It won't be making smartphones great again. The long-awaited Trump-branded smartphone has finally arrived, and it appears to be exactly what many suspected: an existing handset in gold drag. Repair biz iFixit got its hands on the Trump Mobile T1 after the device became available in May, and its teardown found the model is essentially an HTC U24 Pro with cosmetic tweaks and a Trump-friendly gold finish. It was almost exactly a year ago that the Trump Organization unveiled the Trump Mobile cellular service and heralded the coming of the T1 Phone, described as "a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States." Few expected the gilt gadget to live up to that promise, as there are effectively no mass-market smartphones built in the US, with the possible exception of Purism's Liberty Phone, which is priced at a challenging $1,999 for those who absolutely must have a smartphone made outside China. Despite accepting $100 deposits to pre-order the coveted handwarmer, Trump Mobile failed to deliver the device by August last year, as promised, and many started to believe it would never show up. But it arrived this May amid claims that the Trump Mobile website was leaking customer data to anyone who sent an HTTP POST request. The nerds at iFixit passed the Trump Phone through a CT scanner alongside an HTC U24 Pro to confirm that the internals of the two devices are almost an exact match. They even went so far as swapping the main board of the T1 for that of the HTC phone, and showed that it not only fits, but the phone still works. One difference iFixit noted is that the multichip package housing the 12 GB of LPDDR5 memory and 512 GB of storage is from Micron, whereas the corresponding package in HTC's phone is supplied by SK hynix. The HTC U24 Pro is a mid-range smartphone that was launched almost exactly two years ago in June 2024. It is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 platform, has a 6.8-inch display, and came with Android 14 at launch, whereas the Trump phone features Android 15. In other words, it's a fairly unremarkable smartphone, sprayed gold and marketed to Trump fans for a promotional price of $499. To be fair, as iFixit makes clear, this is not a bad price for a device like this, so aureate wannabes are not being overcharged here. But as iFixit also makes clear, the device may be assembled in Florida, but it was designed in China and the vast majority of its parts have been sourced from and made in China as well. ®

Online chat platform VRChat says a recent cyberattack compromised the data belonging to nearly 2.5 million users. It confirmed the “data security incident” in a report filed with Maine’s attorney general, but has not disclosed it via public channels. The company’s report confirmed that its cloud environment was accessed between May 10-12, with the unauthorized intruder making off with information concerning 2,436,782 users. This included VRChat usernames, email addresses, whether a user was a VRChat+ subscriber, login histories (including device, hardware identifiers, and IP addresses), and Steam or Meta user IDs. It does not believe passwords, credit cards or other payment information, or government IDs used for age verification were affected. “VRChat sincerely regrets that this security incident occurred,” the company stated in its disclosure. “We understand that trust between our platform and its community is earned through consistent action, and we take full responsibility for the concern this event has caused. “The security and privacy of our players' information remain our highest priority, and we are committed to doing everything within our power to protect it.” VRChat said that after it was made aware of the intrusion, it contained the threat and implemented additional security controls, as well as engaging outside security experts. And in an unusual move for US breaches, the San Francisco-based company did not offer identity theft or credit monitoring services. Offering these kinds of services is not a legal requirement, but doing so is highly common, especially regarding attacks that affect so many individuals. VRChat does not publish the total number of registered users that it has on its books, but its documentation states that “the platform has grown to millions of users,” who have collectively published tens of millions of unique pieces of content for it since its first release in 2014. The part game, part chat platform is an online, open-world chatroom where people walk around interacting with one another via their 3D avatars. It has been compared to Second Life in that users explore other users' worlds, play mini-games, and partake in casual chit-chat, with support for both virtual reality headsets and conventional PCs. You can also think of it as something similar to Meta’s vision for the metaverse, just without all the coworking and KPI meetings, and with way more users. ®

