Texas has stopped connecting new data centers to its grid. The order came from Governor Greg Abbott in late August, and ERCOT acted within hours, suspending the study process that developers had been waiting on. The Public Utility Commission now has to audit what is sitting in the queue before anything else moves. What’s in the queue is the story. Requests from data centers and other large loads have gone from roughly 48 gigawatts in 2023 to more than 474 gigawatts.

De Nederlandsche Bank shifted more than a quarter of its gold out of American vaults and into London between March and August. The bank confirmed it this week and gave a reason: rising geopolitical unrest. The official justification is that Bank of England bullion is the most tradable in the world and therefore the most readily available if a crisis breaks. That reason is true and also incomplete, which is normal for central bank communication.

G20 governments met in Chapel Hill this month and endorsed a set of AI policy principles backed by Washington. They’re non-binding. They favour rules written for particular uses over rules written for the technology itself, and they lean on cooperation between governments and industry. The name attached to them is the Carolina Principles. What they don’t do is create a universal regulatory regime, and that omission is the substance of the agreement.

Microsoft spent the first of September restoring 365 after an outage that took down Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot at the same time. Mail flow came back before search did. Users kept hitting failures across several services well after the headline recovery. The cause was a configuration problem in a core authentication component shared by all of them. That single sentence is the entire lesson, and it’s worth sitting with rather than filing under bad day at the office.

Every announcement of a new AI campus leads with megawatts. Power is the number that gets negotiated in public, fought over at the utility commission, and quoted in the analyst note. It’s also the constraint that money can eventually solve, because you can build generation, sign a nuclear offtake, or put turbines on the site. Water is harder, and it decides more siting arguments than the public record suggests. A large data center running evaporative cooling can consume millions of litres a day at full load.

You smell it before you find it. Walk up Rua do Loreto from Praça Luís de Camões and somewhere around number 49 the air turns to smoke and chicken fat, and there is the grill, sitting right in the window, glass smeared with grease and the cook’s back to the street. That window is the whole argument. Casa da Índia does not hide the kitchen behind a swing door. The fire is the shopfront.

Nike’s removal from the S&P 100 on September 21 has put a number back in circulation that deserves more scrutiny than it is getting. The company has shed roughly 80% of its market capitalisation since November 2021, somewhere near $215 billion depending on whether you measure against the closing high of $169.74 or an intraday print. The interesting part is what did not happen alongside it. Fiscal 2022 revenue, the year containing the peak, was $46.

The photograph is CeBIT, Hanover, 2015. A suspended ring of blue neon the size of a small building, two levels of stand, screens promising to depict the future of a city with technologies, and a crowd thick enough that people are shuffling rather than walking. This was ZTE at full extension: a Chinese vendor buying floor space in Germany at the scale of a national pavilion, on the assumption that it would be selling infrastructure to European carriers for the next twenty years.

Four women in blue and red robes stand barefoot on a wooden stage in front of a carved stone relief panel, mid-sequence in an Okinawan dance. In the bottom third of the frame, a hand rises out of the dark auditorium holding a phone, and on the phone screen the same four women appear again, about three centimetres tall, lit and rendered by a computational photography pipeline that has never seen this dance before.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering another broad round of semiconductor tariffs, potentially extending beyond chips themselves to laptops, gaming consoles and, most importantly, servers used in AI data centers. The proposal could also tie tariff exemptions to companies’ commitments to invest in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. Importantly, this is still a proposal rather than a finalized policy, but the direction is clear. The problem is that tariffs cannot manufacture chips. They can only make imported chips and the products built around them more expensive.