Good Wednesday morning! If you’re looking for two polar opposites among today’s AI newsmakers, you could do a lot worse than socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and trillionaire Elon Musk. With Mamdani now openly pushing his state’s governor to sign a data center moratorium bill, New York State could soon cement its status as one of the worst places in the country to try and build a data center.

Meanwhile, Musk’s booming data center business is the star of the SpaceX balance sheet. These two are like AI’s Mario and Bowser (assign “hero” and “villain” labels as you see fit).

→ AI looms large as SpaceX and Tesla officially mull merger
→ Amazon’s nuclear option
→ Mamdani will push for data center moratorium expansion

The news: AI is core to the business narratives of both of the major Musk-led companies. Tesla because, broadly speaking, “physical AI” is at the center of the pitch for driverless cars and its forthcoming Optimus humanoid robots; and SpaceX because, well, one could almost forget it’s a rocket company what with its Colossus data center—which the SpaceX website calls “our gigafactory of compute”—and its giant division called SpaceXAI (Or sometimes SpaceXSI), which is the home of Grok. On a Tuesday earnings call for SpaceX, Musk said the two companies now have special committees aimed at discussing a merger.

Musk has been teasing this for months, but these committees mark the first official move in the direction of a link-up. Musk says he thinks the merger is a good idea, and AI is his stated reason. “I do think there’s a lot of merit to combining companies as we are pretty much in the superintelligence singularity,” he said, according to the Verge.

The takeaway: Believe it. The way things are trending, analysts suspect this merger really will happen within the next couple of years.

The news: Amazon Web Services is the bedrock on which many of today’s LLMs are built. Anthropic, for instance, is highly dependent on AWS, committing a breathtaking $100 billion to Amazon over the next ten years. Cloud means data centers, and data centers mean power—often nasty, polluting, climate-change-causing power. But Amazon just announced an agreement with X-energy and American Electric Power (AEP) to at least try to build a nuclear facility in Indiana over the next few years.

The partnership is aiming for 12 of X-energy’s Xe-100 reactors. That’s 960 megawatts of clean grid electricity—which, yes, would also feed Amazon’s cloud computing needs—by the mid-2030s. Or the timeline could stretch out longer if necessary, the South Bend Tribune wrote, per an X-energy spokesperson.

The takeaway: These are meant to be “small modular reactors”—which, once fully developed and deployed, are supposed to allow U.S. companies to mass produce nuclear generating stations and pepper them everywhere. And the thing about small modular reactors in the U.S. is that, so far, they are vaporware. Zero small modular reactors actually exist in the U.S. So let that be your grain of salt when it comes to Amazon’s nuclear ambitions.

The news: It’s been something like a meme this election season for politicians to bludgeon their opponents by linking them to data centers. Mayor Mamdani is not in the middle of an election, but he did just promise to bludgeon someone: the governor of his state, Kathy Hochul. He said at the AI Now Institute and More Perfect Union’s “People’s AI Assembly,” that he would prod Hochul to sign the “Responsible Data Center Development Act.”

The takeaway: New York State looked like a trendsetter with its July data center moratorium, but that moratorium happened via executive order. While Hochul was signing that, state legislators kinda scratched their heads and said that’s cool, but, uh, when are you going to sign the bill we passed that would do the same thing, except more clearly and definitively?

In an interview with his biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk conceded that he should have brought his time in DOGE to an end sooner.
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