This week on Uncanny Valley, we also discuss Anthropic’s IPO filing and the volunteers gearing up to counter ICE at the midterms.

Big Tech is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but mounting debt, negative cash flow, and growing investor skepticism are raising questions about the sustainability of the AI spending boom.

Six weeks after the EU unveiled its much-anticipated proposal to protect kids across the bloc from social media, European governments are pressing ahead with their own rules. 

National political leaders had spent months asking for unified age restrictions for social media access across the European Union, to avoid 27 different sets of rules. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s response came in September with the EU Kids Act, a signature initiative of her second term that would ban under-13s from accessing most current social media platforms and severely restrict access for under-15s. 

But it is becoming clear that individual countries don’t want to wait for the Brussels legislative wheels to turn — and in some cases, are proceeding with national laws that would kick even more kids off the platforms than what von der Leyen has in mind.  

“While we wait for the EU Kids Act – we are pushing forward with national legislation,” Denmark’s digital minister Christina Egelund said. “The problems are urgent. Children and parents should not be asked to wait.” 

Last week, Greece’s parliament passed a bill to bar social media access for under-15s, while Italy’s own stalled efforts to shield under-14s suddenly found new winds.  

By Thursday, the Commission will have to give the first indication of how it will deal with national laws. Its response to Austria’s proposal to bar social media access for under-14s will be the first test case.

Capitals continue to ultimately favor a unified EU law, which is in line with existing rules that give Brussels oversight of big platforms like Instagram and TikTok. A harmonized law also avoids fragmenting the market with different rules in different countries.  

Yet agreeing on a final text for the legislation and implementing the Kids Act will take more than a year — too long for national leaders eager to show they are serious about protecting the mental health of kids and reining in Big Tech. The age at which limits are set is also a sticking point, with countries preferring various thresholds between 13 and 16.  

“Greece decided to move forward with its own legislation on minors’ access to social media because protecting children is a pressing issue that calls for timely and concrete action,” a spokesperson for the country’s digital ministry said. “We have a responsibility to address an issue that is already affecting the daily lives of children and their families,” they said, adding that the Greek law is “complementary” to the EU’s and that Athens is still in favor of a bloc-wide solution.  

Portugal formally notified the Commission of its own law a little over a week after the Kids Act was proposed, formally asking the EU executive to say if Lisbon’s plans are in line with European rules. Cyprus’s ministers approved their own ban for under-15s on the day Brussels proposed its law. Austria and Germany have also not shown any signs of slowing down. Many of these countries had backed an EU-wide solution.  

The current trajectory could create a confusing situation for minors, who may find themselves locked out of social media in January 2027 only to then regain access under parental controls once the Kids Act is implemented later that year or in 2028. 

The Commission had stressed that the law would bring about “maximum harmonization,” meaning national laws would be scrapped if and when the EU-wide measures came into force.  

When France first formally informed the Commission of its national law to ban social media access for under-15s, “we said very clearly: you should be able, and you should be ready to repeal this law once there are European measures in place,” a senior Commission official told reporters when announcing the law in September.  

But a few weeks later, Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told POLITICO that the EU executive was still considering how to respond to the laws that have been submitted to be checked for compatibility with European rules.  

The Kids Act will have to be negotiated between the Commission, the European Parliament and EU governments, meaning it may not be finalized for months. It would then come into force six months later. The senior official estimated negotiations would take eight to 12 months starting next September, putting the implementation date well into 2028.  

Capitals had backed a pan-European solution in part because it allows enforcement to align with the landmark Digital Services Act, which gives the power to oversee big platforms like Instagram and TikTok to Brussels. Industry and some civil society groups were also supportive of an EU-wide solution because they wouldn’t have to deal with dozens of national laws and different ages in different countries.  

But public sentiment around social media and teen mental health has taken a severe turn for the worse in recent years, culminating in multimillion- and, in some cases, billion-dollar settlements against Meta and TikTok across the U.S.  

In the meantime, European leaders and von der Leyen have spent the last year promising the public age restrictions for social media.  

