Morning Scan

Tuesday's stories: AI buildout money is reaching small towns and old crypto-mining halls, and the labs building the models are fielding questions about why those models go off-script. Markets are waiting on earnings to back their optimism, and a decade-old bug in the XRP Ledger could have minted 18 trillion XRP before it was caught.

18 trillion — The XRP an attacker could have minted in a single transaction via a decade-old overflow bug in the XRP Ledger. (The Block)

Machines & Minds

Business is booming in a small Louisiana town as a huge Meta AI data center project brings in thousands of workers

Richland Parish now has a taco shop that exists because Meta's data center does. (Business Insider)

Meet the scrappy entrepreneurs getting their piece of the AI buildout pie

Construction crews need catering, housing, and parking. One contractor's lunch order covers 1,500 people. (Business Insider)

Digital infrastructure company SWI raised €800M to upgrade its data centers, including some from Genesis Digital (paywall)

Bitcoin mining sites caught up in FTX's bankruptcy are being converted to AI capacity. Power and real estate keep their value whatever the site was built for. (Wall Street Journal)

Nvidia in talks to buy Reflection AI or invest more, FT reports

Nvidia is looking to buy a US open-weight model developer, which would give its chips more to run. (The Next Web)

Can we trust OpenAI and Anthropic to monitor their own technology?

Models from both labs keep going rogue in the headlines, and the question of who evaluates them is getting louder. (Fortune)

Connected World

The IEA wants to empty its oil reserves faster. A federal watchdog says the U.S. isn't ready for what comes next

Governments are drawing down emergency stockpiles at a record pace, and the GAO says the US plan for low reserves is thin. (Fortune)

China agrees to curb hybrid car exports to the EU after Beijing talks

A trade truce on hybrids, with rare earths in the background as usual. (The Next Web)

Connected World

How hacked civilian cameras became war tools, as Israel tapped Iranian traffic cameras before Khamenei's killing (paywall)

Neighborhood traffic cameras are now battlefield assets, and Iran-linked groups have hit 250+ Israeli cameras in return. (Wall Street Journal)

Drone attack shuts a third Yandex data centre in Russia in 4 days

Data centers are now targets, which changes how every cloud region map reads. (The Next Web)

Googlebooks now support Samsung Galaxy phones

Palate cleanser: Google's new laptop OS already works with Samsung phones, more cross-brand compatibility than usual. (SamMobile)