This article is aimed at bioinformatics platform leads, ML infrastructure engineers, and genomics budget owners who are now running GPU-accelerated workflows in the cloud. It's about a hidden cost problem that almost every genomics infrastructure team is paying for — and very few are actively measuring. The observations here are specific to short-read sequencing workflows, which remain the dominant data type in production genomics environments. Short-read sequencing pipelines, standard in next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflows, used to be CPU-heavy. You'd run them on a cluster, they'd grind through alignment and variant calling over hours, and the bottleneck was CPU throughput. GPU acceleration wasn't the story. That has changed. AI-driven variant calling, GPU-accelerated alignment tools like Parabricks, and deep learning models running on top of sequencing data have all moved toward the GPU, which means teams are managing serious GPU infrastructure for the first time. The cost model that comes with GPU cloud differs sharply from CPU clusters, and people are bringing CPU-era assumptions about pipeline reliability and cost accounting into a GPU environment. That mismatch is costing them. We work with a lot of these teams, and when we ask about infrastructure costs, they almost always lead with the same number: cost per sample. That's what gets reported upward, what sits in the budget. What that number hides is where things get interesting. When pipelines fail A typical short-read germline variant calling pipeline has maybe ten to 15 distinct processing steps. You start with raw FASTQ files off the sequencer, run quality control, alignment, duplicate marking, base quality score recalibration, variant calling, annotation — each step hands off to the next. These pipelines mostly run on workflow managers like Nextflow or Snakemake, which do have built-in mechanisms for resuming failed jobs. Nextflow has a flag designed to let you pick up from step eight of 11 rather than restarting from scratch. In principle, that's exactly the right solution. In practice, the problem is configuration. For that flag to work, Nextflow needs to find its cache directory — the folder that records which steps completed successfully. If the solutions architect set up the compute environment without properly configuring persistent disk space for that cache, the file isn't there when you need it, and the pipeline restarts from step one anyway. That's a setup failure rather than a tool limitation, but the result is the same: you've paid for compute you didn't get output from. When a large task fails mid-execution rather than at a clean step boundary, even proper checkpointing won't save you, because the task has to be rerun in full. A problem difficult to measure Genomics teams working with Nebius consistently report that 15 to 40 percent of their pipeline runs hit at least one failure and restart before completion. Pinning the figure down precisely is hard, and we have no definitive numbers that reflect the reality here. The range is wide because it depends heavily on how mature the infrastructure setup is. Teams with well-configured environments sit at the low end; teams newer to GPU cloud, or running on spot instances with higher interruption rates, sit at the high end. What makes this invisible is that if your metric is cost per completed sample, a failed run that eventually completes still looks like one sample at normal cost. The retry disappears from the number that gets reported. For example, a GPU-accelerated whole genome sequencing pipeline — germline variant calling — takes roughly two GPU-hours on an H200. At current on-demand rates that's about $9 of compute per sample, and that's the visible cost. Now apply a 25 percent failure rate — toward the conservative end of what teams report. For every four samples you complete, one run failed, restarted, and ran from the beginning. Your real cost per completed sample isn't $9 anymore — it's $11.25, a 25 percent hidden markup. Scale that to a team processing 2,000 samples a month: the visible compute bill says $18,000, but the real cost is $22,500. That's $4,500 a month — $54,000 a year — in compute that produced no output. For a mid-size genomics team, that's a meaningful fraction of the cloud budget, and it shows up nowhere as waste. That's before you touch storage. The hidden costs The storage picture is more nuanced than people expect. A standard whole genome generates roughly 200 gigabytes of raw FASTQ data, but that's the uncompressed figure. In practice, almost everything going into cold storage is compressed, typically down to around 30 gigabytes per sample, so the storage cost per sample is quite manageable. Where it gets complicated is retrieval. When you want to reanalyze archived samples — say, running a new cohort through an updated pipeline — you pull those compressed files back, and your infrastructure then needs to decompress them. That 30-gigabyte compressed file expands to 200 gigabytes, which means you need the disk space and memory headroom to handle the expansion. If the environment wasn't sized for it, you get failures or severe slowdowns at the decompression step, which becomes another category of hidden cost that's rarely accounted for up front. In cancer research, the numbers are much larger. Somatic mutation calling runs at 60x to 100x sequencing depth, so 600-gigabyte FASTQ files aren't unusual. Everything I've described scales accordingly. The key point: retrieval from cold storage always has a cost, regardless of where your compute lives relative to your storage. Some platforms charge for data egress between regions on top of that. Either way, the teams that haven't modeled their reanalysis frequency as a real line item are almost always surprised when they do. Tracking, tracking and tracking... Bioinformatics engineers know the failure rates, because they're the ones watching jobs fail at 2am. But by the time the numbers roll up to whoever controls the budget, it's just "cloud costs." There's no line item for "compute we paid for and got no output from." Cloud billing by service and instance type doesn't surface this. You see your GPU compute spend, your storage spend, your egress. You don't see "20% of your GPU spend this month was on runs that didn't complete." That decomposition requires deliberate instrumentation, and most teams haven't built it yet. What teams should measure instead of cost per sample Teams should measure a few things instead. First, completion rate: the percentage of pipeline runs that complete without failure or restart. That's your pipeline reliability score, directly linked to compute waste. Second, cost per attempted sample versus cost per completed sample. If those numbers are meaningfully different, you have a problem worth fixing. Third, storage retrieval frequency and the infrastructure overhead of decompression: how often you're pulling archived data back, and whether you've properly sized the disk and memory headroom for it. This is the gap between what looks cheap in the storage bill and what it costs to use the data. One thing genomics infrastructure teams should do differently starting this week Instrument your pipeline failure rate, right now, before anything else. The number itself doesn't fix anything, but it makes the problem visible. Once you can show that 15 or 25 percent of your compute spend is going toward runs that restart — with real dollar figures attached — the conversation about fixing the underlying infrastructure becomes easy to have. People move fast when they can see the waste. Everything else follows from that — better checkpointing configuration, smarter storage architecture, more stable compute — but you have to see the problem first. Discover the breakthroughs shaping the future of AI in healthcare and life sciences. Visit https://nebius.com/solutions/life-sciences-and-healthcare to learn more and register for the 2026 AI Discovery Awards ceremony: nebius.com/ai-discovery-award. Anastasia Raskolova Anastasia is a senior product manager for healthcare & kife sciences at Nebius, where she focuses on infrastructure product for drug discovery and clinical AI workflows. Before that, she spent her career building ML products across computer vision, recommendation systems, and generative AI — and stays grounded in the clinical reality through volunteering in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital. Contributed by Nebius.