“A European age limit will send a much stronger signal to Big Tech – enough is enough,” said Denmark’s Egelund. “It will also place the responsibility firmly and directly on those who should bear it – the tech giants.”  

This week on “Uncanny Valley,” we go behind the scenes of our Nathan Fielder cover story, unpack tech billionaires’ generous promises, and discuss the suspicious letters sent to US election offices.

An earnings briefing on Wednesday revealed ad revenue has slowed since the European Union introduced the Less-Personalized Ads model at the beginning of this year.

Meta’s board feared that its CEO’s departure could disrupt the company’s AI ambitions. A new stock agreement gives him financial incentives to stay put.

BRUSSELS — Europe’s biggest media companies have asked regulators in Brussels and London to stop Meta from introducing new terms they say would let it copy publishers’ websites to build artificial intelligence, as a backlash that began in the U.S. spreads across Europe.

In a letter Monday, the European Publishers Council, whose members include POLITICO’s owner Axel Springer, called on EU competition boss Teresa Ribera and tech chief Henna Virkkunen to press Meta to put the terms on hold before they take effect Oct. 30.

The group wants Brussels to check them against EU copyright and competition law, and has requested an urgent meeting with the teams of both commissioners.

“The Commission remains committed to ensure that Meta’s practices fully comply with all applicable obligations under EU law, including competition rules and the Digital Markets Act,” Commission spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso told POLITICO, referring to the EU’s rulebook for Big Tech. He said Brussels was aware of both Meta’s changes and publishers’ concerns.

The U.K. competition watchdog has moved as well. British publishers have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority that Meta is so dominant they are compelled to accept its terms. 

The watchdog’s chief, Sarah Cardell, told British lawmakers on Tuesday that it had asked Meta to explain the changes and would meet the company on Wednesday. She named Meta as a possible candidate for Britain’s new rules for tech giants.

The terms cover businesses that use Meta’s tools to run Facebook pages, Instagram accounts or ads, which includes almost every newsroom. 

The fight began in the U.S. last week, when Nieman Lab, a journalism research outlet at Harvard, reported on the terms after receiving a tip from a small business owner.

As first written, they let Meta send automated programs to copy websites linked to those accounts and use the material to “train” its products, Nieman Lab concluded. There is no opt-out, and a business that continues to use Meta’s tools after Oct. 30 will be deemed to have consented.

Publishers say the terms would hand Meta content for free that other AI companies pay to license.

Rapid reaction

On Friday, Meta communications chief Andy Stone responded on X that the Nieman Lab report was “false” and that there was “no change to how Meta uses web crawlers.”

Stone said the update aimed to let Meta pull accurate product information from shopping sites for ads, not to scrape news sites. The company also said the crawling language already existed in other Meta terms and was just being gathered in one place.

Late Friday, however, Meta revised the terms and deleted the word “train,” saying the terms cover only its advertising and business products.

“We’ve heard you and want to clarify,” a spokesperson for Meta told POLITICO over the weekend, adding the change was “not about scraping news sites.”

Publishers say that changes little, however. 

Meta has given them verbal assurances that they can keep using its tools without surrendering their content to AI, but the terms themselves don’t guarantee that, the European Publishers Council’s letter says.

“Meta’s supposed Friday night correction is a farce,” said Jason Kint, who heads Digital Content Next, a U.S. publisher group whose members include Axel Springer. “Exactly what you’d expect from a gatekeeper notorious for abusing its market power.”

Others have gone further. 

“This is unscrupulous theft,” Germany’s newspaper and magazine associations said in a joint statement on Tuesday. They want Brussels to block the terms while it reviews them, warning that once articles are copied into AI systems, they can’t be clawed back.

Joseph Bambridge in London contributed reporting.

TikTok and other sites were told to curb protest footage and AI-altered images, while online retailers like Vinted and eBay reportedly signed an agreement stop looted goods from flooding resale sites.

