People familiar with the matter said the projects would be located at the Pecem industrial port in Ceara and could reach up to one gigawatt of capacity. Voltalia plans to supply the facilities with electricity from its renewable energy pipeline in northeastern Brazil. Final agreements will depend on the approval of new tax incentives for export-oriented developments at the site. Voltalia has also made early approaches to US hyperscalers including Alphabet and Meta as it seeks partners capable of funding the vast computing infrastructure required. A one gigawatt advanced data centre can cost more than $30bn, while a 1.5GW project in Rio de Janeiro is expected to cost around $50bn. Brazil has emerged as Latin America's strongest contender in the global AI data centre race thanks to abundant renewable energy, an interconnected grid, and extensive subsea cable connections at Fortaleza. Nearly half of all planned and existing South American data centres are in Brazil. ByteDance said it is in advanced negotiations with local partners for a separate project at Pecem. Casa dos Ventos is reportedly planning a 300MW facility with ByteDance worth 50bn reais ($9.4bn), although no agreement has been finalised. Brookfield declined to comment....

But as companies scale across states and/or add new revenue streams, tax exposure also can quietly expand in the background. The U.S. has more than 12,000 distinct sales tax jurisdictions, and each has its own rules and rates. So, even a small misstep can snowball into significant penalties or create challenges during due diligence. At the most basic level, sales tax is what a business collects from customers on taxable goods or services. Use tax applies when a company purchases taxable items and no sales tax was charged (which commonly occurs from an out-of-state vendor). For example, if a startup based in California orders $10,000 of equipment from an Oregon supplier, the business likely owes use tax to California. The point of the system is to keep local and remote sellers on equal footing. However, complexity arises because rules differ dramatically by state and industry. For founders, that complexity becomes more than a compliance nuisance ' it's a business risk. Noncompliance can delay funding, lower valuation and, in some cases, create personal liability....

New York's mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, campaigned on a promise to raise the city's income tax on its richest residents from 3.9% to 5.9%. Combined with the state income tax, which is 10.9% for the top bracket, the increase would cement the city's position as having the highest taxes on top earners in the country. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul echoed the concern, opposing the proposal 'because we cannot have them leave the state.' Before the election, Mamdani's opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, joked that if Mamdani won, 'even I will move to Florida.' I research whether high earners actually move when their taxes go up. My colleagues and I have analyzed millionaire taxes in New Jersey and California, the migration of Forbes billionaires globally and decades of IRS data tracing where Americans with million-dollar incomes live. Top earners are often thought of as 'mobile millionaires' who are ever searching for lower-tax places to live. In reality, they're often reluctant to leave the places where they built their careers and raised their families....

Is anti-Semitism in American political discourse actually just a carefully cultivated deception' Over the weekend, Elon Musk's X revealed the location of every account on the site, and the results were eye-opening. Viral MAGA influencers ranting about 'my tax dollars' funding foreign wars were exposed as Pakistani or Russian. Thirst traps of attractive Israeli soldiers turned out to be run by Indians. Heartbreaking stories of Gazan suffering were found to be posted from Europe. And many overtly racist accounts championing Nick Fuentes, the young white supremacist and Hitler aficionado, were revealed to be foreign-run. This discovery led some to suggest that anti-Semitism on the app was in fact an inauthentic intrusion into the American debate with little organic appeal. 'Groypers are in shambles right now,' crowed Eyal Yakoby, a student activist who once testified before Congress about anti-Semitism on college campuses, referring to the supporters of Fuentes. 'It's all a foreign psyop,' he added. 'Liberals point to these accounts and say, 'See, here's the evidence that Trump's base, the MAGA movement, is racist and anti-Semitic to its core,'' the libertarian journalist Robby Soave wrote. 'Well, guess what' A substantial number of them are based in the Middle East'Pakistan in particular. They're not MAGA or America First. They're cosplaying as America First in order to discredit MAGA.'...