New York passes one-year data center moratorium

Euwyn Poon, former founder of e-scooter company Spin, has raised $5 million to launch Orbital, a startup planning to build 10,000 space-based data centers. Poon previously scaled Spin to 250,000 scooters before exiting that venture. The funding signals investor interest in orbital infrastructure as a new computing frontier, though the technical and regulatory challenges remain substantial.

Seattle City Council will vote June 9th on a one-year moratorium on new data centers, just two months after companies proposed five large-scale facilities in the city. Amazon employees have joined other supporters in testifying for the moratorium, citing concerns about water consumption, electricity prices, and noise. The vote reflects growing tension between tech infrastructure expansion and local environmental and operational impacts.

Databricks is in talks to raise new funding at a valuation between $165 billion and $175 billion, up from its $134 billion valuation in a late 2025 round. The database management software company could launch the funding round within the next month. The 13-year-old company continues to remain private, raising successive rounds of capital rather than pursuing a public listing.

AWS has introduced cross-Region Inference (CRIS) on Amazon Bedrock, a managed capability that automatically routes AI model inference requests across multiple AWS regions within defined geographic boundaries. The feature allows European customers to access generative AI models and compute capacity while maintaining compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR. CRIS includes both global profiles that route to any supported AWS commercial region and EU-specific profiles designed for customers with regional data processing requirements.