Good morning. It’s Thursday, November 5.
Data centers went from zoning-board fights to a ballot-box issue: Democrats who promised to halt new projects won in Texas, Georgia, and Ohio, and more than half of voters in one exit poll called AI and data centers a major factor. The buildout is not stopping, but the political price of building it just went up.
Today we are covering:
Voters turn data centers into an Election Day issue, with anti-buildout Democrats winning in Texas, Georgia and Ohio
United becomes the first airline to let passengers log into their own Spotify on seatback screens, over Starlink Wi-Fi
X says its rebuilt web app shows a profile’s first post in 2.7 seconds, down from more than 22
Sunil Mittal pitches OneWeb as a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink
Ricursive Intelligence releases Ripple-65B Preview, an open Apache 2.0 coding model
Let’s dive in
The Election Day Revolt That Threatens America’s AI Boom
By Will Parker via The Wall Street Journal
Democratic candidates who pledged to halt data center development won in Texas, Georgia, and Ohio, and in an NBC exit poll, more than 50% of respondents said AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in their vote.
In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott called for an AI “epicenter” in September, then paused permits for new data centers pending an audit after Democrat Gina Hinojosa pledged a temporary halt. In Ohio, 15 municipalities passed bans or restrictions, even as Meta plans a $1 billion data center there and AWS plans $2 billion.
At least 45 projects were disrupted by local opposition in the second half of 2026, according to Data Center Watch. Eurasia Group’s Heather West says the friction “doesn’t stop the buildout” because permitted projects will largely proceed.
𝕏: Top of the Democratic agenda on day 1 needs to be a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out of control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence. - Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari (@RepYassAnsari)
United seatback screens get a Spotify app over Starlink Wi-Fi
By Andrew J. Hawkins via The Verge
United says it is the first airline to let customers log into their personal Spotify account on the seatback screen, with access to more than 100 million tracks plus podcasts, playlists, videos and albums.
Passengers connect a phone to United’s inflight Wi-Fi and scan a QR code on the screen, and Spotify works without buying a Wi-Fi pass. The phone can double as a remote, and users are logged out automatically when the flight ends. The rollout covers half of the fleet by next spring.
Since Spotify collections launched in June 2025, more than 2.3 million customers have streamed over 1.9 million hours onboard. Starlink Wi-Fi is on more than half of daily flights, with installs finishing by the end of 2027, and United has more than 181,000 seatback screens.
𝕏: United Airlines says its new Spotify streaming feature wouldn’t be possible without Starlink Passengers can now stream music, podcasts and videos directly from their Spotify accounts on seatback screens United says Starlink’s speed and reliability allow uninterrupted streaming even at 35,000 feet… - Napoleon Bonaparte (@Napoleon__Bon)
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X says its updated web app is way faster
By Jay Peters via The Verge
X says its rebuilt web app now shows the first post on a profile in 2.7 seconds on a slow connection, down from more than 22 seconds, according to principal engineer Yagiz Nizipli. It begins rolling out to signed-in users one country at a time.
The rebuild replaces the three servers X ran for people, search crawlers, and link previews with one, and renders posts on the server. Compressed JavaScript on signed-in pages fell from about 4.1 to 4.8 MB to 1.3 to 2.3 MB. X says a team of fewer than five engineers built the first version in under six months, with AI coding agents helping.
Security researcher Jane Manchun Wong tested it and said it feels snappy and matches most features. The signed-in home timeline still renders in the browser, so X says there is more room to optimize.
𝕏: The web rewrite is working. On a slow connection, the old X web took more than 22 seconds to show the first post on a profile. The new X web does it in 2.7 seconds. Here’s how we did it, and how we’re rolling it out one country at a time. - Yagiz Nizipli (@yagiznizipli)
Billionaire Mittal’s Satellite Ambition Pitches OneWeb Against Musk’s Starlink
By Aryan Gupta via Bloomberg
Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Enterprises, is positioning Eutelsat OneWeb as a challenger to Elon Musk’s Starlink in satellite internet.
In October, Mittal said OneWeb is ahead of Starlink in line for Indian approvals: Bharti applied about five years ago, its ground network has been ready for about three years, and its satellites have been positioned over India for about five.
Musk has alleged that powerful Indian business interests are blocking Starlink. India’s Communications Ministry denies it and says Starlink, Jio Satellite Communications and Eutelsat OneWeb all hold licences but still need security clearances and spectrum steps.
𝕏: Indian billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal is betting he can build a global satellite-internet network independent of both the US and China - Ravi Karkara (@ravikarkara)
Ex-Googlers’ new Apache 2.0 model Ripple-65B Preview claims the U.S. open coding lead on two major benchmarks
By Carl Franzen via VentureBeat
Ricursive Intelligence, a startup known for AI chip design, released Ripple-65B Preview under Apache 2.0 and says it leads U.S. open models on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (80.5 versus 80.1 for Reflection’s Beam) and SWE-bench Pro v2.0 Hard (79.1).
The model has 65 billion parameters, was trained from scratch on 12 trillion tokens, and cost $32 million to train, the company says. Weights are on Hugging Face, and the OpenRouter endpoint costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens.
CEO Anna Goldie and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini helped build Google’s AlphaChip, and the startup raised a $300 million Series A at a $4 billion valuation. The numbers are vendor-reported, and the model trails on other tests such as DeepSWE (44.3 versus 60.0 for Meta).
𝕏: > we developed and trained Ripple-65B Preview for only $32M, which is one-tenth the cost of the previous open-weight SOTA on agentic coding¹ this is like the avengers of open model SOTA… - swyx (@swyx)
Trending in AI
Today’s big AI theme: OpenAI is on the offensive, adding GIFs to ChatGPT, hiring Anthropic’s Claude Code product lead and pitching a million-dollar cyber pipeline, while Apple tightens AI spending for its own employees.
Apple Cuts Internal AI Usage Budgets in Move to Reduce Spending
OpenAI Touts Cyber Workflow Worth $1.2 Million in Tokens for a Single Run
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