HANDS ON At WWDC this week, Apple introduced container machines, which are persistent virtual machines running Linux, bearing some resemblance to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Microsoft's operating system. Developers using macOS, as with those on Windows, face the problem that most applications are deployed to Linux, creating a mismatch between the development machine and the deployment target. The friction is less for macOS, which, like Linux, is Unix-like, but still exists. Apple's solution builds on the Container project previewed at WWDC last year. Version 1.0 was released at this year's WWDC, complete with the new container machine feature. The project uses standard Open Container Initiative (OCI) containers, and both the containers and container machines run on lightweight virtual machines (VMs), giving strong isolation. The name "container machine" is intended to convey that the feature combines both a container and a VM. The feature uses Apple's native virtualization framework, and the command line interface integrates well with macOS. Once installed, the command container machine run will open a terminal in the default container machine. Another option is to run a command such as container machine run uname -a, which will execute in the default container machine but without leaving the macOS shell. The code is written in Swift and is open source on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses another Swift package called containerization, which is also open source. On Windows, WSL is an important tool for developers. Could container machines have a similar impact for Mac devs? There is potential, but Apple has work to do both on features and documentation, and the project is tucked away on GitHub rather than being presented as part of macOS. We tried a brief hands-on, installing the 1.0 release from the GitHub release package on Tahoe 26.5.1. Only macOS 26 is supported. Once installed, the command container machine create is enabled, though only containers that include the /sbin/init system initialization program will work. Many container images designed for running applications, rather than being used for persistent VMs, do not include this. The solution is to build a custom container image from a Dockerfile, for which the documentation now includes examples. We used the Dockerfile supplied in a tutorial that sets up a container machine based on Ubuntu 24.04 with the Swift SDK included, followed by the steps to develop using Visual Studio Code running on macOS and connecting to the container machine via VS Code remoting. This worked and we were able to build a project on Linux and run it using VS Code and Safari on the Mac side, but debugging breakpoints were not hit. We tried again with a .NET project, for which debugging worked correctly. By default, a container machine mounts the macOS home directory with read-write permissions. This is great for accessing code or other assets from both macOS and the container machine, but not good for security. A rogue package installed on Linux, for example, could easily harvest credentials from a .ssh folder in macOS. This is configurable via the --home-mount argument. Setting access to "none" is more secure. The memory available to a container machine defaults to half the system memory. In our case that is 32 GB, but after launching the VM and starting PostgreSQL, the actual memory used, according to Activity Monitor, was only 1 GB. Additional memory is used on demand, but a limitation described in the technical overview is that memory cannot be released back to the host. In other words, memory usage will increase during use and can only be released by restarting the VM. WSL supports GUI applications via the X11 or Wayland graphic systems. An issue raised by a user about GUI applications in containers was closed on the basis that developers can install XQuartz, a project for running the X windows system on macOS, and then use container-to-host networking to connect, though we did not try this. GUI support appears not to be a goal of the project. Mac developers already have many ways to run Linux containers or VMs, including the mature ecosystem around Docker, Podman, Colima, UTM, VirtualBox, and OrbStack, to mention some contenders, as well as the option of using SSH to connect to a remote Linux VM. That means Apple has some work to do to establish its native container tools, and now container machines, as serious alternatives. On the plus side, the system is lightweight, aside from the inability to release memory, and performed well in our quick hands-on. A WWDC video has further details, alongside the documentation on GitHub. ®

