This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil fields. For example, as a Bitcoin mining facility in rural Dickens County, Texas is converted into a 1.6 gigawatt data center, Bloomberg reports its workers are living in gray housing units with access to a gym, a laundromat, game rooms, and a cafeteria that grills steaks on-demand. Target apparently sees the U.S. data center construction boom as its most lucrative growth opportunity, with chief commercial officer Troy Schrenk describing it as 'the largest, most actionable pipeline I've ever seen.' Target also owns the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, which holds families detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Court filings have alleged that the center's food has had worms and mold, and that children have suffered without accommodation for allergies and special diets. Actively scaling' Fundraising' Planning your next launch'TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 delivers tactical playbooks and direct access to 1,000+ founders and investors who are building, backing, and closing.Register by March 13 to save up to $300....

Few venture capitalists have the name recognition ' or tenure ' of Tim Draper. A fixture in Silicon Valley for decades, Draper has built a reputation for bold, often contrarian bets that have yielded some of the industry's most notable wins, including early investments in SpaceX, Tesla, Coinbase, Skype and Twitch. His career, which spans his time as founder of Draper Associates, DFJ and the Draper Venture Network, has also included high-profile missteps ' most notably Theranos ' underscoring the risk and volatility that goes along with making bold wagers. A frequent personality on TV and social media, Draper is also known as a relentless champion for decentralized technology and a leading voice for bitcoin and blockchain. In 2024, he launched Draper TV, a media network, where he continues to host a global pitch competition called 'Meet the Drapers.' The series, which is now entering its ninth season, invites viewers at home to invest alongside him in innovative startups. Draper exudes an almost schoolboy-like enthusiasm and passion when it comes to startups, technology, bitcoin and innovation. I recently spoke with him ' while he was sporting his favorite purple and gold bitcoin tie ' to get his thoughts on everything from his use of digital twins, how the current AI boom compares to previous cycles, and how he wishes policymakers approached tech regulation....

On Thursday, Dorsey announced that Block, the payments company he founded that operates Square, Cash App, and Tidal, is cutting more than 4,000 employees, nearly half its global workforce, taking it from over 10,000 workers down to just under 6,000. Investors responded enthusiastically, sending the stock up more than 24% in after-hours trading. It isn't the first time a major tech company has done something of the sort. In November 2022, Musk slashed roughly 50% of Twitter's staff in a single stroke after taking the company private, a move that rattled many in Silicon Valley and rewrote the unofficial rules for how far a CEO could go in one shot. Dorsey was in an unusual position to watch it unfold. He'd rolled his roughly 2.4% ownership stake in Twitter into Musk's takeover rather than taking a cash payout, making him one of the largest outside investors in what became X. The two men have had one of tech's stranger relationships, with warm words giving way to public shots, then back again. Dorsey championed Musk's Twitter acquisition, then said Musk 'should have walked away.' He helped launch Bluesky, the decentralized Twitter alternative, then quit its board and called X 'freedom technology.' Both are also vocal Bitcoin advocates ' Block and Tesla each carry the cryptocurrency on their balance sheets....

The past few months have been disastrous for cryptocurrencies. Even after bouncing back a bit on Friday, bitcoin is now down almost 50 percent from its all-time high in October, and other cryptocurrencies'including well-established ones such as ethereum and solana'have fallen far further. Crypto winters are nothing new: The biggest drop in bitcoin's history, in 2011, knocked 99 percent off its value. But this one feels especially painful, because it came at a moment when crypto enthusiasts thought they had finally made it. Donald Trump's election finally gave the industry a president who was avowedly crypto-friendly. Trump appointed regulators who, unlike those under Joe Biden, showed no interest in limiting crypto's spread or cracking down on crypto exchanges. In October, he pardoned the founder of the biggest crypto exchange, Binance, who had been convicted of violating U.S. law by failing to adequately prevent money laundering on the site. Trump even put out a crypto coin of his own days before his inauguration'the value of which, like most meme coins, skyrocketed before collapsing....