Top 5 US news stories
February 9 2026
Tech Giants Commit $650 Billion to AI Infrastructure in 2026, Eclipsing 40-Year Cost of Interstate Highway System in One Year
AI Coding Tool's Explosive Growth Puts It on Track to Generate One-Fifth of All Code by Year's End
Taxpayer-Backed Chinese Glass Giant's Ohio Factory Undercuts American Rival, Threatening 250 Jobs
SpaceX Pivots to Lunar Colony as Faster Path to Multiplanetary Life, Targeting City on Moon Within a Decade
Musk's Starlink Cuts Off Russian Troops in Ukraine After Kyiv Requests Crackdown on Illicit Access, Disrupting Battlefield Communications
Seahawks Defense Leads Team to Its 2nd Super Bowl Title...Seattle won, 29-13, after holding New England scoreless through three quarters...
Tech Giants Commit $650 Billion to AI Infrastructure in 2026, Eclipsing 40-Year Cost of Interstate Highway System in One Year
Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft plan to spend a combined $650 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, with nearly all of it directed toward artificial intelligence infrastructure including chips, servers, and data centers. The figure represents a roughly 70 percent increase over the approximately $380 billion the four companies spent in 2025, which was itself a record, and exceeds the inflation-adjusted cost of the U.S. Interstate Highway System, which was built over four decades for an estimated $530 billion to $650 billion in today's dollars. Amazon leads the group at $200 billion, followed by Google at $175 billion to $185 billion, Microsoft at around $145 billion annualized, and Meta at $115 billion to $135 billion. The companies view AI as central to the future of search, advertising, cloud services, and new product development, and each is racing to build compute capacity before competitors do, even as investors express concern over plummeting free cash flow and near-term returns—Amazon's stock dropped 8 percent after its spending announcement.
Citizen Journal
AI Coding Tool's Explosive Growth Puts It on Track to Generate One-Fifth of All Code by Year's End
Claude Code, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Anthropic that writes and submits software code, now accounts for 4 percent of all public commits—individual changes to a codebase—on GitHub, the world's largest software development platform, according to an analysis by the semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis. At its current growth rate, the firm projects the tool will be responsible for more than 20 percent of all daily commits by the end of 2026, a milestone that would mark a fundamental shift in how software is built. A commit is the basic unit of work in software development, recording each change a programmer—or, increasingly, an AI agent—makes to a project's code. The trend suggests that AI systems are rapidly moving from assisting human developers to independently authoring significant portions of the world's software, a transformation SemiAnalysis describes as an inflection point for the industry.
SemiAnalysis
Taxpayer-Backed Chinese Glass Giant's Ohio Factory Undercuts American Rival, Threatening 250 Jobs
A Chinese-owned glass factory in Moraine, Ohio, once celebrated as a symbol of Rust Belt revival after it took over a shuttered General Motors plant a decade ago with the support of state taxpayers, is now threatening the livelihood of a nearby American competitor and raising broader questions about foreign investment from U.S. rivals. Fuyao Glass America, which supplies General Motors, Ford, Stellantis, and other automakers, has undercut domestic competitors on price, and rivals allege the company employs unfair business and labor practices. Vitro, a company that has operated a glass plant in Crestline, Ohio, since the 1950s, spent the past year considering whether to close the facility and its approximately 250 jobs; after announcing plans to shut down at the end of 2026, the company told employees last month it would continue operating, though its long-term future remains uncertain. "The entry of Chinese firms into the U.S. auto industry not only threatens the safety and security of domestic supply chains," said Carlos Bernal, Vitro's head of automotive glass, adding that the companies "jeopardize entire communities that rely on American manufacturing jobs." Since 2019, Vitro has closed three other auto-glass plants in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Indiana, decisions the company attributes in large part to Chinese competition.
WSJ
SpaceX Pivots to Lunar Colony as Faster Path to Multiplanetary Life, Targeting City on Moon Within a Decade
SpaceX has shifted its primary focus from Mars to building what CEO Elon Musk described as a "self-growing city on the Moon," a goal he said the company could potentially achieve in less than 10 years, compared with 20 or more years for a Mars settlement. "The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars," Musk wrote on his social media platform X, but he said the Moon offers a critical logistical advantage: launch windows to the lunar surface open every 10 days with a two-day transit time, whereas missions to Mars can only depart when the planets align every 26 months and require a six-month journey. "This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city," Musk said, adding that the "overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster." He said SpaceX still intends to begin work on a Mars city in roughly five to seven years, but the lunar effort will take precedence.
X (Elon Musk)
Musk's Starlink Cuts Off Russian Troops in Ukraine After Kyiv Requests Crackdown on Illicit Access, Disrupting Battlefield Communications
Russian troops fighting in Ukraine have lost access to Starlink satellite internet after SpaceX acted on a Ukrainian request to curtail illicit use of the network by Moscow's forces, according to reports from Russia's pro-war military bloggers. The bloggers, who closely track the country's armed forces, began noting the disruption this week, reporting frustration and communications problems along the front lines, where Russian soldiers had for years relied on smuggled Starlink terminals to connect to the internet. The cutoff represents the latest turn in a nearly four-year-old conflict defined by an unrelenting race for technological supremacy that has reshaped modern warfare. The full extent of the impact on Russian operations remains unclear, but the loss of reliable satellite communications on the battlefield could degrade coordination and morale among front-line units that had come to depend on the service.
NYT
February 9 1942: Daylight saving time instituted
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