The defence secretary’s departure was the wrong resignation at the worst possible time for the prime minister

• UK politics live – latest updates

During Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions, the defence secretary was standing at the other end of the Commons, away from other cabinet members on the government frontbench. His expression gave nothing away as Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch blamed one another for spending too much on welfare and not enough on defence. In hindsight, he was possibly thinking “to hell with both of them”. Most defence secretaries go native sooner or later, imagining themselves to be embedded officers serving on the frontline. Tory Ben Wallace appeared to hate most of his cabinet colleagues by the time he resigned in 2023.

Less than 24 hours after PMQs, Healey had also resigned, his departure being all the more powerful for being so unexpected. This exit seemed to come out of a clear blue sky. There had been no briefings to the media in the preceding days. No threats to stand down if his demands were not met. All the arguments had taken place behind closed doors. A determination to do the right thing throughout.

Continue reading...

Cat allergies affect millions of people. Experts explain how to manage symptoms without necessarily giving up a pet

When I got a kitten in February, I thought I had done everything right.

I’d considered getting a cat for years and carefully thought through the decision. I am allergic to them, but I had lived with a cat before and managed symptoms like sneezing and itchiness with antihistamines. I rationalized that I’d probably be OK, especially if I found a “hypoallergenic breed” (more on that later).

Continue reading...

Exclusive: PSNI repeatedly warned by monitoring group for eight months after a so-called hitlist of addresses began circulating in far-right networks

A monitoring group repeatedly warned the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) over the past eight months that anti-immigration activists were circulating the addresses of properties that were targeted in this week’s Belfast riots.

The Accountability Project Northern Ireland, a volunteer group formed last summer to monitor anti-immigration activity online, sent dozens of reports to police between November 2025 and June 2026.

Continue reading...

Those with this orientation find strangers more alluring than people they know well – and their sexuality is often misunderstood as an attachment disorder

Name: Fraysexuality.

Age: Twelve years, but only just picking up steam.

Continue reading...

For the first time on record, solar overtook coal in the US electricity mix in May 2026. “Solar supplied a record 12.8% of US electricity, while coal fell to 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.”

