🌎 Sloppy Work

OpenAI commits $1 trillion to data center expansion

As Emperor Palpatine once said, “UNLIMITED POWER.” OpenAI is planning to spend more than $1 trillion building massive data centers across the US and abroad, in what some call the boldest infrastructure play in tech history.

A $1 trillion vision

Earlier this week, Stargate, a joint project of OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank with White House backing, unveiled a $400 billion plan to build five new data center “warhouses” to support future AI growth.

• The investment is on top of OpenAI’s $500 billion AI infrastructure proposal made in February of this year.

But why does OpenAI need to invest so much money to support its AI needs? Because it consumes a lot of energy, and energy burns cash:

• The company said its upcoming data centers will consume around 7 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power around 8 million homes.

• However, demand could rise to 20 gigawatts in the coming years, and each gigawatt adds an estimated $50 billion in costs.

If energy use scales to 20 gigawatts in the near future, like OpenAI thinks it will, the total build-out cost could stretch to over $5 trillion. Good thing they’ve already started building one of the largest data centers in the world.

Everything’s bigger in Texas

The centerpiece of the gargantuan initiative is a massive complex in West Texas, which has a fiber cable long enough to go to the moon (and back), and is described by OpenAI as the largest AI supercomputing campus in the world.

• That site alone includes eight data centers already drawing over 900 megawatts of power.

Analysts caution that OpenAI’s rapid expansion of AI infrastructure may grow faster than the company’s revenue, potentially saddling the company with large amounts of debt.

OpenAI isn’t worried: In response to concerns that OpenAI’s infrastructure growth might outpace the demand for its products, CEO Sam Altman said he “totally get[s]” the worry but defended the pace, noting that the company is “growing faster than any business I’ve ever heard of before.”

Harvard says AI “workslop” is destroying productivity

Less is more I guess. A recent Harvard Business Review study found the spread of generative AI in the workplace has led to a troubling amount of low-quality results, a growing issue researchers are calling “workslop.”

Bring on the slop

Over the last year, the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled as businesses attempt to maximize productivity with minimal expense, and to some people’s surprise, it’s kinda backfiring.

The study notes that the increase in AI use is enabling a flood of AI-generated “stuff” that looks like work, but often isn’t good work (HBR’s definition of workslop), leading to increasingly superficial, off-target, or lazy results.

In HBR’s study of 1,500 full-time employees across several industries:

• Those who have encountered the phenomenon say around 15.4% of all work that’s put on their desk qualifies as workslop.

• 40% said they have received workslop in the past month.

• Workslop accounts for 18% of direct reports to managers and 40% of peer-to-peer content.

Employees have had enough: Over half of participants said receiving workslop is annoying, while 38% said it confused or offended them (22%), which is worsened by the stress of correcting errors and bringing up the issue with bosses.

Workslop isn’t good for business, either: The HBR study estimates that a 10,000-person company could lose $9M in productivity every year thanks to workslop, mirroring similar research from MIT that shows 95% of companies don’t see any return on billions invested in generative AI.

SpaceX rocket successfully deploys satellites to study solar storms

Hopefully the edges don’t get too crispy. Earlier this week, a SpaceX launch carried three scientific spacecraft into orbit tasked with studying various aspects of solar activity that can impact Earth and space missions.

The power of the sun

The three missions, valued at approximately $1.6 billion, aim to help scientists get a better understanding of our sun’s properties, mainly the solar wind.

• Created in the sun’s outer atmosphere, the solar wind is made up of superheated charged particles that stream into space.

• These particles generate the heliosphere, a large magnetic bubble that helps protect the solar system from dangerous cosmic radiation.

The biggest of the three missions, led by NASA, will examine both the solar wind and the heliosphere, while a second mission is set to track how Earth’s outer atmosphere interacts with solar storms.

• Solar storms are massive, intense flare-ups of solar activity that shoot charged particle streams into space, often disrupting communications and space missions.

The third mission, led by the NOAA, is mainly focused on defense and will monitor solar storms to improve space weather forecasting and protect Earth from potential flare-ups.

Looking forward: The three satellites are headed for a sun-orbiting lookout around 1 million miles from Earth and are expected to be operational by early next year.

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These rings will soon be worth $11 billion

Can someone tell Gollum not to put it on, please? Finnish wearable tech company Oura Health Oy, the maker of the popular Oura Ring, raised $875 million in its latest funding round, pushing its valuation to nearly $11 billion.

