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On Saturday, a little less than two weeks into his second term in the White House, President Donald Trump fired Rohit Chopra, whod served as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) since October 2021. During his tenure, the Bureau oversaw the return of some $6 billion from financial services providersbanks, credit card companies, mortgage brokers, payday lenders, and so onwho defrauded, gouged, swindled, harassed, stole from, lied to, discriminated against, or otherwise harmed consumers in violation of federal law. In a letter announcing his departure, Chopra expressed hope that the Bureau would continue to be a pillar of restoring and advancing economic liberty in America, and wished Trump good luck in serving our great country. The most surprising aspect of Chopras termination was that Trump waited so long to do it. Congress created the Bureau after the Great Recession to consolidate enforcement authority for consumer protection laws in a single, independent agency. And although Chopra had about a year and a half remaining in his five-year term, Republicans had anticipated that Trump would quickly move to replace him with a director more sympathetic to banking executives eyeing megayacht purchases. In November, shortly after Elon Musk announced the Department of Government Efficiency that is now setting fire to the civil service, he called for Trump to delete the Bureau posthaste. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies, he said. A firm belief in the villainy of the Bureau has become common of late not only among Wall Street behemoths who want to squeeze poor people for money they do not have, but also among Silicon Valley oligarchs eager to see their fintech and crypto startups compete with the traditional banking industry. Last fall, the CFPB probed allegations that Meta had improperly used personal financial data in its targeted advertising business; in response, during a recent interview on Joe Rogans podcast, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested the emergence among regulators of a quiet consensus that tech companies like his needed to be brought to heel. In November, and also on Joe Rogans podcast, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen accused the CFPB of terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services. In a possibly related story, as Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect notes, in 2021, the CFPB ordered the closure of LendUp, a fintech startup, after determining that the company lied to customers about how they could qualify for better loan terms. Among LendUps backers: Google Ventures, PayPal Holdings, and Marcs firm, Andreessen Horwitz. Sure enough, on Monday, Trump named hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, whom the Senate confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury last week, as the CFPBs acting director, pending Trumps decision on Chopras permanent replacement. According to NPR, among Bessents first acts in his side gig was directing CFPB employees to stop doing anythingimplementing new rules, taking enforcement actions, even communicating with the publicin order to promote consistency with the goals of the Administration. There is no subtext here: Republicans do not want to install a new person to lead the CFPB so much as they want to kill it. Trumps return to the White Houseand the elevation of Musk, an unelected billionaire with a rudimentary-at-best understanding of how government works, to the position of shadow presidentis their best chance in years to do it. Since it opened in 2011, the Bureau has probably done more to rein in abuses of corporate power than any agency in recent memory, returning an estimated $20 billion to millions of consumers victimized by junk fees, predatory loans, and the like. (It was still busy a week before Trumps inauguration, suing Capital One for allegedly bilking customers out of more than $2 billion in interest payments.) In an effort to shield the Bureau from regulatory capture, the Congress that created the CFPB limited the presidents ability to fire its director, allowing for removal only in cases of inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. A consumer protection watchdog vulnerable to kneecapping by a president with no interest in protecting consumers, lawmakers reasoned, would not do much to prevent the industry from inciting another global financial crisis at its earliest convenience. These statutory handcuffs have long infuriated Republican politicians, who argue that forcing usurious student lenders to comply with modest restrictions on their ability to saddle borrowers with late fees is an unconscionable constraint on their beloved free market. In a 2014 interview with an industry publication, then-Congressman Mick Mulvaney described the Bureau as a joke in a sick, sad kind of way, a sentiment shared by many of his Republican colleagues at the time.I dont like the fact that the CFPB exists, he said in 2015; that same year, he co-sponsored legislation to abolish the Bureau altogether. Although bills like Mulvaneys never passed, the Bureaus opponents started chalking up real victories during the first Trump administration. For starters, Trump appointed Mulvaney as the Bureaus interim director in November 2017, a