Social

Ja eerst even voor de scherpslijpers in de comments: bovenstaande kop klopt niet helemaal, kennelijk werd de Hugo-frikandel afgelopen zaterdag al gelanceerd in samenwerking met De Dagelijkse Standaard ("Weg met het chemische separatorvlees: Waarom de kwalitatieve Hugo-frikandel de ultieme rechtse snack is"), de site voor en door FvD-frikandellen, maar Thierry Baudet heeft er zojuist pas over getwitterd dus laat ons even. Want Eerlijk Eten, het kokende onderdeel van de FvD-sekte waarover in de Powned-docu die FvD niet wil dat u ziet wordt gesproken, heeft dus een frikandel gemaakt. Een dure frikandel misschien, maar naar eigen zeggen wel een lekkere frikandel. Die zou u bijvoorbeeld op kunnen eten terwijl u naar de Powned-docu die FvD niet wil dat u ziet zit te kijken. Een afgewogen oordeel over de Powned-docu die FvD niet wil dat u ziet vindt u overigens bij Victor Vlam, die door Sander Schimmelpennick ooit is vergeleken met een frikandel. Je kunt zeggen: de Hugo de Jonge-frikandel is een geniale bliksemafleider van de Powned-docu die FvD niet wil dat u ziet, maar je kunt ook zeggen: het is een frikandel, die genoemd is naar Hugo de Jonge. Hoe vet is dat.

Dus niet deze docu kijken!

Social

De binnenvaartsector maakt zich grote zorgen over de containerafhandeling in de Rotterdamse haven. De bedrijven vinden de wachttijden te lang, de planning onvoorspelbaar en er is te weinig plek aan de kades. Hierdoor lopen de kosten op en wordt het werk voor de schippers en planners steeds lastiger.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De documentaireserie De Afhaalchinees: Thuisbezorgd van Omroep Zwart heeft dit jaar de Zilveren Nipkowschijf gewonnen. Regisseur Kelly-Qian van Binsbergen nam de belangrijkste Nederlandse juryprijs voor televisie in ontvangst in Het Ketelhuis in Amsterdam. De Afhaalchinees: Thuisbezorgd is het vervolg op De Afhaalchinees uit 2023 en gaat over de gevolgen van adoptie.

Ook de winnaar van de Zilveren Reissmicrofoon, de prijs voor radio en podcasts, werd donderdag bekendgemaakt. De podcast De Rolverdeling van de NTR was de uitverkorene. Hierin volgt Sara de Monchy een groep 8 van een basisschool tijdens de repetities voor de eindmusical. Ze vraagt zich af wat hun musicalrol zegt over de rol in het echte leven.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De AEX-index is donderdag op de hoogste stand ooit gesloten, onder aanvoering van de chipbedrijven. Besi, ASMI en ASML wonnen tot 7,4 procent, na een flinke verhoging van de koersdoelen van de Nederlandse chipbedrijven door de Amerikaanse zakenbank Goldman Sachs.

De Amsterdamse hoofdindex eindigde 1,1 procent hoger op een nieuw slotrecord van 1063,09 punten. Het vorige record was van 25 mei, toen sloot de AEX op 1053,27 punten. De AEX heeft donderdag ook de hoogste tussentijdse koers ooit aangescherpt.

De MidKap, met daarin de middelgrote fondsen op Beursplein 5, sloot 0,4 procent hoger op 1076,96 punten. De beurzen in Frankfurt, Parijs en Londen noteerden bij het slot van de handelsdag plussen tot 0,6 procent.

TYRUS (ANP) - Bij een Israëlische aanval op de Zuid-Libanese stad Tyrus is een persoon gedood en raakten zeventien mensen gewond, meldt het Libanese staatspersbureau NNA. Bij de luchtaanval zou een woongebouw zijn geraakt in de buurt van een ziekenhuis, dat door de brokstukken ook schade opliep. Tien van de gewonden zijn medewerkers van het ziekenhuis.

Onder meer patiëntenkamers en de eerste hulpafdeling van het Hiram-ziekenhuis raakten beschadigd. Verpleegkundigen werden geraakt door rondvliegend glas en puin.

Israël heeft Tyrus de laatste weken veelvuldig onder vuur genomen. Het Israëlische leger vaardigt nu bijna dagelijks zogenoemde evacuatiebevelen uit voor grote delen van de stad. Volgens Israël worden alleen doelen van Hezbollah aangevallen.

Burgemeesters moeten volgens het kabinet meer macht krijgen wanneer demonstraties uit de hand dreigen te lopen. Ook het wetsvoorstel tegen het ophemelen van terrorisme ligt weer op tafel. „De ministers voelen duidelijk de druk vanuit de Kamer om het demonstratierecht aan te passen.”

