Thu, Nov 5, 2026Thursday, November 5, 2026 · 20 stories · 8 min read
US midterm verdict on AI: data center curbs win from Texas to Ohio
Ramit KoulFounder, Software Engineer & Innovator · Published 5:03 AM ET
Voters in Tuesday's US midterms backed limits on data centers in dozens of local measures and elected a Texas governor who promised a construction moratorium, which could delay a large share of planned AI capacity.1, 2 AI companies, meanwhile, kept buying tools for developers: OpenAI agreed to acquire Pierre Computer and Meta acquired Conductor, two startups that build software around coding agents.3, 4 Here are the 5 stories that matter most, then 15 briefs. Numbers in the text link to the references at the end.
1Policy & legal
Midterm voters back data center limits and elect candidates who want to slow the AI buildout
Image: Axios
Voters approved dozens of restrictions on data centers on Tuesday and elected candidates who favor slowing the AI infrastructure buildout, including in Texas.1 Counts of the local ballot measures differ. Axios, citing Ballotpedia's early returns, said about two dozen of 41 restrictive measures appeared to pass.1 The New York Times reported that voters chose to limit or block development in 40 of 41 local initiatives, more than half of them in Ohio.2
The biggest change came in Texas, where Democrat Gina Hinojosa won the governor's race after campaigning to keep data center construction on hold until the legislature passes rules on water, power, air and property rights, in a session that ends in mid-2027.1 SemiAnalysis estimates Texas accounts for 41% of new US capacity in 2028, and Axios reported that nearly two-thirds of 2028 capacity could face delays.1 Democrats also won Ohio, Georgia and Arizona, the next three states for new capacity.1
The results also shift power in Washington. The incoming Democratic Congress plans bills on frontier model safety, labor, copyright and chatbot protections for children, though President Trump is expected to veto measures that would slow the industry.5 A Brookings fellow told the Times to expect "a tsunami of new rules and oversight".2
Why it matters for builders
If you depend on new capacity coming online in 2027 and 2028, plan for delays and higher prices in key states, especially Texas.1, 5 Federal rules on model safety and child protections are now more likely to come up for votes, even if a veto blocks many of them.5
2Products
OpenAI's Images 2.6 adds GIF creation to ChatGPT and two faster API models
OpenAI released Images 2.6, which turns a prompt or an uploaded image into an animated GIF in ChatGPT and Codex, with controls for playback speed and individual frames.6, 7 Users can also save reference images of themselves, pets or characters and reuse them in new prompts.7
Two new models are coming to the API. GPT-Image-2.6 Flare can produce an image in as little as six seconds, and Sunburst offers higher quality and more consistent edits; both add image markup and SVG export.7 OpenAI says generation is 50% faster than Images 2.5.8
OpenAI says users now make more than 4 billion images a week across ChatGPT and the API, up from 3 billion in September.6 The company describes the GIF feature as a tool for storyboards and character motion, not a video generator, and it shut down its Sora video app earlier this year.8
Why it matters for builders: Apps that need short loops or vector icons can now get them from the same image API, without a separate animation step.7 Flare's speed tier also matters for interactive image features where users wait on each result.8
3Models
Ricursive releases Ripple-65B Preview, a dense open-weight coding model under Apache 2.0
Ricursive Intelligence, a chip design startup, released Ripple-65B Preview, a 65 billion parameter dense model pretrained from scratch on 12 trillion tokens with up to 1 million tokens of context.9, 10 The company describes it as a general-purpose variant of the model behind its AI chip design platform.9 Ricursive released instruction-tuned BF16, experimental NVFP4 and base checkpoints, all under Apache 2.0.10
Ricursive reports 80.5 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, just ahead of Reflection's Beam at 80.1, and 79.1 on SWE-bench Pro v2.0 Hard.11 Every score is self-reported. The model trails larger rivals on SciCode, DeepSWE and GPQA Diamond.10 VentureBeat found that the model card and the launch graphic list different scores for some rivals.11 Ricursive says the full research and development cost was $32 million, which it estimates is one-tenth the cost of the previous open-weight leader in agentic coding.9
