What's up: A weekend of H-1B Visa chaos; Secret Service thwarts telecom threat; Workday's CIO on how AI is changing the role.

Good morning. OpenAI did the impossible Tuesday, making its Central Park-sized data center complex in Albilene, Texas, appear almost quaint as it detailed its plans for a $1 trillion build-out of AI infrastructure.

With the 1,100-acre site as its backdrop, OpenAI announced plans for five new U.S. data center complexes built in partnership with Oracle and Softbank. It said the new facilities, combined with an expansion to Abilene, would help bring online nearly 7 gigawatts of power, enough for almost 8 million homes.

But that’s just the start. Executives see a need for more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity to meet demand for ChatGPT, the WSJ's Berber Jin reports. And that could eventually reach closer to 100 gigawatts, one company executive said. Each gigawatt of capacity is expected to cost roughly $50 billion. Do the math. 

The announcement is part of a wider effort among tech companies to build AI data centers and comes one day after OpenAI announced a $100 billion deal with Nvidia to support its data center efforts. 

Coming soon to a sprawl near you. To give reporters a taste of  what's to come, OpenAI showcased its Albilene facility and it's pretty much what one would expect: "Fiber lines snake across the data centers and underneath the ground, allowing the AI chips—called GPUs—to talk to one another and complete requests more quickly."

The first completed data center in Albilene, called Building 1, is larger than two Walmart Supercenters.

Forecasts from memory-storage maker Micron are giving the tech rally fresh momentum today after faltering on Tuesday. Plus, Chinese tech titan Alibaba upsized its spending pledge as it released a new AI model.

More on that below, but first, a look at the chaotic weekend that was for tech workers and their employers.

The race back to work.

Chaos, confusion and races to the airport summed up last weekend for a contingent of the tech workforce in the wake of the administration's overhaul of the H-1B visa, an action the WSJ calls "a tacked-on proposal" designed to overhaul the immigration system without alienating key parts of the president’s coalition.

The WSJ reports that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a meeting with immigration hard-liners, said the new $100,000 fee for visas would be annual. The White House later walked that back, saying the new fee would only apply one time to new applicants.

More signs of AI's fresh momentum

Alibaba shares climbed after the company said it would invest more than $53 billion in artificial intelligence and released an addition to its flagship AI model series, the Qwen3-Max, which it described as its “largest and most capable” large language model yet.

Micron Technology's high-end memory for AI data centers helped the maker of memory-storage products log another rise in revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter, Barron's reports. Micron posted a profit of $3.20 billion, compared with $887 million a year earlier.

Count Sebastian Siemiatkowski, chief executive of payments provider Klarna, among the C-suiters taking up “vibe coding.” “Rather than disturbing my poor engineers and product people with what is half good ideas and half bad ideas, now I test it myself,” he told the podcast Sourcery, according to Futurism.

Readers: Would you encourage your CEO to vibe code? Why or why not?

Meanwhile, in New York City...

The Secret Service said it dismantled a network of electronic devices, which was capable of shutting down cellphone services and carrying out other telecommunications-related threats in the New York City area. Early analysis of the network shows that the devices have communicated with nation-state threat actors, the Secret Service said.

“Like something out of a Jason Bourne movie.” The network included 300 servers and 100,000 SIM cards that investigators uncovered at multiple sites. Officials also found 80 grams of cocaine and firearms at the locations, according to a law-enforcement official familiar with the matter.
 

Meta Platforms is taking its war against AI policy proposals national, pledging millions to a new super PAC, American Technology Excellence Project, the New York Times reports. The company earlier launched a statewide effort, called Meta California.

Amazon aims to close all its bricks-and-mortar Amazon Fresh U.K. stores just four years after opening its first in the country as it leans into online delivery.

During a recent discussion with the WSJLI, Workday Chief Information Officer Rani Johnson explained how AI is changing the role.

Here are highlights, edited for clarity:

A different level of responsibility. “About two years ago, I had to learn how to price GPUs so we could help procurement buy differently...And so we've had to be great business partners at the procurement side. Great business partners with legal, making sure that these contracts give us the right protections around our data…And when it's time to actually deploy, we had to train our business stakeholders… 

So our role is really kind of instructing or coaching or consulting our business partners on how to unlock value and protect themselves along the way."

You need to be fast. “We deploy and say, ‘You know what? We think most of these solutions may have only—because we went out early—maybe a year's lifespan.’ So our contracting for a certain type of technology says, we think the industry is going to either in some cases consolidate or change dramatically during this period...And we design our solutions to not just graduate, but potentially be able to migrate to more enterprise-grade platforms.”

Why the AI era is proving to be a good time to be a CIO. “I get a chance to represent the people and each persona and each function and figure out, how do we make an impact around their productivity? Sometimes it's quality. Sometimes it’s customer success…but on all the KPIs where AI just does a really, really good job of improving the quality of our outputs or outcomes, I get to be the harbinger of all good things."

Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC Tuesday night after a four-day suspension, choking up as he told the audience that it was never his intention “to make light of the murder of a young man” and criticizing the Trump administration for threatening comedians and the press. (WSJ)

A growing contingent of doctors and policymakers say they have grown wary of federal health guidance since longtime vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became Health and Human Services Secretary—and they are forming a parallel public-health universe outside the U.S. government. (WSJ)

Camp Mystic is set to reopen next year after summer floods killed more than two dozen campers and counselors at the Texas girls camp. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.