The Smashing Pumpkins

The AI industry has been pushing a narrative that the technology is a “black box” whose inner workings are so complex that they remain unknown even to the people making it. But another black box of AI is the underlying cost of the technology, and, specifically, what the AI boom is costing people who live near massive data centers. The data centers and energy plants that power large language models and other generative AI tools are subject to contracts cloaked in non-disclosure agreements and in many cases shielded from public scrutiny on the pretext that they contain competitive information. 

A new report written by consultancy Synapse and commissioned by advocacy groups Earthjustice and Environmental Advocates Mississippi attempts to calculate the cost of 3 planned Amazon data centers to Entergy Mississippi customers, who share an energy utility with the centers. These hidden costs may offer a window into the broader burden borne by residents living near data centers around the country. The report estimates that residential customers of Entergy Mississippi, one of the state’s regional energy monopolies, have paid $38 million as of March 2026 for infrastructure and other costs related to data centers and will have paid $74 million by the end of the year. 

The average Entergy Mississippi customer is now paying at least an extra $10.60 a month to finance the data centers, the report says. It amounts to a 7 percent bill increase at a time when gas prices, choked supply chains and cuts to federal benefits are already hurting Americans. Entergy customers do not see costs for data centers highlighted separately in their bills.

According to report author Ben Havumaki, this only represents the costs that Entergy Mississippi customers have paid so far, and bills will likely rise.

“We know as a matter of fact that Entergy has made far more investments in service of data centers already and that the total..will be far in excess of that amount,” Havumaki told 404 Media. 

The assessment was made by examining public dockets filed by Entergy Mississippi as well as the company’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. While Mississippi law makes a specific cost breakdown of energy bills difficult to uncover, the authors traced a line item used to specify costs of large load energy infrastructure to make their assessment.

In 2024, Amazon announced it was building two new data centers in Madison County and in 2025 announced plans for a data center in Warren County. 

To power the data centers, Entergy announced three new gas-fired plants in 2025 in Greenville, Ridgeland, and Vicksburg, two of which are replacing existing gas plants, as well as two solar facilities for a total cost of nearly $4 billion. 

Yolanda Daniel is a member of Environmental Advocates Mississippi, which helped commission the report and opposes the data center. Daniel says that the home that she grew up in is steps from the proposed gas-powered plant in Ridgeland Entergy is building. Daniel, who spent 30 years out of the state before returning to the area last year, first learned about the power plant driving down the road dividing Madison and Hines County, where she saw a sign notifying residents of a zoning board hearing. She said she and others helped pack the hearing in opposition. 

“We named all the harms, all the studies, all the science,” Daniel says. While the Ridgeland zoning board initially voted down Entergy’s permit to examine the land, the Board of Aldermen went ahead with the plans anyway.  Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee said, “Nobody will even know it’s there, no pollution that sort of thing, and it’ll bring a lot of business to Ridgeland and Madison County,” according to the Magnolia Tribune. 

Four homeowners associations, including one Daniel belongs to, filed an administrative complaint against the gas plant.

Entergy’s public messaging about the data centers focuses on the company using its newfound revenue from Amazon to make grid improvements that will lower customers’ bills in the long term. Haley Fisackerly, the company’s CEO, has argued that though energy bills are going up, they are going up at a slower pace than if the data centers were not built. 

In a June 8 press release, Fisackerly touted the company’s previously announced “Superpower Mississippi” plan, which includes $300 million of grid improvements he says will save customers money by, “improving reliability and reducing power outages through stronger materials, tree trimming measures and technology-driven distribution network upgrades.” He says the improvements are funded by Amazon and Avaio, which constructs data centers. Fisackerly says that this is in addition to $600 million grid improvements the company already had planned. 

The announcement assumes that Entergy would have replaced the two power plants regardless and makes hard-to-prove assertions about energy efficiency.

But the fact that Entergy Mississippi is already charging its customers for the construction of those energy plants is more straightforward, according to the Synapse report.

While Entergy Mississippi’s rate increases are typically restricted to 4 percent a year under state law, a 2024 law called SB2001 allows the company to raise rates in excess of that to fund the construction of energy plants that power data centers.

