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• Bolt is a data center development firm co-founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt last year.
• The company is in talks with Google to anchor a large campus it plans to build in West Texas.
• Google and its Big Tech peers have unveiled record spending on AI infrastructure in 2026.

Bolt Data and Energy, a data center development firm that was cofounded late last year by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is negotiating a deal that would allow it to begin construction on a large data center project it is planning in West Texas.

Schmidt’s firm is in discussions with Google, his former employer, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks. The tech giant, one of the leaders in the race to develop and commercialize artificial intelligence, is considering a commitment of 250 megawatts, according to one of the people. The other person said it was too early to characterize the exact size of the potential transaction because it was still under discussion.

The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because the potential transaction is still being arranged and the talks are confidential.

“We don’t comment on rumors,” a Google spokeswoman told Business Insider, declining to comment further. Google announced last year that it plans to build $40 billion of cloud and AI infrastructure in Texas by 2027.

The potential deal highlights how Big Tech is racing to secure the power, physical infrastructure, and land needed to fuel AI, even as the costs and financial risks of those bets loom.

In December, Bolt completed its first funding round, raising $150 million from investors, including $50 million from Texas Pacific Land Corporation, a public company that owns large tracts of land in West Texas. As part of the investment from TPL, Bolt will develop data centers on land in TPL’s portfolio.

A presentation detailing Bolt’s development plans, shared with Business Insider, said that TPL’s land would give it access to abundant power and water for cooling. These commodities have become increasingly strained as data center development has boomed around the country.

The presentation states that Bolt’s development would begin with an “initial 250 megawatt facility” and expand in 250-500 megawatt increments into a 5 gigawatt campus.

Bolt’s plan is one of several large-scale projects that have been envisioned in Texas to cater to the AI race. Fermi, a public company co-founded by former Texas governor and US Energy Secretary Rick Perry, has plans for an 11-gigawatt campus in Amarillo.

In December, Business Insider revealed that Amazon had pulled back a $150 million cash advance it had pledged as part of a preliminary deal to anchor the project. Fermi’s disclosure of the reimbursement of that advance caused its stock to fall by 50%. Fermi’s CEO, Toby Neugebauer, told Business Insider that although Amazon had reclaimed its advance, the negotiations for it to take space with Fermi were still ongoing.

Major bank lenders who extended $38 billion to finance the construction of data center campuses in Shackleford County, Texas, and Port Washington, Wisconsin, for Oracle and OpenAI, meanwhile, have had difficulty selling off pieces of the huge loan to other banks and investors. Those troubles stem, in part, from worries about whether Oracle’s credit will be strained by its massive AI spending.

To help allay concerns, Oracle announced it would raise as much as $50 billion in debt and equity in 2026 to continue to pursue its AI buildout while also maintaining “a solid investment-grade balance sheet.”

Last week, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, revealed in its fourth-quarter earnings report that it plans to spend between $175 and $185 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, roughly double its outlay in 2025. The spending is being done largely to pay for AI equipment and infrastructure.

A record wave of spending has been announced by big technology companies on AI this year, including Amazon’s disclosure during its earnings last week that it would spend $200 billion alone this year.

• Instagram is building an internal prototype of a new app that’s similar to Snapchat.
• The disappearing photos app is being called “Instants.”
• A Meta spokesperson confirmed the internal prototype is not testing externally.

Hey Meta, are you also nostalgic for 2016?

As social media users wax poetic and share throwbacks about the social media heyday of 2016, it seems Meta wants to revive a piece of it.

The tech giant is working on an internal prototype of a new stand-alone app for sending disappearing photos, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.

Yes, that does sound like Snapchat’s original premise.

According to a screenshot shared by mobile developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who reverse engineers Instagram to reveal prototypes, the app is being called “Instants.”

“Share disappearing photos with friends,” Paluzzi’s rendering says.

The Meta spokesperson said the stand-alone Instants app is not testing externally.

Instagram has also been testing a feature called Instants, which was previously called “Shots,” with some users of its main app. It has been a limited test available to “some countries globally,” the Meta spokesperson said.

The Instants feature lets Instagram users quickly send disappearing photos in their direct-messaging inbox. Once the photo message is opened, the photo disappears and expires 24 hours after sending, per Instagram’s Help Center.

Instants can only be “sent to followers you follow back,” the same help page says. The photos cannot be edited.

This isn’t the first time Instagram has rolled out disappearing messaging tools.

In 2016, Instagram launched tools for disappearing text and photos in its DM product. The platform also introduced “Vanish Mode” in 2020, which lets users turn on disappearing messages by swiping up in the DM thread. These features are still live within the Instagram app, but Instants would be a new way to send disappearing content to friends.

A new app from Meta shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s rolled out several stand-alone apps in the company’s recent history, including Threads, Edits, and Meta AI.

More friends, more Snapchat

Instagram has been doubling down on ways for friends — which Meta defines as people who mutually follow each other — to interact on the app.

