California now has 286 operating data centers — soon over 300 — and the national-average story is hiding where the water for compute actually comes from.

AI's reflexive turn — MarketingProfs reports Anthropic's "dreaming" research preview, which gives autonomous agents time between sessions to review prior behavior and learn from it, while Accelirate cites Gartner predicting that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027 because organisations cannot enforce purpose limits or quickly terminate misbehaving agents.

Where compute lives — Around today's California focus, two related signals: Salt Lake Tribune reports that Utah's 920 MW of operational data centers plus 2,600 MW under construction could form a heat island over the already-shrinking Great Salt Lake, and a Virginia Tech st ...