Silicon Valley has built its reputation on seeing the future, yet many of its leaders recently appeared to misread the political landscape. Five weeks before the midterms, a group of tech executives gathered at the White House to pose with President Trump and endorse his artificial intelligence agenda, despite growing public opposition to AI and data centers. Critics, including former Square executive Aaron Zamost, argue that tying their companies so closely to the president was a serious miscalculation. The move has not only put some firms’ prospects at risk but also raised doubts about the judgment and foresight of the industry’s most prominent voices.
Meanwhile, Nvidia has reportedly told Illinois Democrat Bill Foster that it is technically possible to implement the anti-smuggling measures proposed in the Chip Security Act. Foster, a cosponsor of the bill, says the company’s private assurances contrast with an industry group’s public claim that such tracking may be infeasible. The legislation would require geotracking to verify the location of advanced AI chips and help prevent their diversion to China. The debate has gained fresh attention following the resignation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, with Colette Kress serving as interim chief executive.
Elsewhere in technology news, a major Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, and Copilot worldwide, forcing some traders to fall back on phone and fax. Researchers continue to advance brain-computer interfaces, and volunteers in implant trials are pushing for greater rights, including access to their own neural data. Separately, advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against several frontier AI labs, and Norway is building what will become the world’s longest and deepest subsea road tunnel beneath the North Sea.
Source: The Download: Silicon Valley’s blind spot and Nvidia’s chip-tracking plan via MIT Technology Review