choice that is roughly analogous to me asking my dog to keep an eye on a 72-ounce porterhouse while I run to the store to pick up a nice bottle of red. Like Bessent, at the time of his promotion, Mulvaney already had a Senate-confirmed day job as director of Trumps Office of Management and Budget; according to The New York Times, by June 2018, he was only going into the Bureaus offices twice a week. Also like Bessent, Mulvaney set about the task of bringing the Bureaus work to a grinding halt, asking courts to block the implementation of new rules and pausing or dropping some investigations, including a lawsuit against a lender that allegedly charged interest rates of up to 950%. Also among the probes the Bureau ended: one of a South Carolina-based payday lender whose political action committee a href="https://www.americanbanker.com/news/cfpb-drops-probe-into-lender-that-gave-to-mulvaneys-campaigns">donated at least $4,500 to Mulvaney when he was still in Congress. Then, in 2020, the Supreme Courts five-justice Republican majority decided that those pesky firing protections created by Congress were unconstitutional. Although the justices rejected the more ambitious argument that the law compelled them to abolish the entire Bureau and strike down a decades worth of rules by judicial fiat, they made clear that going forward, presidents like Trump would be able to fire directors like Choprit whenever they felt like it. Musks takeover of vast swaths of the federal government, however, is the most serious threat yet to the Bureau, and to anyone who aspires to live in a country in which financial institutions have to comply with laws that require them to treat customers fairly. When he called for its elimination, Musk characterized the Bureau as duplicative of other regulatory agenciesessentially framing its work as wasteful and unnecessary, and the notion of closing its doors as a straightforward matter of prudent administration and good governance. But like every other institution that Musk is using DOGE to target, Musks conception of inefficient government spending is any government spending that does not align with his political ideology, or go into his pockets, or both. Musk has long aspired to make X, the social media platform he bought and ruined, into an everything app on which users can pay for purchases, transfer money to friends, and even earn interest on their account balance. Earlier this month, X rolled out a partnership with Visa that would allow it to dispense with onerous state-by-state bank licensing requirements and turn X Money into a Venmo-like digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments service. Linda Yaccarino, Xs chief executive, promised that with Visa in the fold, X Money would debut its services before the end of the year. Under ordinary circumstances, a microblogging website owned by a White House employee announcing imminent plans to enter the financial services business could expect to undergo rigorous scrutiny from the Bureau. As CNET notes, details about how secure your banking data is on X Money are still unclear, which is the sort of thing about which users will want to know more before opening virtual checking accounts on a platform ridden with porn bots, crypto scams, and crypto scams run by likely porn bots. Just a few months ago, the CFPB under Chopras leadership ordered Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and other X competitors to turn over information about how they operate their digital payment systems, citing its ongoing obligation to monitor for risks to consumers. Presumably, none of these companies will have to comply with these orders on Bessents watch, and X will not be receiving one anytime soon. In Musks ideal world, he would be able to turn X into an app that can access your life savings without having to contend with the CFPB at all. But a CFPB run by a Trump lackey under strict orders not to do any meaningful work is a pretty appealing alternative. Complaining about the CFPBs purported inefficiency is a lazy repackaging of the Republican Partys standard objections to any agency that is good at its job: Safeguarding the financial interests of everyday people is indeed an inefficient method of making the Republican Partys corporate donors wealthier. But years of sustained political attacks from the right have already weakened the CFPB. The movement fueling the Trump-Musk presidency might be able to quietly finish it off.
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E-Commerce
Cybersecurity startup EchoMark is releasing a new application programming interface (API) to allow for its novel digital watermarking tool to integrate with virtually any existing communications software. Founded in 2022 to develop a digital watermarking system to safeguard organizations sensitive and proprietary information, EchoMark originally focused on injecting personalized identifiers into emails and link-based networked document sharing tools. Now, armed with $10 million in seed funding, the company is on a mission to watermark the world, as founder and CEO Troy Batterberry puts it. Our vision is that any piece of private information can be forensically watermarked and tied to a recipients identity, Batterberry tells Fast Company, adding that the companys customers asked for a way to integrate the