The fees show up in public dockets as an “interim facilities rate adjustment,” which is how Synapse reached its calculation of costs to residential customers. $8.7 million in fees associated with the Delta Blues Advanced Power Station were charged to residential customers, as are $46.7 million in costs related to data center projects whose specifics are unknown.

While in theory costs other than data center infrastructure could be present in this line item, “We see no evidence that that is occurring,” the author of the report, Ben Havumaki, told 404 Media. That’s because this line item was zeroed out before Entergy Mississippi began making its data center energy buildout, he said.

Entergy Mississippi shares a parent company with Entergy Louisiana, which approved three new gas plants last year to power Meta’s data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Entergy Louisiana has now pitched an additional seven gas plants to serve Meta’s facility. 

The report also takes issue with a March claim by Entergy that agreements with data centers will actually be saving customers in three states (Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana) $5 billion over the next two decades. Synapse says “it is possible that data centers could be offsetting some or all of their incremental costs through separate financial arrangements with Entergy,” but there is no way of confirming this because filings between Entergy and data center operators are kept confidential. 

Mississippi is a uniquely difficult state to verify Entergy’s claims that customer’s bills are being subsidized by Amazon or other tech companies. SB2001 cloaks the public service commission’s review of energy contracts from public view, designating them “a trade secret” and exempting them from the state’s freedom of information law. The law limits the Mississippi Public Service Commission’s role in making sure that data centers are distributing their costs evenly to energy utility customers. It also exempts state agencies from competitive bidding requirements when courting data centers. This means, “they can just put the shovel in the ground and start building themselves immediately without proving that they are the least costly option,” Havumaki says.

When Entergy says Amazon’s data center is saving customers money, “It's basically [saying] trust us, we've done the math and know that it works out better for you,” Havumaki says. Havumaki also notes that infrastructure costs related to data centers have skyrocketed, so Amazon has an incentive to hide costs.

The 2024 law also makes it impossible for the public service commission to adjust how much Amazon pays for its energy bills later on. 

According to the law, public utilities can enter into agreements with a large customer,  “without reference to the rates” set according to the state’s public utilities statute. ” SB2001 also says the utility can’t alter or edit the agreement between Entergy and the data center customer later on.

According to the report, this means, “once the Entergy-[Amazon]contract sets a cost allocation, that allocation is locked in. The Commission cannot revisit it even if future rate proceedings reveal that it is unfair to other customers. “ 

While the commission can’t change rates that Amazon or other tech companies pay for energy, it still has the ability to stop charging residents for energy plant construction related to data centers. But Havumaki is skeptical this would happen.

“It's highly unlikely that any commissioner would disallow recovery of any of these investments, because there is so much momentum behind this whole process,” he says.

When reached for comment about the Synapse report, a spokesperson for Entergy sent a statement saying that, “Entergy Mississippi customers are not subsidizing data centers — they’re benefitting from them. Independent regulators in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana confirm that data centers are paying their fair share, plus additional benefits for customers.” 

When it comes to Entergy’s hidden contracts with Amazon and other tech companies, the spokesperson said, “Customer confidentiality doesn’t reduce accountability. The facts are clear: Technology investment is making power in Mississippi more reliable, more affordable, and more competitive.” The company did not answer any specific questions about the interim facilities rate adjustment that shows residential customers are paying for data center infrastructure.

Amazon commissioned a report on the costs of its data centers to customers. The report found that Amazon was paying, “sufficient or surplus net revenue,” meaning that Entergy could be using its profits to subsidize other customers, but that “the use of this additional margin is at the utility’s discretion.”

The Synapse report ends with a recommendation that Entergy commit that data centers’ energy needs not be subsidized by other customers. To make the process more transparent, Entergy should have a standard contract with customer protection provisions that it uses for data center customers. 

To prevent “stranded assets,” or costs incurred by customers for infrastructure that ends up abandoned or unused, the report recommends charging a minimum rate to the data center regardless of use, as well as “exit fees” if the data center closes. 

“These are really uncontroversial, widely adopted provisions to ensure a baseline of customer protection, a baseline of transparency, and actually hold Entergy's feet to the fire,” Havumaki said.