Wednesday June 24, 2026
Death Threats, Clouded Leopards, and the Data Center Nashville Is Fighting About
There is a particular kind of excitement that comes from watching one of your portfolio companies build something real. DC BLOX is looking to build a data center in Nashville, and for those of us who backed the company, this was supposed to be a proud moment, critical infrastructure rising to serve a growing city. The proposed site sits next to the Nashville Zoo, and that single fact has turned a routine permitting process into a national media battle. DC BLOX employees have started receiving death threats and people whose job is to design cooling systems and pull fiber are being told to fear for their safety. Something is broken if this is how we talk about the infrastructure our country needs and depends on.
Here’s what the media is not telling you. DC BLOX filed through the standard public process, on a parcel of land where a data center had previously been approved to operate. The company committed to closed loop and waterless cooling, so the facility consumes almost no water on an ongoing basis. It committed to paying the utility for every megawatt it draws and for any new infrastructure required, so none of that cost lands on local ratepayers. It also plans to locate its generators on the far side of the building inside sound attenuation enclosures and to shield its lighting.
A zoo caring for white rhinos and clouded leopards has every reason to ask hard questions about resources, noise and light. Yet much of what is circulating online is simply untrue. DC BLOX is not building an AI factory draining the aquifer and overloading the grid. It is a cloud and communications facility built to carry the internet traffic Nashville already generates. Calling it a monster does not make it one.
The larger stakes are easy to lose in a local zoning fight. Technological leadership is won in the ground, in the unglamorous concrete and fiber and power that let a country compute faster than its rivals. China is building this capacity at a pace that should concern anyone paying attention. Every data center America does not build is a unit of compute that settles somewhere else, and with it the jobs and the strategic edge that compound on top. Honest questions deserve honest answers, and DC BLOX has offered them. What we cannot afford is to let fabricated outrage and a new culture of protest decide what gets built. A nation that allows fake news and a crowd with placards to veto its own future surrenders its lead one project at a time. The workers breaking ground in Nashville are not the enemy of progress. They are how we keep it.
◾ EU Monetary Affairs Committee approves digital euro (European Parliament)
◾ CFTC Chair: perps may not suit traditional asset classes (CFTC)
◾ Mythos model identifies vulnerabilities in classified US government system (CNBC)
Government & NGO Actions
◾ Senate Dems call for hearing on $500M UAE investment in World Liberty Financial (Senate Banking)
◾ Catholic leaders urge Congress to strip CLARITY Act provision weakening safeguards against trafficking, child exploitation, illicit finance (Punchbowl)
◾ CFTC sues Kentucky over prediction market lawsuits (The Hill)
◾ US law enforcement raises concerns about CLARITY Act (Eleanor Terrett)
◾ DOJ seizes cloud infrastructure used by Cambodia’s Huione Group (DOJ)
◾ NASA warns launch sites nearing capacity (NASA OIG)
◾ NSA loses access to Anthropic’s Mythos model (NYT)
Financial Notices & Public Company Releases
◾ Financial updates:
CEA Industries $BNC FY’26: Revenue $29.3M +4.8% y/y | Net income $115.2M (SEC Filing)
Cerebras Systems $CBRS Q1’26: Revenue $193.4M +94% y/y | Op loss $15.0M | Net loss $14.0M | aEBITDA $12.7M (Cerebras)
◾ SK Hynix plans $29B US listing (Bloomberg)
◾ Alphabet $GOOGL added to Dow Jones Industrial Average (CNBC)
◾ Samsung Electronics planning $59B share buyback (Reuters)
◾ ByteDance seeking $20B offshore loan (Bloomberg)
◾ SpaceX $SPCX upsizes debut bond sale to $25B (Bloomberg)
◾ $CBOE launches prediction market with binary options on Mini-S&P 500 (Cboe)
◾ GameStop $GME CEO withdraws personal performance award to focus on eBay acquisition (GameStop)
◾ $CBOE weighing conversion of continuous crypto futures to perps (CoinTelegraph)
Restructuring, Hacks, Losses & Legal Updates
◾ Alibaba $BABA sues US government over Chinese military designation (Reuters)
◾ $GOOGL confidentially settles YouTube case over social media harm to children (Reuters)
◾ Federal judge allows search warrant for chatbot records in crypto case (Reuters)
◾ US government sued for cutting foreign access to Mythos (Reuters)
◾ Voyager Digital investors appeal dismissal of claims against Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks (The Block)
Crypto Protocols, Applications & Business News
◾ DCG taking self-miner Fortitude public via merger with HeartSciences $HSCS (Business Wire)
◾ CEA Industries $BNC reaches cooperation agreement with YZi Labs (Globe Newswire)
◾ StarkWare launches Private KYC preserving document confidentiality (StarkWare)
◾ Bitget launches stock trading for crypto investors (Globe Newswire)
◾ 21Shares releases 2026 Crypto Market Report (Globe Newswire)
◾ OpenPayd secures MiCA license (Business Insider)
AI Models, Applications & Developments
◾ Qualcomm $QCOM in talks to provide custom chip design services to ByteDance (Reuters)
◾ Hyperscale Data $GPUS signs 10-year deal with California neocloud for 20 MW of AI compute (PR Newswire)
The Attention Economy, Gaming & Interactive Shifts
◾ $META to develop own prediction markets (NYT)
◾ $META introduces new line of smart glasses (Meta)
◾ Tencent $TCEHY to launch Slack-like communication app (Bloomberg)
◾ Kalshi bars users in India (Economic Times)
◾ Tencent $TCEHY plans to exit minority stakes in Japanese gaming studios (Bloomberg)
Space Systems, Satellites & Cosmic Activity
◾ Airbus $EADSY and Leonardo $FINMY call for European space champion to challenge SpaceX (FT)
◾ Boeing $BA wins $2B contract for USSF communications satellites (SpaceNews)
◾ Rocket Lab $RKLB launches USSF mission with under 17 hours notice (Space.com)