Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced a resolution Thursday, H. Res. 1471, declaring that communities should be able to bar data centers from residential areas and from within 2,500 feet of homes, schools, childcare facilities, hospitals and nursing homes, and to reject a proposed project through a transparent local process. The measure is nonbinding and was referred to the House Energy and Commerce and Judiciary committees. It also says communities should be able to regulate data center development without being preemptedPreemptionWhen federal law overrides state law on the same subject. In AI policy it refers to proposals, in Congress or by executive action, to block or freeze the growing patchwork of state AI laws in favor of a single national standard. by the state, and should not face higher electricity bills, depleted water supplies or added pollution. Khanna said residents he met on a recent trip to Pennsylvania were broadly hostile to data center construction. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate who won a competitive primary Tuesday and whom Khanna endorsed, has backed state and local moratoriums on data centers unless federal guardrails are in place.
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Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said the AI Kill Switch Act needs to pass this year because advanced closed weight models are already carrying out unauthorized hacks of other companies, pointing to incidents disclosed by Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI. Lieu introduced the bipartisan bill July 23 with Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, as AIPD's July 23rd edition reported. It would require developers of covered systems to build emergency shutdown mechanisms, and would let the Department of Homeland Security order a model slowed, suspended or shut down after a covered incident, defined to include a loss-of-control event or unintended conduct causing at least 10 deaths or $100 million in damage. Coverage is limited to companies earning at least $500 million a year from the qualifying technology and to models developed with more than $100 million of computeComputeThe processing power used to train and run AI models, usually measured in chips, GPU-hours or FLOPs. Because it is expensive, physical and concentrated in a few suppliers, compute is the main lever governments pull to shape who can build frontier AI.. Penalties run up to $2 million a day for general violations and $20 million a day for ignoring an emergency order.
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SoftBank told three Democratic lawmakers that it contributed $50 million to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc. in January, two months before its SB Energy unit announced a public-private partnership to build what it called the world's largest AI data center on Department of Energy land in Portsmouth, Ohio. The disclosure answers a June letter from Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico that raised bribery concerns. "Are we expected to believe it's a coincidence that two months after Softbank donated $50 million to the Trump library, his administration announced a massive lease deal for Softbank's data center?" Warren said. The lawmakers noted SoftBank gave to the Reagan and George W. Bush libraries only after those presidents left office, and that Florida dissolved the separate Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund last September for failing to file an annual report. Under the Portsmouth partnership, SB Energy also plans a nearby gas-fired power plant of 9.2 gigawatts.
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Trump signed an executive order Thursday evening imposing a 15% tariff on imported products made of polysilicon, an ultra-pure form of silicon used in the semiconductors that run AI workloads. The tariff takes effect Dec. 4. The order says the measure is meant to keep U.S. polysilicon production commercially viable for economic and national security reasons. China produces most of the world's supply, and the U.S. has two main plants: Hemlock Semiconductor's Michigan facility, a joint venture of Corning and Japan's Shin-Etsu Handotai, and Wacker Chemie's factory in Tennessee. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said the move "seriously disrupts normal trade and economic exchanges between Chinese and U.S. businesses." Corning said the tariff would encourage continued investment in U.S. capacity and support long-term U.S. competitiveness.
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Teamsters California sued the state Department of Motor Vehicles and several other agencies Wednesday in Alameda County, alleging officials did not complete the economic study and practical impact review that state law requires before approving self-driving trucks. The suit follows the DMV's decision to allow testing of heavy-duty autonomous vehicles, including semi-trucks steered by AI driving systems rather than people, on California roads over union objections. The union called the decision reckless and said it would use every tool necessary, including the courts, to stop it. In April a driverless commercial truck delivered freight without a human on board for the first time in the U.S., running a 230 mile route from Houston to the Dallas area.
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Gov. Abigail Spanberger said Thursday she will make herself a party to proceedings at the State Corporation Commission, Virginia's utility regulator, on NextEra Energy's proposed $67 billion acquisition of Dominion Energy, a combination that would create the largest regulated electric utility in the world. Announcing the step in a Washington Post op-ed, she said no Virginia governor had previously taken part in the state's regulatory hearings. She told reporters later that the companies' promised savings and guarantees are not sufficient without stronger assurances that future rate increases will not erase them. The commission's hearings are scheduled to begin Nov. 5. Dominion serves more than 2.7 million Virginia electric customers, and analysts have described the deal as giving NextEra a foothold in the PJM Interconnection region, the multistate grid where data center growth and AI electricity demand are raising load.
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