New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order pausing new discretionary environmental permits for data centers that require at least 50 megawatts of power. The pause can remain in effect for up to a year while state agencies develop consistent standards for the facilities’ energy, water, and air impacts.
The order is narrower than a separate bill passed by the legislature, which would cover projects from 20 megawatts and remains unsigned. Hochul’s office had not determined how many proposed data centers the order would affect.
Featured source: The Verge , Axios .
Other Stories
General Fusion Begins Nasdaq Trading After a Reverse Merger
General Fusion began trading under the ticker GFUZ after completing its merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III, becoming the first publicly listed company focused solely on fusion power. The company says it holds about $150 million in cash after a $108 million private placement and the de-SPAC transaction, but the trust contribution has not been disclosed and commercially viable fusion remains unproven.
Filed from: TechCrunch .
Bun Merges a Million-Line Zig-to-Rust Rewrite Produced With Claude Workflows
Bun creator Jarred Sumner says about 50 dynamic Claude Code workflows rewrote the JavaScript runtime and toolchain from Zig to Rust over 11 days, producing a merged diff of more than one million lines. Bun reports that the work cost roughly $165,000 at API pricing and passed its cross-platform test suite, while Zig creator Andrew Kelley argues that the existing tests do not substitute for human review; the rewrite is in the main branch but not yet a versioned release.
Filed from: Bun , Andrew Kelley .
Apple Alleges a Former Engineer Exploited an Authentication Bug
Apple’s federal complaint says former systems electrical engineer Chang Liu retained repository access after leaving for OpenAI, exploited what Apple calls a rare authentication bug, and downloaded dozens of confidential hardware files. The allegations have not been tested in court, OpenAI denies interest in other companies’ trade secrets, and Apple has not disclosed technical details of the bug or its credential-decommissioning timeline.
Filed from: TechCrunch , Complaint .
HCLTech Commits Up to ₹3,500 Crore to AI Data Centers
HCLTech announced an investment of up to ₹3,500 crore through new subsidiaries to establish AI data centers with potential capacity of 50 megawatts. The company plans to combine the facilities with its cloud, DevOps, software, and data-center operations, but has not disclosed their sites, construction schedule, or energy arrangements.
Filed from: HCLTech .
PsiQuantum Details Its Photonic Architecture Ahead of a Scale-Up Test
PsiQuantum is building a photonic quantum-computing system around GlobalFoundries chips, single-photon detectors cooled to roughly 2 kelvin, and optical links between cabinets. Its proposed million-qubit machine does not yet exist: the company’s 2027 “operational” target means its Australian facility should be ready for hardware, not that a full-scale computer will already be running.
Filed from: MIT Technology Review , PsiQuantum .
Tracebit Tests Defensive Prompt Injections Against AI Hacking Agents
Tracebit planted short strings in decoy AWS secrets to trigger model safety controls and interrupt autonomous attack agents. Across 152 runs involving five models in a custom cyber range, the company says the decoys reduced successful attack objectives by roughly 90%; the results do not establish effectiveness against production attacks, varied by model and wording, and deliberately rely on prompt injection rather than eliminating it.
Filed from: Tracebit Research , Ars Technica .
FCC Clears a Prototype Space Mirror for Launch
The Federal Communications Commission authorized Reflect Orbital to build, launch, and operate Eärendil-1, a low-Earth-orbit demonstrator with an 18-meter reflector intended to direct sunlight onto selected areas after dark. The authorization covers one prototype rather than the company’s proposed 50,000-satellite constellation, which has drawn concerns about astronomy, light pollution, wildlife, and aviation.
Filed from: The Verge , Reflect Orbital .
PixVerse Says Its Series C Funding Reached $439 Million
AI video company PixVerse announced that a Series C extension brought the round’s total to $439 million, with plans to expand its real-time world-model work into games, interactive livestreaming, and virtual hosting. The funding total comes from the company; TechCrunch reports that PixVerse told it the financing lifted the private company's valuation above $2 billion.
Filed from: TechCrunch , PixVerse .
From the Community
JetBrains Opens YouTrackDB as an Object-Oriented Graph Database
JetBrains has published YouTrackDB as an Apache-2.0-licensed project, describing it as a general-purpose object-oriented graph database already used internally in production. The Java database supports ACID transactions, snapshot isolation, native graph relations, Gremlin and TinkerPop, and a SQL-derived query language called YQL.
Filed from: YouTrackDB repository .
An Experimental Agent Learns to Train Other Models With Reinforcement Learning
An open-source experiment trained an outer agent to write and submit reinforcement-learning jobs for smaller models, using Tinker for the trainer and prime-rl on rented GPUs for the inner runs. The author reports that reward increased from about zero to 0.63 over 54 steps and transferred to a held-out task family, but the work is an individual experiment whose results may not generalize.
Filed from: Project repository , Model .