Meta seems to be looking at Snapchat as a frequent source of inspiration for how people communicate with their closest friends.

Disappearing messages aren’t the only way Instagram has imitated Snapchat. Stories, famously, was a clone of Snapchat’s highly successful product. Last year, Instagram also launched a social map feature similar to Snapchat’s Snap Map.

There’s a reason Snap CEO Evan Spiegel keeps “VP Product @ Meta” in his LinkedIn bio.

• ChatGPT has hundreds of millions of users, and only a small percentage of them pay to use the service.
• But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to turn those free users into revenue-generating users by showing them ads.
• This move has been a long time coming, and has real risk: What if users think ChatGPT’s answers are influenced by the ads it sells?

OpenAI’s Sam Altman used to think ads were gross.

Now he’s rolling them out.

OpenAI has formally announced that it will start showing ads to some US users, starting Monday. The ads will show up for some of ChatGPT’s free users, as well as some users who’ve subscribed to ChatGPT Go, a new $8-a-month tier the company rolled out last month.

Here’s a mockup:

OpenAI says it will serve ads to you based on the conversation you’re currently having with ChatGPT, as well as previous queries and chats. It will also factor in whether you’ve engaged with — or hidden —other ads it has shown you.

For now, the company says, it won’t use data about what you do outside of ChatGPT to target ads inside the service. But I’d be surprised if they don’t do that eventually, since just about every other big internet ad platform uses those signals.

The fact that ChatGPT is launching ads isn’t news: The company has been circling the idea for months, and last month it formally announced that ads would be coming to the service.

And that news became the subject of a back-and-forth between OpenAI and rival Anthropic, which included a testy social media post from Altman and a cheeky Super Bowl ad from Anthropic underlining the possible trust issues OpenAI may have once ads intermingle with “organic” results on the service.

Now we’ll see how these things actually look, and work — and what users and advertisers think of them.

• Public comment is open on Trump’s student-loan repayment overhaul.
• New borrowing caps for post-graduate nursing programs dominated the conversation.
• Advocates and lawmakers expressed concern that the limits could exacerbate the healthcare shortage.

Nursing programs are taking center stage in the public conversation on President Donald Trump’s student-loan repayment overhaul.

Public comment on the Department of Education’s proposed student-loan changes has been open for one week, giving anyone the opportunity to submit feedback. Those changes include new income-driven repayment plans, updates to the handling of defaulted student loans, and new borrowing caps for advanced programs.

The new borrowing caps, in particular, have sparked conversation and concern among advocates, lawmakers, and students. The department proposed a $100,000 lifetime borrowing limit for graduate students and a $200,000 limit for professional students, and narrowed the programs that would qualify as “professional” to 10, including medicine, dentistry, and law.

Post-graduate nursing programs are not included in the professional definition, meaning that students in those programs would not qualify for the higher borrowing limit. Of the over 2,500 public comments received so far, more than 1,200 mentioned nursing. One comment, for example, said: “During a critical nursing shortage it’s vital that nurses are able to advance their education so they can teach the next generation of nurses.”

Another comment said: “Policies that make graduate nursing education less affordable will not only discourage nurses from advancing their education but will also reduce the number of nurse educators available to train the next generation of nurses. Fewer educators mean fewer nursing school slots and longer delays in bringing new nurses into the workforce, and ultimately compromising care.”

Ellen Keast, the department’s press secretary for education, previously cited data from the Department of Education showing that 95% of nursing students are borrowing within the student-loan limits when asked about concerns on the borrowing caps.

“As for the most expensive outlying 5%, enrolled students are grandfathered into current lending limits to ensure there are no barriers to completion,” Keast said. “We expect that institutions charging tuition rates well above market prices will consider lowering tuition thanks to these historic reforms.”

Data from the College Scorecard also showed that most advanced nursing programs would not be affected by the proposed caps. Still, many of the comments expressed concern that the caps could exacerbate the existing healthcare shortage. In December, a bipartisan group of over 140 lawmakers sent a letter to Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent, urging him to revise the definition of a professional degree to include postgraduate nursing programs.

“Classifying these programs as graduate programs would result in these students having to take out additional student loans to cover the remainder of their tuition, which will limit the ability for students to complete their advanced degree,” the lawmakers said. They referred to the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist program, which can cost over $200,000 — double the proposed cap for the program.

The public comment period for the repayment proposals ends on March 2. The department said in a press release that it “may make changes” to its regulations based on the feedback it receives before moving toward final implementation this summer.

• When I was a student at Stanford University, my classmates raved about ChatGPT.
• I refused to use the AI system because I would have done a disservice to myself.
• I had the privilege of learning from many fine writing instructors and professors — not ChatGPT.

It wasn’t until my junior year at Stanford University that I first heard about ChatGPT from classmates who’d mentioned they had “chat” summarize the class reading.

When I asked them what they meant by “chat,” they told me all about the AI tool, chatGPT.

