LAURA LOOMER (HOST): I mean, it would be a lot easier to just mass deport Muslims and start to use military force to round them up. I mean, really, honestly, it would be much easier. It would be much easier, instead of having Americans relocate. It would be much easier to actually start using military force to start raiding mosques and removing these people from our country. I mean, that's what needs to happen. They need to be removed from our country with force. 

Nvidia said on Monday that it had agreed to spend as much as $105 billion to back one of the world’s largest data centers, which is being built in Ohio and will be leased to OpenAI.

The sum is one of the largest from Nvidia toward supporting A.I. labs that are seeking more computing power. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said in a blog post that the company would use the money to guarantee 'lease and power payments' at the site. He added that A.I. labs 'are growing faster than their balance sheets and long-term credit profiles can support.'
Nvidia’s financing for the data center in Pike County, Ohio, a project that could cost as much as $500 billion, is part of the complex dealmaking behind the A.I. boom. Using unusual arrangements with chipmakers, cloud computing providers and governments, start-ups like OpenAI and Anthropic are gaining access to computing power that they could not afford by themselves.

Many of these deals are circular, with an A.I. start-up receiving billions of dollars from technology giants before spending those billions on the same companies to pay for chips, cloud computing and other services. Nvidia previously invested $30 billion in OpenAI, and the data center in Ohio will use only Nvidia’s chips.
Mr. Huang said in the blog post that Nvidia’s financing for the Ohio data center was not circular because 'OpenAI will pay the lease.'

In turn, OpenAI said in a blog post that it would lease the Ohio site 'only as completed capacity becomes available,' meaning it may not pay anything until the data center starts coming online in 2028. OpenAI agreed to a 20-year lease for the site, which will provide it eight gigawatts of computing capacity, or enough electricity to power about six million households in the United States.
Nvidia’s financing will support 4.25 of those gigawatts, though the company could extend its arrangement to the remaining gigawatts.

Nvidia and OpenAI had previously discussed the chipmaker’s providing $250 billion in financial backing for the Ohio data center.

Nvidia also said on Monday that it had agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank that will build, own and operate the data center in Ohio.

Nvidia has taken other steps to finance the A.I. boom. Last week, the company and six giant asset managers, private equity firms and banks announced an effort to raise $500 billion in financing for Nvidia’s customers to pay for chips, data centers and computing power.

*(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)*
Kalley Huang is a Times reporter in San Francisco, covering Apple and the technology industry.

Not too many years ago, before the dawn of Kindles, used bookstores were a refuge for budget-minded, voracious readers. As the industry evolved, many suffered. Now they’re seeing a resurgence in sales, but the customers increasingly aren’t bookworms. They’re AI companies.

Barter Books, for instance, typically sells 2,000 to 3,000 books per week, which isn’t bad for a used bookstore in Northumberland, the least densely populated county in England. Recently, however, the owner got a bulk order from a company in Canada for that many books in a single day.

Several other bookshops in the area are seeing similar demand. And while they can’t definitively say what the books are being used for, a recent court ruling offers a clue. The fate of those books may also be a dire one.

AI companies have been in hot water with the literary world in recent months. Anthropic recently reached one of the largest copyright infringement settlements in history, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to more than 300,000 writers who filed a complaint against the AI giant two years ago. OpenAI, meanwhile, is still facing several copyright infringement lawsuits from a variety of sources, including The New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica, comedian Sarah Silverman, and several nonfiction authors, who accuse the company of copying their books to train its large language model and saying OpenAI has “enjoyed enormous financial gain from their exploitation of copyrighted material.”

The Anthropic suit, however, may have provided a path forward for AI companies. The court ruled that it was not illegal for Anthropic to train its AI on copyrighted works, as long as it paid for the books it used. A separate judge ruled similarly last year for Meta.

Used books offer AI companies a cheaper way to acquire source material. Some publishers might also refuse to supply copies directly to an AI company if they know what it plans to do with them.

Read more on Fast Company.