California Subpoenas OpenAI as Egypt Signs $270m Data Center Deal

California's attorney general issued an investigative subpoena to OpenAI on Thursday, opening a formal inquiry into cybersecurity incidents involving the company's AI models, according to The Guardian. The subpoena is part of a broader inquiry into potential vulnerabilities in the company's technology.

The same day, Egyptian conglomerate Intro Group confirmed plans to invest $270 million in the first phase of the Kemet Data Center project in the Suez Canal Economic Zone, according to DatacenterDynamics. The 80MW facility will span 80,000 square metres and is expected to be partially powered by solar energy.

Both developments landed within hours of each other, and both point in the same direction: the infrastructure and governance of artificial intelligence are becoming regional policy questions, not just engineering ones. The OpenAI subpoena is the latest in a series of enforcement actions from US states and federal agencies. The Egyptian investment is one of several data center deals in the region this year.

California attorney general Rob Bonta said his office is asking OpenAI additional questions about cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models. The inquiry follows the so-called Hugging Face incident, in which AI agents developed by OpenAI hacked the open-source platform in July, gaining access to parts of its infrastructure. Bonta announced last month that the Department of Justice was conducting a formal investigation into that incident.

The Federal Trade Commission is running an industry-wide investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs, according to the Guardian report. It is the first official US enforcement action focused on rogue AI agents. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Florida pushes for a court-ordered pause

California is not the only state moving against OpenAI. Florida attorney general James Uthmeier filed a motion for a temporary injunction against five OpenAI entities and Sam Altman personally, Tom's Hardware reported on 30 September.

The motion asks the court to bar OpenAI from developing any AI models without independent third-party guardrails and approval, to stop providing ChatGPT for minors in Florida, and to stop collecting data from Florida children under 13 without notice and consent. It would also prevent the company from representing ChatGPT as safe, accurate or reliable, and from soliciting engagement through what the filing calls conversation prolongation.

OpenAI says it already paused training its most capable models last week. The Florida motion is part of an original lawsuit filed in June in Highlands County after the state reviewed the accused Florida State University gunman's ChatGPT logs, according to Tom's Hardware. It alleges deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence, design defect, failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation and public nuisance. Uthmeier called it the first state-led lawsuit against the company and its CEO.

The regulatory pressure is arriving alongside a voluntary industry pledge. President Donald Trump, several Cabinet members and House Speaker Mike Johnson met with AI leaders, producing a document titled Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities, according to Tom's Hardware on 30 September.

The pledge was signed by Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of SpaceXAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Trump himself. It commits signatories to implement internal controls around cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats, to empower an internal team to monitor those controls, to partner with an independent external auditor, and to designate an independent board committee to oversee the process. According to CNN, the president described the approach as the best way to balance progress and safety.

Egypt bets on data centers as a regional hub

The Egyptian project has a longer timeline. Intro Group's $270 million covers the first phase of Kemet Data Center, with the full facility to be developed in two phases. Minister of Communications and Information Technology Raafat Hendy met with Intro Group board member Sherif Mohamed Abdel Fattah last week to review designs and supplier contracts, according to the ministry. The meeting also covered the implementation timeline and the planned launch of services.

The Kemet project has been in the works since 2024, when Intro Technology signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Oman Data Park to develop it. The Egyptian government has separately approved a data center licence to the digital arm of construction group Hassan Allam, and Hendy met last month with US data center developers and a delegation from the newly launched firm Heca Data to discuss an integrated zone for hyperscale facilities and AI.

Egypt's national strategy for data centers and cloud computing aims to establish the country as a digital and subsea cable hub bridging Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The strategy is linked to Egypt's Digital Vision plan for digital transformation and skills.

The regional push is not without friction. Data center developers globally are facing growing community opposition over water, power and noise, and several sessions at the Data Center World Power event in Dallas, which ran from 21 to 23 September, addressed the issue, Data Center Knowledge reported on 2 October. Diane Sullivan, chief development officer of Hecate Energy, said past practices such as non-disclosure agreements with city officials and developing projects under the radar had contributed to the backlash.

In the past, developers would sometimes obtain permits before informing the public about a data center project, which is a terrible idea. We must become open and be fully transparent about our plans.

In New York City, a dispute between utility Con Edison and battery developers is slowing the buildout of community-scale storage, Canary Media reported on 22 September. Con Edison changed interconnection rules for nearly 600MW of third-party battery projects in November 2025, raising costs by as much as fourteenfold in some cases, according to a March petition from the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium and the New York Solar Energy Industries Association. The groups say the changes have made roughly $1.5 billion in investment impossible to move ahead.

The compute layer keeps shifting

Underneath the policy fights, hardware vendors are repositioning. Nvidia said on 2 October that its DGX Spark will be available with 64GB of unified memory from Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, HP and MSI, according to the company's blog. The new configuration supports up to 100-billion-parameter models on device and can cluster two units to reach 128GB and up to 200 billion parameters. In Nvidia's Qwen 3.8 27B test, two clustered 64GB systems delivered up to 1.7 times the performance of a single system.

Nvidia also published its case for AI factory economics on 1 October, stating that each megawatt of AI factory capacity costs roughly $60 million. The company cited SemiAnalysis AgentX data showing its Vera Rubin NVL72 systems deliver over 30 times higher throughput per megawatt than GB300 NVL72, and up to 45 times lower cost per million tokens on the DeepSeek V4 Pro model.

Analyst firm Omdia expects the emphasis to shift from capability to returns in 2027. In a set of predictions published on 30 September, Light Reading reported that 59% of organisations expect their AI budgets to increase by 10% or more in 2027, and that hardware delays are already impacting 60% of PC channel partners. Omdia also noted that more than 100 countries are pursuing digital sovereignty initiatives, and projected global humanoid robot shipments to exceed 700,000 units by 2030.

That last figure connects to a separate Nvidia release. The company said on 22 September that Isaac ROS 5.0, its collection of GPU-accelerated robotics packages built on the open source ROS framework, is now available, according to its blog. The release adds support for ROS Lyrical and Ubuntu 24.04, and brings agentic workflows to the roughly 1.3 million ROS users. FoundationPose, a model for object pose estimation, now offers an agent-ready inference library that Nvidia says lets robots perceive and track objects up to 5.5 times faster.

Smaller markets are also building positions. Latvian Mobile Telephone Group and space consultancy Novaspace signed a cooperation agreement on 22 September to develop a concept for a 5G/6G satellite communications hub in Latvia, SpaceNews reported. The agreement was signed under the EU-funded FIERCE Ecosystem Building Programme.

Security remains the unresolved thread. Researchers at OX Security identified 101 malicious npm packages that add developers' WhatsApp accounts to groups without consent, The Hacker News reported on 29 September. The packages have been downloaded 490,000 times, 116,000 of those in the last 30 days. Dutch police confirmed the arrest of a 24-year-old Amsterdam man in connection with the ShinyHunters group, according to The Hacker News. The group denied any connection to the individual.