We’ve been following this conversation here in The Editors’ Blog about what AI is, what it can do and whether it can possibly live up to its hype. It’s worth considering the question from what we might loosely call not only the supply side but also the demand side. From a very broad perspective, the history of the last three decades has been one defined by the fact that you have too much capital chasing too few productive investments. That’s the driver of the recent history of cycles of booms, bubbles, over-investment and busts: the Asian Financial Crisis, the Dot Com Bust, the Global Financial Crisis, perhaps soon the AI Bubble Collapse, along with many smaller of regional ones.

During a tense vote on a data center being built in her drought-stricken Arizona district last summer, Tucson City Councilmember Nikki Lee made an unlikely pitch: “We’re going to get a little out-of-this-world for a second, so just bear with me.” 

Like many of her constituents, Lee did not want Project Blue, a sprawling 290-acre data center, gobbling up an ounce of her local drinking water. “We need to put data centers where they belong,” she said, and “we don’t think data centers belong in the desert.”  

President Donald Trump’s recent bluster aside, it’s possible that the only thing as bipartisan as loving Dolly Parton is hating data centers, whose construction has become so controversial, so costly, and so backlogged here on Earth that companies like Google, Meta, and of course, SpaceX, are actively flirting with the idea of flinging them into orbit instead. Soon after the Tucson City Council rejected Project Blue’s attempt to connect to city utilities, Amazon Web Services, the secretive intended beneficiary, pulled out of the project, and another Jeff Bezos company, Blue Origin, filed a plan with regulators for tens of thousands of possible new data centers, this time, destined for orbit. 

Sure, launching a hyperscale AI data center into space is still unprecedented engineering-wise, carries an unfathomably large price tag, could engender its own severe environmental risks, and may or may not draw unwelcome attention from the hunters among the stars. But for AI companies, such trade-offs might still be preferable to the terrestrial roadblocks, among them an explosive populist backlash and a 12-year wait to connect to the power grid. 

Next Thursday, Google plans to launch a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries into orbit, the most significant test yet in what’s become a burgeoning race to power AI from space. For now, the satellite won’t approach the levels of computing power at a hulking terrestrial data center like Project Blue. But it is a major step toward a future in which many or even most of our AI queries will be powered not from the outskirts of a city like Tucson, but from a blinking data center circling the skies.

SpaceX’s gargantuan initial public offering earlier this summer was predicated on the idea that it would launch a thus-far-unrealized fleet of orbital data centers to fuel much of the AI economy. The company — whose rockets Google will use to launch its pilot — claims that by the end of this decade, possibly as early as 2028, it will have successfully assembled an AI data center in orbit, with plans to eventually harvest a staggering 100 gigawatts of new solar energy for AI annually, equivalent to one-fifth of all US electricity consumption last year. (As always, that’s a very iffy promise.)

Still, as Google’s overtures clearly demonstrate, it’s no longer a question of if large-scale space-based data centers could be technically feasible, but rather when they’ll be ready to launch, and perhaps more importantly, whether the math of using them to power something like AI will make much financial sense anytime soon. As of now, building a one-gigawatt data center in space would cost about $51.5 billion, according to an analysis by aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip, compared with $16 billion for one on land.

“They’re not breaking any rules of physics. Yes, there are going to be engineering challenges, but they are all solvable with enough time and money,” said Jason Aspiotis, a leading space systems engineer who now leads an orbital data center startup. “The gray area is, well, what about the economics?” 

But even if this astronomically kooky plan does take off, it may not change much for those of us left on terra firma: Our energy bills will remain high, even if data centers aren’t there to drive them up. Our earthly infrastructure — affordable housing, public transit, and more — may be just as hard to build as ever. Harder even, maybe, given that crucial resources and untapped tax revenue will be literally rocketing up out of our reach.

No, if these tech giants succeed, it will not fix what’s wrong here on Earth, but merely prove once again their exemption to the gravitational forces holding the rest of us down.  

Space-based data centers, explained

My father spent most of his career working in the satellite industry, and would sometimes let me waltz inside the quaint little data center housed in his office, a room I remember as roughly the size of my school’s computer lab, hosting rows upon rows of servers that I couldn’t touch, churning with a cool, mechanical hum as they crunched zeroes and ones.