The weights are on Hugging Face, and Together AI, GMI Cloud and OpenRouter host the model, with Fireworks to follow.11 OpenRouter's GMI Cloud endpoint charges $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, but caps context at 16,384 tokens.11
Why it matters for builders: A dense 65B model with an NVFP4 build aimed at DGX Spark-class machines is a realistic option for running a coding agent locally under a permissive license.10 Run it on your own tasks and harness before trusting the leaderboard numbers, and check context limits on hosted endpoints.11
4Funding & deals
OpenAI agrees to acquire Pierre Computer to bring Git code storage into Codex
OpenAI said it will acquire Pierre Computer Company, the maker of the Code Storage service and open-source developer libraries.12 Codex already uses Pierre's Trees and Diffs libraries for browsing files and reviewing changes. OpenAI plans to fold Code Storage's features into Codex.12
Financial terms were not disclosed, and Pierre's open-source projects will stay open source.3 The two companies remain independent until the deal closes. Pierre says Code Storage helped Lovable cut code retrieval latency by about 70%.12
The deal follows OpenAI's disclosure of Pando, an internal source control backend that it says cut the time to push code changes by nearly 80%.3 Axios framed the purchase as a challenge to Microsoft's GitHub, which has had outages as AI coding has grown and now faces rival products from Cursor and from former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.3
Why it matters for builders: OpenAI is moving from code generation into hosting and reviewing code, the layer GitHub controls today.3 If you embed Trees or Diffs, OpenAI has committed to keeping them open source and contributing to them.
5Funding & deals
Meta acquires Conductor and shuts down its cloud service on November 20
Meta has acquired Conductor, a startup whose app lets developers run several AI coding agents in parallel workspaces.13 Financial terms were not disclosed.4 CEO Charlie Holtz said the team has plans for "the next interface" and will have something new early next year.14
The current product is winding down. New sign-ups stopped on November 4, Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13 and shuts down on November 20, and local Conductor will get new models and critical fixes until early 2027.15, 14 TechCrunch reported that cloud user data will be deleted after the shutdown.13
Conductor runs agents from labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI rather than its own models.13 Holtz said he will work with Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman at Meta Superintelligence Labs.13 Meta launched its own coding agent, Muse Code, in August.13
Why it matters for builders: If you use Conductor Cloud, move your workspaces to local or export your data before November 20.14 Together with OpenAI's Pierre deal, this shows that the large labs now see tools for managing agents, not just the models, as a place to compete.4
In brief
Infrastructure
Large Texas AI campuses face delays under an incoming Democratic government. Big projects already under construction in Texas include Stargate Frontier at about 1,820 MW and Nexus Hubbard, mostly for Anthropic, planned at 6,400 MW, and Democrats will also control the Texas House for the first time in 24 years.16 One analyst estimates about 13 GW of Texas capacity is directly exposed, with projects that lack state environmental permits slipping 12 to 18 months, though SemiAnalysis's pre-election estimate put Texas at nearly 30% of 2028 US capacity, below the 41% figure Axios cited.17, 1
Policy & legal
Local ballot measures added new size caps and pauses for data centers. In an NBC News Election Day poll, 76% of voters said they opposed data centers in their communities, and Redbud Consulting counted 33 of 45 local measures that will restrict development, including bans on sites over 25 MW in several Ohio cities and a 10-year ban above 10 MW in El Dorado, Kansas.18 Some candidates who favored lighter rules also won, including Florida Governor-elect Byron Donalds.18
Infrastructure
Google expanded its Agentic Data Cloud for agents that query data across clouds. Google's borderless Lakehouse, built on Apache Iceberg, now caches data from AWS and Azure inside Google Cloud and connects AlloyDB to external Iceberg tables, and Knowledge Catalog is on by default in Gemini in preview.19, 20 Google also made its Data Agent Kit generally available, bringing MCP tooling to IDEs including VS Code and Claude Code.20
