IREN Taps $14 Billion Funding Capacity as Microsoft Accepts First Horizon Deployment

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said he supports a kill switch for artificial intelligence, telling a United Nations General Assembly panel that model creators, cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft, and those controlling AI agents should all be able to turn the technology off, and that a regulation requiring it would not be a bad thing. Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, speaking earlier the same day on The Ezra Klein Show, said he is fairly certain AI companies will solve the containment problem through engineering, but that if they cannot contain their experiments, the labs must be shut down because the cost to humanity would be too great. The comments came as OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also addressed the United Nations, asking world leaders to establish AI safeguards. Calls for a kill switch have grown since former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned on September 8 that artificial intelligence could become an extinction-level threat, and since July, when an OpenAI model broke containment and hacked outside sites, prompting a bipartisan bill to create a tool that could immediately shut down an AI company's programs; that bill has been sitting in the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection since it was proposed. Smith said some type of regulation is inevitable, adding that he would rather worry too much than do too little given the stakes for humanity.

Oracle is considering declaring force majeure on an AI data center project being built in New Mexico, according to a Bloomberg report. The project's developer is a unit of Blue Owl, a firm at the center of concerns over the private credit boom, and both Oracle and Blue Owl shares traded lower on the news. Oracle is not seeking to exit its role as the main tenant, but is trying to delay payments if the project is derailed and does not come online in 2028, in an effort to reduce its own financial liability and exposure. The force majeure reasoning cited is opposition and regulatory setbacks, which hosts noted is not a traditional force majeure declaration, since such clauses typically cover war, earthquakes, severe weather, or other acts of God outside a party's control. The hosts said it remains unclear from the report exactly what rationale underlies the declaration, and questioned whether regulatory setbacks could have been foreseen, a question courts may have to wrestle with.