watch whether Goldman Sachs is right that these pauses prove short-lived. Chief economist Jan Hatzius says, "The states where Democrats are likely to further restrict data centers account for roughly 45% of planned US data center capacity, with Texas alone accounting for roughly 25%"14. Goldman still expects most of that delayed spending to land in 2027.
Goldman Sees 45 Percent of Planned U.S. Data Center Capacity at Risk
Share of planned U.S. data center capacity in states likely to restrict construction, per Goldman Sachs
The magenta ring is the share of planned capacity sitting in states likely to slow data centers down; the rest of the ring keeps building on schedule.
Source: The Next Web [14]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| States likely to pause construction | 45% |
| Whole | 100% |
Congress carries the next test. Casar and his allies want AI executives testifying under oath once Democrats take the House in January3. The next ballot test comes whenever a state next puts the same question to its own voters again. Each side already expects that fight.
Sources
- Andy Hirschfeld, "How the US midterm elections reflected resistance to data centres," Al Jazeera, Nov. 7, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/11/7/how-the-us-midterm-elections-reflected-resistance-to-data-centres
- "OpenAI will keep investing in AI data centers despite election results, CFO tells CNBC," CNBC, Nov. 6, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/06/open-ai-data-centers-election.html
- Solange Reyner, "Casar, Markey Put AI Executives on Notice After Dem Sweep," Newsmax, Nov. 4, 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/casar-markey-put-ai-executives-174945782.html
- "1,600x faster: Google DeepMind agents expose weaknesses in older encryption methods," Interesting Engineering, Nov. 6, 2026, https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/google-deepmind-agents-expose-older-encryption-flaws
- "New Albany: where Ohio's community spirit meets the frontier of AI," Meta, Oct. 20, 2026, https://datacenters.atmeta.com/2026/10/new-albany-where-ohios-community-spirit-meets-the-frontier-of-ai/
- "AI data center firm IREN delays Microsoft AI deliveries, plans $15 billion spending push," Reuters, Nov. 5, 2026, https://www.centraloregondaily.com/news/consumer/iren-tops-quarterly-revenue-estimates-delays-some-microsoft-ai-infrastructure-deliveries/article_c43f1a31-e941-5a3f-a465-11fde19d9f0f.html
- Gennaro Cuofano, "Eminem's Publisher Seeks $41M From Suno Over 269 Songs," FourWeekMBA, Nov. 7, 2026, https://fourweekmba.com/ai-eminems-publisher-seeks-41m-from-suno-over-269-songs/
- Rhea Solis, "Meta Brings Real-Time Voice and Expressive Avatars to Muse," Unite.AI, Nov. 5, 2026, https://www.unite.ai/meta-brings-real-time-voice-and-expressive-avatars-to-muse/
- Stefani Langehennig, "Why Colorado replaced its AI discrimination law with a transparency requirement that the feds might challenge anyway," The Conversation, July 9, 2026, https://theconversation.com/why-colorado-replaced-its-ai-discrimination-law-with-a-transparency-requirement-that-the-feds-might-challenge-anyway-286517
- "Voice actor plans to sue Netflix over use of his voice in AI training," Yahoo Entertainment, Nov. 3, 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/voice-actor-plans-sue-netflix-181841904.html
- "Anthropic Marketer Austin Lau Says He Is Joining OpenAI," TokenPost, Nov. 5, 2026, https://www.tokenpost.com/news/people/49824
- Austin Lau, post on X, Nov. 5, 2026, https://x.com/helloitsaustin/status/2118161804463595931
- "Google Launches Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash: 15-Sec AI Videos & 30% Price Cut," NPowerUser, Nov. 5, 2026, https://nokiapoweruser.com/google-launches-gemini-omni-1-2-flash-for-longer-cheaper-ai-videosseo/
- "Data centres lost 40 of 41 US ballot votes as Democrats swept Texas," The Next Web, Nov. 5, 2026, https://thenextweb.com/news/data-centres-us-midterms-ballot-measures