I was an English major with a creative writing emphasis during my time at Stanford, so reading and writing were important to my work.

I wanted to ask the students who used ChatGPT to do the reading: Why are you even at Stanford? Why be at any university at all? Isn’t the point of pursuing higher education to expand our minds and become better communicators?

As I progressed through my studies, I would hear ChatGPT mentioned more and more often, with some college professors even adding an AI clause to their syllabi. Some instructors would allow students to use ChatGPT for assistance (a murky definition) while others wouldn’t allow it at all.

I refused to use the AI tool in any way.

I chose not to use ChatGPT as a Stanford student

I didn’t care if instructors allowed students to use ChatGPT. I deliberately chose not to use it at all.

Sure, studying and studying literature in particular was difficult, but this was why I’d chosen the major; it was challenging, and I wanted to become better with words.

I chose to become an English major because I wanted to improve my writing. I lacked confidence in my writing because I didn’t know how to use words when I first entered college. I didn’t have that finesse.

Apart from wanting to become a better writer, I also wanted to defend my opinions and thoughts with flair. I wanted to articulate sentiment precisely and formulate strong arguments. I wanted to write strongly worded emails. I wanted to think and speak freely.

I wouldn’t have been able to achieve any of that if I used ChatGPT.

It would be a disservice to my professors and the past students to use ChatGPT

Whenever I’d hear a peer say they just used ChatGPT for their homework assignments, I’d often think about the many deserving students who hadn’t been offered a seat at the university — students who, in a heartbeat, would’ve happily done these assignments themselves.

I had the privilege of studying words at a strong English literature department with so many fine writing instructors. I leaped at opportunities to have my very own work critiqued by great writers. I still can’t fathom having “my” writing, either partially or entirely synthetic, reviewed by instructors.

After all, I was writing in and walking about the same grounds that writing legends once did — writers like bell hooks, John Steinbeck, Karen Zacarías, and David Henry Hwang. With this writing pedigree in mind, I was inspired and motivated to write myself.

Not a day goes by without me putting my English degree to good use. Not a day goes by without me being grateful to my past self for putting in the work to earn the degree herself — without ChatGPT.

• Kristen Boelen, founder of Lunch Break Vintage.
• She regularly cruises thrift stores to supply her online stores.
• On a recent trip, she scored an authentic $3,000 Bottega Veneta bag. She paid $8 for it.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kristen Boelen, the founder of Lunch Break Vintage. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I have been thrifting since the moment I could drive. Back then, I was into higher-end things that were out of my budget, and I’d go thrift shopping to find similar items that I could afford. That habit carried on through college and beyond, including when I was most recently working as an art director for a wine and spirits company. While working there, I’d thrift on my lunch breaks.

I’d find stuff for myself, as well as one-of-a-kind items that didn’t fit. I wanted someone to take that stuff. So I began selling items on Whatnot.

I’d thrift on my lunch break from work, and then on the weekends I’d go live and sell my pieces. My business grew from there, and I named it Lunch Break Vintage, which I began full time in February 2025.

I scored a luxury designer bag during a recent shopping trip

In December 2025, I was at a thrift store in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a normal Wednesday, which is the day this particular thrift store opens for the week, and when I always try to go. It was very empty that day.

Two woven leather bags caught my eye. You see woven leather bags all the time. There are so many Bottega Veneta dupes. I didn’t really think much about it, just that one of them looked exceptionally nice.

I first noticed the hardware, then the leather slouching and hanging. I could tell it was soft leather. When I picked it up, it was heavy — designer leather bags have a weight to them because of the hardware. I opened it up and saw the logo. You can see in the video that I posted that’s the moment my jaw drops. The leather inside was really soft and buttery too; that’s always a sign a bag is legitimate.

I know they sort through and send a lot of the higher-end pieces to an online audience. It seemed unrealistic that someone wouldn’t have set it aside. I thought, if they had put it out there, it must not be real.

I used technology to help confirm my suspicions

I took a photo of it and put it into Google Lens, and found on Vestaire Collective there was the exact same bag and color. That clued me into the style name and that it had been retired. There’s a video of me going, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” once I figured out where the serial tag was. I got out of there as quickly as possible, paying $8 for the bag.

I later had it authenticated through an app I use called Authentic Detective. It will give you a certificate of authenticity. Online research says the bag is valued at around $3,000.

I’m keeping the bag for myself. It’s something that will be passed down for generations. I had so many comments on the video saying that the bag was ugly, but I love it.

Scoring finds at the thrift store takes a little skill — and luck

I thrift all the time because I now do this for a living, but I think consistency is key. I thrift at least three times a week, every week. It’s also important not to just pick up what is trending. A good secondhand item has to check all the boxes for me, and I really care about quality, always looking for natural fibers. I focus on what makes people feel elevated and the kinds of secondhand pieces they can keep in their closets forever.

Don’t believe that middle-of-nowhere places are garbage. Some of my best, coolest, most unique pieces have come from middle-of-nowhere stores.