AI slowdown calls and researcher warnings emerge as Thailand freezes data center projects and Nvidia expands its data center buyer base.
how this picture was made
Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-15 01:35Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A sprawling cityscape at dusk with a massive data center in the foreground, its rows of servers humming beneath a lattice of pipes and ducts, while in the distance, a group of people gather around a researcher who gestures emphatically, set against a deep orange sky with heat haze rising from the city streets.
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 a massive data center in the foreground, its rows of servers humming beneath a lattice of pipes and ducts, while in the distance, a group of people gather around a researcher who gestures emphatically, set against a deep orange sky with heat haze rising from the city streets. 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)
223109fe741557e6eb047137e001ee8ecae24bee5e67373bc41d617ae0d9489f
Abbott orders penalties for data centers that hide water use
Texas now requires data centers to report water consumption to the state water board, with the governor directing regulators to penalize those that do not comply.
By June Park · 3wTexas Governor Greg Abbott signed a regulation requiring data centers to report their water consumption to the Texas Water Development Board. Abbott has also directed state regulators to penalize any data center that fails to comply with the disclosure requirement.
The two moves - a reporting mandate and an enforcement directive - put a compliance obligation on data centers operating in the state. What shipped here is a rule with teeth: a disclosure requirement backed by a penalty mechanism.
The read here is that the pairing matters. A reporting rule without enforcement is a roadmap, and a penalty order without a reporting rule is noise. Together they describe a state government that wants numbers it can act on, not numbers filed and forgotten.
Read with its sources →