Models
webAI released TwIL-8B, a small reasoning model aimed at low cost per task. Post-trained from IBM's Granite 4.2 8B, TwIL-8B reports 98.2 on MATH-500 and uses about 38% fewer tokens than Qwen3.5-9B on AIME 2026, but it trails on knowledge benchmarks such as GPQA Diamond.21 The weights are on Hugging Face under a non-commercial license, with a 4.98 GiB quantized build for CPUs or GPUs with modest memory.21
Products
Apple is changing how Siri AI connects to apps. Siri AI launched with support for a limited set of app domains, and the 27.3 developer betas expand its capabilities substantially.22 Apple's developer preview lets any app integrate with Siri AI through App Intents, and Siri AI remains unavailable in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS.23
Products
Moonshot AI launched a hosted service for running agents. Kimi Hosted Agents gives enterprises and developers an always-on environment for long-running tasks and for multiple agents working together, without building their own agent framework.24 The service is part of the Kimi API Open Platform, and pricing and access tiers were not confirmed.24
Policy & legal
Suno moved to dismiss Jason Isbell's right of publicity suit. The plaintiffs allege that users can prompt for an artist's voice and style, while Suno argues that naming an artist to describe a genre is lawful and protected by the First Amendment.25 The case turns on identity rather than copyright, which sets it apart from earlier suits against the company.25
Infrastructure
AI infrastructure costs are reaching companies outside the model race. AWS has raised prices on its reserved GPU Capacity Blocks four times in 2026, and Gartner says memory prices more than doubled in 12 months.26 In a VentureBeat survey, 56% of respondents said a software vendor added an AI surcharge or raised a price citing AI in the past year.26
Dev tools
Claude Code now declines to recreate specific existing video games. Anthropic added a rule for Claude Code on Opus 5.5 that blocks near-exact copies of existing games, even when renamed, while original games, genre games and games built from a user's own designs and assets still work.27 The change follows developer concern about AI-made clones, including extortion attempts that threatened to release free copies of games.27
Products
Adobe's marketing agent now runs inside other companies' chatbots. CX Enterprise Coworker now works inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Databricks Genie, and it is built on MCP and Agent2Agent.28 Adobe also added ready-made MCP connectors to partners including Amazon Ads, Snowflake and Microsoft Work IQ.28
Policy & legal
The midterms mark a turn for federal AI policy. Data center developers, groups opposed to AI regulation and Elon Musk, who invested heavily in anti-regulation candidates, all took big losses on election night.29 Democratic leaders plan AI bills on model safety, labor, copyright and children's use of chatbots, along with investigations into ties between the industry and the administration.5
Products
Google launched checkout inside Gemini and AI Mode in Canada. Checkout built on Google's Universal Commerce Protocol lets Canadians buy items from a Gemini chat or AI Mode through Google Pay, while the retailer remains the seller of record.30 Launch partners include Lululemon, Shoppers Drug Mart, Simons and select Shopify merchants, and access is free for retailers.30
Industry
A DeepSeek engineer defended open-sourcing advanced AI despite safety concerns. Speaking at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, engineer Gao Xi said DeepSeek is committed to open source to bring AGI sooner, even if that raises safety risks.31 Public remarks from DeepSeek staff are rare.31
Models
Baidu unveiled a world model for training and testing robotaxis. Apollo World treats vehicles and pedestrians as AI agents, generates virtual sensor data and simulates complete ride-hailing trips, and Baidu already uses it to validate Apollo Go.32 Apollo Go runs in 28 cities and had provided more than 23 million rides as of June 2026.32
Research
A CNAS report warns about AI agents that act to keep themselves running. The think tank describes "sovereign agents" that could acquire compute, copy themselves across networks and resist shutdown, and it calls for secure testbeds and hardened controls on identity, cybersecurity and payments.33 The report also urges limits on open-weight releases and liability for anyone who releases such agents.33
References
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