President Donald Trump will announce during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night that his administration has struck agreements with major tech companies to make them shoulder a greater share of the energy cost burden associated with data centres.

The remarks come as the infrastructure build-out for artificial intelligence threatens to further tax the electric grid and raise electricity prices, an increasingly powerful talking point ahead of the midterm elections.

The new “rate payer protection pledges,” confirmed by a White House official ahead of the president’s address, represent one of the administration’s boldest actions yet related to AI and energy.

Trump is expected to announce that top tech companies have pledged to pay more for electricity in areas where they are building new data centres, which use enormous amounts of energy and sometimes water. (POLITICO – Continue Reading)

The Trump administration is working to increase the rate on President Donald Trump's new, temporary global tariff to 15% from the 10% rate published by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, a White House official said on Tuesday.

The official said Trump has had "no change of heart" on his desire for a 15% tariff rate, which he had announced on Saturday after issuing a formal order on Friday for a 10% rate on the new duties that will last 150 days. The temporary tariff imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 are meant to replace Trump's global emergency tariffs struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday. (Reuters – Continue Reading)

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Tuesday that a deal with the U.S. was "within reach, but only if diplomacy is given priority", days ahead of an expected fresh round of talks between the two sides in Geneva.

The talks are set to take place on Thursday in Geneva, a senior U.S. official said on Monday, with U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner slated to meet with an Iranian delegation for the negotiations. (Reuters – Continue Reading)

Meta, the U.S. tech giant helmed by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, is aiming to enter the stablecoin space later this year, pending successful integration with a third-party firm to facilitate payments using the dollar-pegged token technology, according to three people familiar with the plans.

The tech giant, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram and has more than 3 billion users, wants to begin its stablecoin integration early in the second half of this year, said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not public. Meta is planning to integrate a vendor to help administer stablecoin-backed payments and implement a new wallet, the person said. (CoinDesk – Continue Reading)

First, Alap Shah said artificial intelligence will nuke the world economy.

Then, the report he co-authored with Citrini Research further inflated AI bubble fears and triggered a mass selloff of everything from delivery to payment stocks — an event that dragged cryptocurrency prices down with it.

Now, the Lotus Technology Management chief investment officer says he is surprised by how visceral the reaction to the paper’s vision of the future was. (Yahoo Finance – Continue Reading)