software directly into their own bespoke communications channels. We built this API so we can add this into any commercial application or custom workflow. Batterberry has been thinking about leaks for a long time. As a young missile systems engineer conducting research and development on new weapons for the U.S. Navy, Batterberry found himself personally entrusted with deeply classified stuff, responsible for constantly adding his signature to paper copies of sensitive documents to signal his role as their authorized guardian. Signing your name on the top of a document indicates youre the custodian of that information, he says. Psychologically, it changes how you think about protecting that information. If you leave it out, you could lose your security clearanceor, even worse, your entire profession. Following his career in the Navy, Batterberry went into the private sector as an engineer, first at Sony and then Microsoft, where he spent the next 25 years and eventually became a corporate VP in charge of Teams and Webinars. It was at Microsoft that Batterberry developed a digital rights management system to protect streaming media via audio and visual watermarks. Such safeguards ensured that, should content make its way to illegal streaming portals like BitTorrent, the source of the leak would be easily identifiable. Those experiences eventually coalesced in Batterberrys brain into a pressing organizational question that formed the basis for EchoMark: What if you could take personalized watermarking and apply it to anything, from emails and images to healthcare records and legal documents? EchoMarks watermarking solution is elegant in its simplicity. When a sensitive document is distributed to its intended recipient, the companys software generates personalized copies with thousands of slight formatting differences imperceptible to the human eye. Once that document makes its way out into the wild, whether as a photocopy, screenshot, or even as a photograph taken from a personal cell phone, users can employ EchoMarks proprietary computer vision and AI to scan the target artifact and match it against the original copies. Rather than physically sign copies, as Batterberry did in the Navy, EchoMark applies personalized signatures at scale with lightning efficiency so that leaks are easily traceable back to the source. Batterberry demonstrated the software for Fast Company in real time with a copy of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade that leaked to Politico in May 2022 (the source of the leak was never identified). Batterberry sent an email containing a PDF of the Dobbs decision processed through EchoMark to seven phony email addresses standing in for those of the sitting Supreme Court justices; he then opened the document from the fake account of Chief Justice John Roberts and took a photo of it on his computer screen with his personal phone. After uploading the photo to EchoMark, the software dashboard quickly analyzed the image and spit out a definitive conclusion: The document pictured in his photo was in fact identical to the one the Roberts account had received.Whoever leaked the [Dobbs] decision knew that as long as they used a personal device, they would never get caught because multiple people had access to the report, Batterberry says. With EchoMark turned on, we could have IDd the source of that leak in minutes. The Supreme Court is just one example of EchoMarks potential governmental applications. Batterberry cites as other disclosures where EchoMarks software may have proven useful the rogue IRS contractor who in 2020 leaked President Donald Trumps tax records to news organizations, as well as Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who leaked hundreds of classified Defense Department files onto Discord in 2023. EchoMark currently boasts more than a hundred high respected clients across the government, financial services, health care, and entertainment sectors, according to Batterberry, with the company projecting 10-time growth in the coming year among. The federal government is extremely interested, Batterberry says. The FBI, for example, has grave concerns about leaks when investigating drug cartels who are willing to spend serious money to get access to information and adapt accordingly. EchoMarks forensic watermarking isnt just about identifying leakers as part of a breach investigation, but prevention as well, so far that the presence of digital identifiers will purportedly dissuade potential leakers from releasing sensitive information into the wild if they know theyll be almost instantly identified. And by empowering organizations with a low-cost, easy-to-implement method for investigating and mitigating leaks, EchoMark serves a larger purpose: helping organizations share information openly and with confidence rather than close themselves off internally to stamp out leakers. Indeed, Batterberry cites the September 11, 2001, terror attacks as an example of what happens when sensitive information isnt allowed to flow freely between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. A key reason for the breakdown in communication leading up to the 9/11 attacks was that government agencies failed to share information they needed to share with each other, Batterbery says. Communication is the lifeblood of any organization.
