Thailand freezes data center projects while Argentina and Spain press territorial claims and Nvidia acquires an open-source AI company.
how this picture was made
Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-10 01:53Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A sprawling cityscape at dusk with construction cranes halted mid-build, surrounded by people from diverse cultures, as a massive heat haze rises in the distance, with servers and data centers humming in the foreground, under a deep orange sky with streaks of purple and pink.
Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received
Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A sprawling cityscape at dusk with construction cranes halted mid-build, surrounded by people from diverse cultures, as a massive heat haze rises in the distance, with servers and data centers humming in the foreground, under a deep orange sky with streaks of purple and pink. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.
The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)
4e9f59ddf45c95f97d4eed3d9d60ac76f6f516e69a39b60baa3078357b5ce25f
Nvidia's broadening data center buyer base draws a PIMCO fund deeper into Asian supply chains
Half of Nvidia's data center revenue now flows outside the five major cloud operators, and one major fund is repositioning toward the companies that build what those buyers need.
By Kenji Mori · 4wNvidia's data center business grew 117% annually, with half of that segment's revenue now coming from companies, regional clouds, and national projects in Japan, Korea, and Europe rather than the five major cloud operators. El Economista reported the overall revenue figure as 106% above the same quarter a year ago and 18% above the prior quarter.
The product mix has also changed. Nvidia now sells processors, five types of networks, specialized accelerators, and reference manuals - not just graphics cards.
That picture appears to be driving at least one large reallocation. Emmanuel Sharef, who oversees Pacific Investment Management Co.'s flagship Balanced Income and Growth Fund, told Bloomberg that the next leg of the AI boom could be concentrated in Asian stocks and beyond. The fund has been moving further down the supply chain toward companies that build data center components and has become overweight in Asia, where it sees stronger earnings growth, cheaper valuations, and greater exposure to what Sharef describes as the building blocks of a data center.
The read here is that the combination of a diversifying Nvidia buyer base and a PIMCO fund repositioning toward Asian supply-chain names suggests that institutional capital is looking past the hyperscalers for the next round of returns - though the facts do not establish that those two moves are directly connected.
West Virginia has been running its own version of that bet at the state level. Governor Patrick Morrisey unveiled a plan, at an unspecified date in 2025, to reduce and eventually eliminate the state personal income tax using revenue from approved hyperscale data center projects. The plan mandates that 50% of revenue from those approved projects be set aside specifically for income-tax elimination, with none of it entering the general fund. Whether enough hyperscale investment arrives to make that math work is the question the plan leaves open.
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