National News
States Discover That Permitting Is a Policy, Not a Formality
Governments across the country are rewriting approval processes after concluding that the gap between funded projects and finished ones is largely administrative.
Infrastructure
National News
The Gas Tax Stops Paying for the Roads
A per-gallon levy funds American highways while fuel consumption decouples from road use. The replacement everyone points to is a mileage fee, and almost nobody has been willing to build one.
AI
Inference Costs Move From Footnote to Line Item
Training got the headlines and the capital budget. The recurring cost of running models in production is what finance departments are now trying to forecast, mostly badly.
AI
AI Spending Moves From Experimentation to Infrastructure
Corporate AI budgets are shifting out of innovation labs and into core operating lines, a change that is quietly redrawing how companies account for technology itself.
National News
The Rural Broadband Buildout Reaches the Hard Part
The easy miles are wired. What remains are the households that made the economics impossible in the first place, and the programs now confronting them.
National News
The Interconnection Queue Becomes the Binding Constraint on New Power
More generation capacity is waiting for permission to connect to the grid than is currently operating on it. The bottleneck is not construction or capital but a study process nobody designed for this volume.
Technology
Companies Start Moving Workloads Back Off the Cloud
Repatriation was dismissed for years as a vendor talking point. It is now a line item, driven less by ideology than by workloads whose usage stopped being unpredictable.
National News
Small Water Utilities Reach the End of Deferred Maintenance
Tens of thousands of small systems have spent a generation postponing pipe replacement. The postponement is ending on its own schedule, and the bill is arriving in towns least able to bond for it.
Technology
The API Economy Enters Its Utility Phase
The scramble of a thousand developer-tool startups is resolving into something duller and more durable: infrastructure priced, regulated and consolidated like the utility it always was.