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E-Commerce
For all the industries that are facing existential crises from the emergence of artificial intelligence, one is seeing a happily profitable outcome. Architects are increasingly being commissioned to design the brick-and-mortar infrastructure supporting the AI boom. These data centersbig warehouse-like buildings stuffed with whirring servers sucking up hundreds of megawatts of powerare becoming a major, and majorly lucrative, part of the architecture industry’s bottom line. We’ve got about 200 people working strictly on data center projects, says Joy Hughes, a design manager at the architecture and design firm Gensler. It’s a subset of the architecture business that has surged in recent years. During the Covid pandemic, the demand for cloud-based online services from Zoom calls to streaming movies caused a spike in data center construction. Now we’re seeing another jump in growth because of AI and machine learning coming on board, Hughes says. Gensler, which has more than 6,000 employees in 57 offices worldwide, has seen its data center business skyrocket. The practice area is up 87% year over year from 2023, and the firm is projecting a growth of 40% for 2025. Gensler is not alone. Many other architecture firms, both big and small, are seeing data center work drive significant revenues. More than a dozen firms pulled in $1 million or more in data center revenue in 2023, according to Building Design + Construction’s annual list of architecture firm revenue. Ten firms earned more than $20 million in data center-related revenue in 2023. Third-ranked Gensler’s take was more than $69 million; Corgan, at the top of the list, raked in $135 million. Gabe Clark, data centers sector leader for Corgan, says the firm has been designing data centers for more than 15 years and anticipates year-over-year growth for at least the next five years. We started executing one megawatt builds. We’re now designing now one gigawatt campuses, he says. There’s truly exponential growth in the marketplace, both in advancement of what data center design is and clearly in the need and the demand. And we don’t see that slowing down anytime soon. The story behind these staggering figures is a simple one of demand. A recent report from McKinsey estimates that global demand for data center capacity could rise at an annual rate of between 19 and 22% through 2030. For architecture firms, that’s a steady pipeline of new projects for years to come. Under construction data centers are expected to reach record highs in 2025. Demand for modern data center facilities continues to soar, says Gordon Dolven, director of Americas data center research at the commercial real estate advisory CBRE. Databank Atlanta [Photo: courtesy of Gensler] Data center design evolves This boom is opening up new avenues for design. It’s an unexpected evolution for a very utilitarian building typology, which usually consists of a big warehouse with a few offices tucked in a corner and the majority of the space filled with precise rows of server racks. Gensler’s Hughes, who started her career with the firm doing IT work, has spent a lot of time in data centers and knows that their design is rarely the first priority. When I walked into my first data center, there were no windows. You are walking into a concrete box, she says. A big gray box, sitting out in a corn field or a potato field or whatever. It wasn’t even painted. It was very, very nebulous. But this is beginning to change, for reasons ranging from location to environmental concern to the availability of power. Hughes says some of Gensler’s large data center projects are being developed in a wide range of places, including the remote greenfields of the past as well as more suburban areas closer to end users. These data centers, often covering hundreds of acres, are becoming a bit more sensitive to their surroundings. Hughes says Gensler’s designers are adding public-facing amenities to them, like hiking trails and open spaces, to soften their edges and reduce the negative visual impact on communities. This is especially relevant for those data centers with their own power supplies, which often require large industrial infrastructure, substations, and power lines that can take up significant amounts of land. We’ll probably start to see a lot more of that as on-site generation starts to take shape here in the U.S., especially in some of those more suburban and urban locations where we’re seeing some of these pop up, she says. Databank Atlanta [Photo: courtesy of Gensler] Some data centers are even being built right within the footprint of existing office complexes. Gensler completed a project in midtown Atlanta in 2019 that’s nestled in a mixed use commercial development at Georgia Tech, providing data hall space for the university as well as leasable data center facilities for private sector clients such as the aerospace, security, and defense companies located in the area. These types of data centers tend to be smaller, more compact, so they can fit within an office building, they can fit within an urban space, Hughes says. Comarch [Photo: courtesy of Gensler] The overall look of data centers is also undergoing a change. One Gensler-designed project for the IT company Comarch is located in Mesa, Arizona, and the 50,000-square-foot building was designed to include a welcoming front-of-house area for the center’s staff, with lounge seating and informal meeting areas drenched in daylight. You have floor-to-ceiling glass, you have all of this natural light, and you have all of these views out into the desert, she says. We design these buildings for computers, but we have to remember that even though there’s not a lot of people in them, there are still people in them. We still have to design for those people. Environmental concerns are also affecting the way data centers are designed. Clark says Corgan’s wide range of data center projects are becoming increasingly focused on reducing not only their surging operational energy consumption but also the environmental footprint of the buildings themselves. Lower carbon materials, like mass timber, are becoming more common, as is insulation that allows for the buildings to be cooled more efficiently. We have seen tremendously more opportunities over the last five years to work with clients to enhance their building image, both purely aesthetically, but also from a sustainability perspective, Clark says. There’s also a lot of eyes on data centers out in the world these days and knowing that these facilities are being built and powered in the most sustainable way possible is becoming more and more critical