Marketplace All-in-One
Bytes: Week in Review - SpaceX eyes an IPO, community members want legal commitments from Micron, and YouTube to ditch AI slop
23 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The pressure is on for tech companies to be good neighbors. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
Chapter 2: What community concerns are raised about Micron's new factory?
A micron memory chip factory in upstate New York is wrangling with local groups who want legal assurances the project will benefit the community. We'll dig into that on today's Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review. Plus, how YouTube plans to crack down on AI slop. But first, it's shaping up to be a big year for very big IPOs.
Elon Musk is reportedly preparing to take SpaceX public at an anticipated valuation of around $1.5 trillion. AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are also expected to follow suit this year. Here to discuss all that is Paresh Devay. He's a senior writer for Wired.
Elon kind of just wants to be first. We know that he has an ego. We know that he cares about beating Sam Altman, beating Jeff Bezos, and those AI companies thinking about going public. And so Elon could take XAI public, but it's not really prepared to do so. And so that leaves SpaceX as sort of the next Elon company that is in a good position now to potentially go public.
There was some reporting in the Wall Street Journal this week about one specific sort of project that SpaceX may want the extra capital that comes from going public for. I'm not sure how seriously to take this, but this idea of building data centers in space, you know, I've seen reporting that this is actually, you know, could be a good use case. You don't need to cool data centers in space.
There's obviously a lot of space, although it's kind of filling up with a lot of satellites. But it does still seem kind of out there or pretty extremely out there.
Yes, it's a serious science experiment, and it requires lots of money. And so raising $30 billion in an IPO would help, you know, fund that science experiment. But Running data centers, having servers, chips in space runs into probably the same problem that you have putting them underwater, which is how do you do maintenance? It is not easy.
And we know these chips don't always last long or they're high failure rates. And it's not easy to fly into space right now and fix those servers. As we know, it would be a slow crawl to fix things.
So as you noted, there is this kind of competition between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, his former colleague at OpenAI. OpenAI has kind of made some moves to go public and also anthropic. These are all very mature companies with very big balance sheets, not necessarily big profits yet, but certainly would energize markets, I guess.
Yeah, normally you go public to sort of build credibility with your customers.
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Chapter 3: Why is SpaceX considering an IPO and what is its potential valuation?
Sometimes potential customers are skeptical that you're going to be around, and being public gives them a sense of like, okay, you're legit, you're around, and it gives them some numbers, opens the books a bit to potential customers as well. Or you go public so employees can sell their shares and get rich. In this case, it's more about who else is going to fund these ventures?
Can you just keep raising the same money from the same investors? Yes, probably. But this gives a chance to put it out there for everyone to start enjoying the riches, which I think will help with the missions that both companies are trying to say, which is that they are building AI that's beneficial to humanity at large.
All right. Well, now we want to turn to something that you've been reporting on for Wired, Paresh, about a megafab facility for micron technology that's planned in Clay, New York. This is kind of in the Syracuse area. Micron, we've talked a lot about recently because it's one of three companies in the world that makes this high bandwidth memory that is essential for AI processing.
It's part of those GPUs we hear so much about. And like a lot of the issues that we've heard about with data centers recently, this company is encountering some hurdles when it comes to building this massive manufacturing facility. What's been going on there?
Yeah, this facility is poised to become even bigger than the TSMC fab in Arizona. And so that's a lot of space. It's going to take over wetlands and forests and former farmland. And so a coalition of community groups, civil rights groups, environmental groups, labor groups, have teamed up to ask Micron to contractually promise, put it in writing in a way that can be enforced in the courts,
to hire locally, to hire from diverse communities, to really take care of the environment and set specific limits on air emissions or water pollution. You know, a series of guarantees that could be held up in court.
And this is sort of being seen as like a test case or a model for, you know, what communities might demand as we see so much of this AI infrastructure being built out throughout the country, right?
Exactly. Here, the groups are saying, we welcome this project, we are in support of this project, but there's a way to do it better. That's their argument. And we're here to make sure that this project gets done well in a way that's responsible. But we're not against the project at all, is sort of their message here.
Right. I mean, I'm sure this kind of facility would be, you know, kind of something that states would be fighting over. Often we sort of see in clean energy projects and, you know, these big kind of facilities that they often do go to red states and not, you know, New York and blue states that have, you know, a bit more of these processes in place.
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Chapter 4: What challenges could SpaceX face in building data centers in space?
And I think that's the... helpful thing than what makes it similar to spam and why YouTube is comparing it to spam. But I would also say that detecting AI slop is probably easier than detecting sort of deep fakes and cheap fakes. There's just something that just looks crappy about it
Very low effort, like minimal effort. Yeah, you just churn it out.
Yeah. Another example has been these videos that are seemingly from talk shows, but they're like clips, and then there's these voiceovers that are completely unrelated to the clips that my colleagues reported on last year. And they're meant to just like kind of get outrage in people because supposedly there's something really controversial happening on this talk show.
But in reality, it's just a real... sort of clip mixed with a voiceover that has nothing to do with it. And it's easy, I think, for AI these days to understand that there's some sort of gap here that makes this slop. But finding a fake is still pretty difficult.
Yeah, the slop that really gets me, that makes me mad, is these sort of like funny animal videos that are not, it's not like the cat that's like doing, you know, wild humanistic stuff that you know that it's AI generated.
It's like, oh, the raccoons jumping on the trampoline or the, you know, just that kind of stuff where it's like, it depends on you believing that it's real for it to be at all interesting at all. And my husband sends me a lot of these videos and I'm always like, this is AI. This is AI. It makes me so mad.
But those can be entertaining. And if they're labeled as sort of, you know, AI generated, YouTube is okay with some of that content, you know, as long as it's not deliberately meant to sort of be low quality and sort of clickbaity. Like some people are genuinely interested and entertained by that kind of content. I would say, you know, you mentioned like
How are they going to do this besides some of the existing algorithms? I think one place to look at is Kaji, a small search engine, has been asking users to report AI slop so that they can build up a database of AI slop content and then hopefully train an algorithm on that database. So YouTube might be asking more of their users for... you know, help identifying slop.
They have a large community of raters who rate videos who could be sort of helping them understand what humans consider to be slop and what they don't consider to be slop.
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