Beige Book: Economic Activity Picked Up In 11 Of 12 Districts; Only San Fran Flat As "Employers Invested In AI"

USDA, US Army Break Ground On Texas Facility To Combat Flesh-Eating Parasite Spread Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), U.S. officials broke ground for a New World Screwworm (NWS) sterile fly production facility in Texas to combat the flesh-eating parasites, which have spread across Mexico and pose a significant threat to America’s livestock, wildlife, and public health. Located in Moore Air Base, Edinburg, the facility “is being built with an aggressive timeline designed to quickly expand the nation’s sterile fly production capacity,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)...

Trump Admin Appeals Order Halting White House Ballroom Construction, Citing Security Concerns Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times, The Trump administration on April 3 appealed a judge’s order to halt construction on a new White House ballroom, elevating security concerns associated with the project. On March 31, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon issued an order declaring the president lacked the authority to order the $400 million addition on the presidential residence. Leon’s ruling came as a win for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, a congressionally chartered...

Compute Costs More Than Talent In AI For leading AI companies, the biggest expense is not talent. It is compute. This chart from Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo, uses Epoch AI data to compare spending at Anthropic, Minimax, and Z.ai across R&D compute, inference compute, and staff plus other costs. In every case, compute accounts for the majority of total spending, underscoring how capital-intensive it has become to build and serve frontier AI models. How AI Company Costs Break Down Despite differences in scale, all three companies allocate the largest share of their budgets to a...