China plans a $295 billion AI buildout; El Paso moves against Meta's data center

Bloomberg reports that Beijing is preparing to spend roughly 2 trillion yuan, about $295 billion, over five years on a network of interconnected AI computing hubs run mostly by state firms like China Mobile and China Telecom. The blueprint, drafted by agencies including the National Development and Reform Commission, would source at least 80 percent of the hardware, including AI chips, from domestic suppliers such as Huawei — effectively designing Nvidia and AMD out of the country's largest buildout. It is the clearest signal yet that China intends to win the AI compute race on homegrown silicon.

A City Council proposal on the June 9 agenda would direct El Paso to negotiate terminating the tax incentives behind Meta's planned $10 billion, one-gigawatt AI data center, the largest such fight yet over a hyperscale campus. The site would draw on city water for cooling and rely partly on hundreds of gas-fired generators, fueling community opposition. City attorneys have warned that breaking the 2023 agreement without cause could expose taxpayers to liability above $1 billion, and the sponsoring representative needs four more votes to prevail — making the outcome a national test case for local pushback against AI infrastructure.

A UCSF-led study deployed Mirai, an open-source risk model from Berkeley data scientist Adam Yala, across more than 4,100 screening mammograms at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. The tool flagged 525 women as high-risk and routed them into a same-day diagnostic pathway, shrinking the wait for evaluation from several weeks to about an hour and the wait for a cancer biopsy from over two months to under 10 days. Published in npj Digital Medicine, the authors frame the model as a triage partner for radiologists, not a replacement.

Amazon signed a multiyear, multibillion-dollar agreement for Corning to supply optical fiber, cable, and connectivity for its US data centers, with production centered at Corning's North Carolina plants. The deal creates about 1,000 advanced-manufacturing jobs plus a new technician-training program, and underscores how fiber has become a bottleneck for AI clusters — optical links move far more data between thousands of chips than copper, with less power loss. It is Corning's third AI mega-deal of 2026, after a $6 billion Meta agreement in January and a $3.2 billion Nvidia partnership in May.

Beyond Monday's consumer Siri reveal, Apple used WWDC's developer sessions to turn iOS into a multi-model platform. A new LanguageModel protocol in its Foundation Models framework lets any cloud provider expose a common inference interface to apps, and Xcode 27 ships dual-engine agentic coding — an on-device Neural Engine model for instant Swift suggestions plus a cloud layer that routes heavier work to Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, or OpenAI. Apple also deprecated SiriKit, making the App Intents framework the only path for Siri to reach into third-party apps.

The Center for Democracy and Technology published a taxonomy identifying 37 manipulative design patterns embedded in widely used chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, plus companion apps like Replika and Character.AI. It groups the tactics into engagement maximization, emotional dependency, capability deception, and friction asymmetry — for example, guilt-inducing language when a user tries to leave. CDT urges data minimization, opt-in roleplay, easy account deletion, and clearer pricing disclosure, and the report is likely to feed state and federal scrutiny of consumer-facing AI design.

OpenAI opened an Economic Research Exchange that gives selected academic researchers project-based access to its tools and privacy-protected datasets to study how AI is reshaping workers, businesses, and the broader economy. The aim is to move the debate past anecdote toward empirical, independent evidence — though letting the company that builds the models also curate the data behind the studies raises obvious questions about independence. Applications close July 5, with selections expected by the end of July.