AI data centers work similarly to that server room but on an exponentially larger scale, requiring far more land and energy to run, and much more extravagant cooling systems. Sending his office’s data center into orbit would have been extraordinarily difficult, and getting one of the facilities that powers modern LLMs aloft would be an even larger, more ambitious undertaking. But the benefits — namely, “cheap space (no pun intended) and power,” as my dad put it to me recently — are even more enticing.

An orbital data center need not negotiate with an elected official like Lee over precious water rights to the Colorado River, though it would need to install bigger-than-football-field-sized heat radiators to keep itself cool. You can’t simply launch something that big into orbit, meaning a space-based hyperscale data center — the size of which would likely rival that of the International Space Station — would need to be assembled piece by piece, probably by robots. And while the sun would provide an endless supply of solar power to process your ChatGPT queries, it would also inflict incessant radiation on delicate circuitry. If something breaks, you can’t send a technician up to fix it. Many experts are also concerned that if an excess of space junk, which extraterrestrial data centers would inevitably produce, begins colliding like bumper cars in Earth’s low orbit, it could knock out the orbital infrastructure we already rely on, like GPS navigation and weather satellites. 

Even plastic decays in space, said Sven Bilén, a professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State, who, like Aspiotis, believes that early orbital data centers will probably be “processing data from space, like spatial imaging satellites or weather satellites, as opposed to, you know, cat videos” or AI-generated reality TV slop. 

But even if AI is not the lowest-hanging fruit for deploying compute into space, it is certainly the deepest-pocketed, meaning that many investors and companies like SpaceX and Google seem quite willing to shoulder the start-up costs anyway. And considering how difficult it’s gotten to build data centers on Earth, or at least in the United States, it’s indeed possible that space could become the cheaper, or at least most convenient option, more quickly than one might think. 

“In some form or another, in five years, we are going to have some orbital data centers in space for sure,” Krishna Muralidharan, who leads the Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing at the University of Arizona, told me, but it’s hard to say right now whether those consist of just a few expensive prototypes, or the beginning of a much bigger swing toward orbital compute. “Only time will tell whether you’re going to have a business case for it.”

Can we send our data center problem into space?

So, is it better to have a data center in space or in your backyard?

David Reid, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates representing Loudoun County, home to more data centers than anywhere else on Earth, says the question has repeatedly come up at his town hall meetings. Reid is the rare politician — apart from the president, anyway — willing to defend terrestrial data centers, calling them a “money-printing machine” for local schools and infrastructure. Having spent decades working in the defense and technology sectors, he is doubtful that the math on orbital data centers will ever make sense.

“I believe this is, for lack of a better term, fictional nonsense,” he said, and is “creating a distraction from the fact that local officials here on Earth still need to make better zoning decisions.”

If most of the AI industry can eventually be powered by space, as SpaceX claims, it will require millions of sprawling new satellites, in an orbit currently dotted by fewer than 20,000 of them. Though “space is really big,” as Elon Musk has put it, one million satellites would still profoundly and, likely irrevocably, transform our night sky into one in which data centers outnumber visible stars.

“Will humanity notice if there are fewer stars in the sky? Well, not so much right now,” given light pollution in many cities, said John Barentine, an astronomer and environmental advocate for the night sky. “But what if they’re replaced by these artificial stars in the night sky? Is that the point at which people will say, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t want this. We want the benefits, but we don’t want this as a consequence.’”

This is, of course, the tension also at the heart of building data centers here on Earth. To some extent, they’re the most tangible representations of how little power we have to shape the course of a transformative new technology that few trust, and even fewer asked for. It’s one thing to object to a hulking data center, but it might be another altogether to see the sigils of our digital overlords illuminating the firmament. Would a place like Tucson, one of the most beautiful places to stargaze in the world, prefer a Project Blue to a starscape marred by blinking servers in the sky?

Update, September 24, 10:35 am ET: This post was originally published on September 3 and has been updated to include information about a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries that Google is launching soon.