The rings of power

The Oura Ring, known for tracking sleep, heart rate, menstrual cycles, and other health metrics, has sold a total of around 5.5 million rings, with 3 million being sold in the past year alone.

Its success has allowed the Finnish company to nearly double its valuation since November of 2024, but Oura doesn’t want to stop there:

• According to CEO Tom Hale, the company is on pace to generate over $1.5 billion in sales in 2026, triple what it made last year.

• Hale said subscription services, which provide deeper analytics and personalized insights, are key to increasing customer retention and snowballing revenue moving forward.

Oura enters an already crowded wearable market, with players like Apple, Fitbit, and Garmin dominating, but its niche focus on sleep and wellness data has allowed it to carve out a loyal user base. That being said, it’s really all about the…

Data, data, data

Although Oura has consistently positioned itself as a lifestyle and wellness brand, its underlying tech behind the products (and more specifically the data they collect) is what continues to secure its biggest contracts.

That being said, it’s safe to say the US government has a few rings:

• Oura’s largest client is the US Department of Defense, where its wearable rings are used to monitor the vital signs of military troops.

• Oura also has a partnership with Palantir, the data analytics firm that provides services to the FBI, CIA, IRS, CDC, NHS, and a range of other law enforcement agencies like ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

Worried about privacy? The company insisted in a recent blog post that it does not share any consumer data with the US government (unless explicitly directed by the user) and that the data environments for customers and for the DoD are kept separate.

More rings, more money, more data: Smart rings now dominate the fitness tracker market in the US, making up 75% of industry revenue this year, up from 46% in 2024, per Circana data. The boom, fueled largely by Gen Z and millennials, has shown a gap in customer protection as US data privacy laws for wearables still lag far behind European standards.

NASA reveals its newest class of astronauts

Hope they’re ready to work off that freshman 15 aboard the ISS. NASA announced the 10 newest members of its astronaut corps this week, narrowed down from a group of over 8,000 applicants from across the country.

A new astronaut class

The class, which includes six women and four men, marks the space agency’s first time selecting more women than men in its 66-year history. The newest group marks the 24th astronaut class since NASA’s program began, raising the total number of NASA astronauts to 370.

The class includes a mix of backgrounds, including engineers, scientists, test pilots, military officers, previous SpaceX or NASA mission team participants, and even a professional Ultimate Frisbee player.

Some notable names include:

• Anna Menon, previously a SpaceX engineer who flew on the private Polaris Dawn mission, is the first NASA candidate to come in with previous spaceflight experience.

• Lauren Edgar, a geologist who worked with Mars exploration and the Artemis mission.

Their training will span two years before they become eligible for flight assignments and will include skills like robotics, geology, space systems, medicine, foreign languages, survival techniques, simulated spacewalks, and more.

They have a chance to make history

The candidates are expected to support future missions to low Earth orbit, the International Space Station, the Moon (through NASA’s ambitious Artemis program), and potentially even Mars.

If the Artemis program stays on track, NASA’s latest astronaut class may be the first crew to dock with the Lunar Gateway, a future space station set to orbit the moon:

• The planned lunar outpost is an essential step in NASA’s plan to support human presence on the moon as well as a critical stepping-stone toward future Mars exploration.

Curious what the candidates have to say? Watch their video responses on NASA’s official “Ask Me Anything” Reddit thread here.

Catch up on this week’s weird news

 > Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this week that Instagram reached 3 billion active monthly users, joining Facebook and WhatsApp, which reached the milestone earlier this year.

 > Geoscientists found evidence that an asteroid slammed into the North Sea more than 43 million years ago, resolving a decades-long debate about the origins of a massive crater over 2,200 feet below the seabed.

 > Dragonfly migration season has officially started in the US as fall comes around the corner. Species like the common green darner may travel more than 80 miles in a day toward warmer southern regions.

 > Paleontologists in Argentina uncovered a new dinosaur species dubbed the “megaraptor,” an apex predator that stood at 23 feet tall, weighed 2,200 pounds, and died eating an ancient crocodile.

 > Nuclear DNA testing will be used in the Gilgo Beach serial killer trial for the first time ever in a New York court of law. The defense called the process “magic” as their client stands trial for allegedly committing seven murders over the last three decades.