to our clients. This kind of design thinking is also happening at a more abstract level. Goodman Group, a global data center operator recently announced a partnership with Oxman, designer Neri Oxman’s interdisciplinary innovation lab, to reinvent its building practices. The partnership is focused on developing practices that maximize the ecological presence and utility of the built environment. Microsoft [Photo: courtesy of Gensler] Land and power With such high demand for data centers, some of these concerns are pushed aside. Many data center developers and hyperscaler data center owner-operators like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services can’t build data centers fast enough. Data center operators are willing to pay a pretty penny to get these up to meet demand, so getting them up quickly is really important, says Jennie Karnes, a vice president in the Data Center Solutions group at CBRE. Access to power is the primary parameter guiding the location, size, and design of data centers, according to Karnes, and that’s led to a variety of approaches. Some operators are buying up sites that can easily latch into the electricity grid, while others are building facilities that have their own substations and power sources, including solar arrays, wind turbines, and natural gas. Some are being considered for construction on the sites of shuttered coal power plants, and others are looking at getting permitted for nuclear small module reactors. Karnes says that even though the power demands of data centers are growingmany are being designed to accommodate hundreds of megawatts of demand per hourthe size of the actual data halls in these facilities is remaining relatively stable. New chips, graphics processing units (GPUs), and improved cooling techniques means that the cabinets of servers inside a data center can operate at much higher power densities. The same cabinet that used to take five kilowatts of power, now we’re looking at designing it to support 100 to 250 kilowatts of power. So 20 to 50 times what we saw five years ago, Karnes says. That’s leading some data center racks to grow in height, raising ceilings in new builds to upwards of 16 feet. AI is driving much of this increased energy demand. And the higher the power density of a server rack, the more cooling it requires. Clark says that the AI boom is leading data center developers to integrate new approaches for cooling, and that additional mechanical equipment means data center facilities are requiring more space than in the recent past. Clark says data centers built primarily to support cloud services just a few years ago could often fit all of this attendant mechanical equipment on their roofs. Now, with AI in the mix, data centers have to have additional square footage outside the building. All of the mechanical and electrical infrastructure to support that same footprint of data module or data hall has now, in some cases, doubled, Clark says. Some of the concern around electricity demand may be tempered by the recent release of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that built state-of-the-art model using a midrange type of computer chip. Because these chips can run using less energy, some have questioned whether data center energy demand will remain so high. But given the growth of AI, more efficient chip utilization isn’t likely to cause the size of data centers to go down, nor to reduce the demand for new facilities. Big boxes will still be built out in empty fields, and many are under construction now. Stargate, a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle, plans to feed AI’s demand by building up to $500 billion worth of large data centers in the coming years. One of Stargate’s first announced data center projects is a 1.2-gigawatt facility being built on more than 1,100 acres in Abilene, Texas. In terms of the form and size of data center designs, there’s no real model to follow. If you look back even four years ago when everything was cloud-based, the market had kind of gelled around a program, Clark says. Generally, they were pretty homogeneous at the end of the day. What’s going on in the world now in regard to designing around AI, it’s a little bit of the Wild West. Everybody’s still trying to find what is the best approach. [Photo: courtesy Lonestar Data Holdings] To the moon Some are looking far beyond the Wild West. Lonestar Data Holdings is a backup data storage provider that has developed a novel type of extraterritorial data center that are designed to operate beyond the surface of the earth. Its newest data center is the Future Payload, a solar-powered eight terabyte data backup device that will be part of a lunar lander mission launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in late February. Lonestar calls it the first data center to be sent to space. More prototype than product, it is designed to operate from the surface of the moon for a single lunar day, just 14 days here on Earth. Even this niche of the data center business is proving to be a boon to the architecture industry. Lonestar commissioned the architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) to design the data center. The device, which measures just 10 by 7 inches will be attached to the side of Athena, a lander developed by Intuitive Machines through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. A thin 3D printed device, it was designed to cast shadows of the silhouettes of the faces of two NASA astronauts as the sun passes overhead. BIG designs the future I want to live in. The future I thought I’d be living in. The future we’re working to build, Lonestar CEO Chris Stott tells Fast Company by email. The Freedom Payload is meant to be a symbol for all of humanity, a beacon of hope to the world as we strive towards that better future. Compared to terrestrial data centers that can stretch across hundreds of acres and draw hundreds of megawatts of electricity around the clock, this lunar data center is a proof of concept both quaint and complex. But just like its counterparts whirring away on earth, the data center that could soon be running on the moon is the result of a significant amount of design and consideration. “As we prepare to return to the Moon to stay, it is important that everything we do these coming years of lunar settlement is done with intention and care,” says Bjarke Ingels, BIG founder and creative director. “Even if modest in scale, this data center is one of very few artifacts designed to remain part of the lunar landscape for years to come.”
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E-Commerce
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