Abbott halts Flock cameras, SpaceX casts xAI blades, Caterpillar scales quarries

Sources

Texas Governor Abbott blocks funding for more Flock cameras theverge.com

As backlash grows over Flock’s AI surveillance cameras, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has frozen state spending on them. The move came just ahead of the publication of a Texas Tribune investigation that revealed the state spent over $30 million on Flock cameras. That money was primarily raised by tacking a $1 fee onto insurance policies, […]

Musk’s faster path to more gas turbines comes with pollution problem techcrunch.com

Elon Musk says a secretive new SpaceX foundry will let him cast his own turbine blades and get gas power online 18 months faster than anyone else — but it’s a bet on a fuel source that’s already triggering lawsuits and health studies everywhere his (and others’) turbines have gone in.

Caterpillar is bringing to AI deployment what it learned from automating mining techcrunch.com

Caterpillar has spent decades putting autonomous machines to work at remote mining sites. It’s now bringing that experience to AI deployment.

The U.S. is building barriers around drones and robots, but China has scale to get around them techcrunch.com

New FCC restrictions aim to shut foreign-made drones and robots out of the US market, but China’s manufacturing scale is redirecting the competition to third-country buyers. The barriers reshape where Chinese hardware lands rather than whether it ships, with Taiwan and allied markets now in play.

References

Texas Tribune investigation texastribune.org

The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority has awarded roughly $30 million in grants from the $1 auto insurance fee to install at least 3,200 Flock cameras across Texas — including $15.9 million to the Department of Public Safety — with no public discussion when lawmakers passed the fee to fight catalytic converter theft.

Sen. Josh Hawley press release (Judiciary subcommittee probe) hawley.senate.gov

Hawley is demanding documents by September 8 on how Flock’s ‘unprecedented national surveillance network’ of 120,000+ cameras — facilitating more than 20 billion vehicle scans monthly — collects, retains, and disseminates data, citing a Milwaukee officer who tracked his girlfriend 124 times undetected and a Florida woman wrongfully jailed 13 days on a false match.

Davis Vanguard on Roseville PD audit davisvanguard.org

Of 1,427 stolen-vehicle and felony-warrant alerts audited by Roseville PD, 1,011 (71%) were misreads — including one resident flagged as a felony suspect six times because the system kept reading a ‘9’ as an ‘8’ — contradicting Flock’s marketed 96% accuracy claim.

EFF 2025 year-in-review eff.org

More than 80 law enforcement agencies used Flock to run searches for ethnic slurs and terms like ‘roma traveler,’ and Texas deputies queried over 80,000 cameras nationwide in an abortion-related ‘death investigation’ — evidence the network enables warrantless fishing expeditions far beyond stolen-vehicle recovery.

Texas Scorecard on Flock’s response texasscorecard.com

Flock cut default retention from 30 days to 7 and introduced ‘Evidence Mode’ requiring a case number, but Texas lawmakers dismissed the changes as ‘lipstick on a pig’ and are pushing warrant-requirement bills for the 2027 session.

Police1 coverage of TCU/UT-Tyler study police1.com

A Texas Christian University and University of Texas at Tyler study found that adding one Flock camera per officer is associated with a 9.1% increase in crime clearance rates, and Flock cites internal data showing an 11% drop in vehicle thefts in areas with active deployments.

Utility Dive on DOJ intervention utilitydive.com

The U.S. Department of Justice intervened on behalf of xAI, arguing that Grok training at Colossus is critical to Department of Defense operations and that shutting down the power supply would impair the U.S. military’s technological edge against adversaries.

Southern Environmental Law Center study selc.org

The proposed permanent xAI plant could emit 1,200–2,000 tons of NOx and up to 19 tons of formaldehyde annually, causing an estimated $30–$44 million in yearly health damages in a community where cancer risk is already four times the national average.

TechInvestments.io analysis of turbine backlogs techinvestments.io

GE Vernova’s production is fully booked through 2030 with new orders reserved for 2031 delivery; Siemens Energy’s gas services backlog sits at ~69 GW, and turbine prices are on track to be nearly 250% higher than 2019 levels.

SoloCap Substack, ‘Single-Crystal Blades’ solocap.substack.com

A single set of 40 blades can cost $600,000 and take 60 to 90 weeks to produce; qualification with engine OEMs typically takes two to five years, with process development for stable yields taking another three.

AI Weekly summarizing Jigar Shah and analyst reactions aiweekly.co

Jigar Shah, former Loan Programs Office director, was dismissive of Musk’s timeline, suggesting the complexity of heavy industrial casting is beyond his typical rapid-deployment model; independent investigators also found no building or environmental permit filings for the Bastrop foundry as of late August 2026.

Fast Company on hyperscaler power strategies fastcompany.com

Meta bankrolled 10 new natural gas plants in Louisiana totaling 7.5 GW for its Hyperion campus, forcing it to exit the RE100 renewable initiative; U.S. data-center gas capacity has surged to 189 GW, nearly doubling since late 2025.

International Mining im-mining.com

Caterpillar sets out to hit over 2,000 autonomous mining trucks by 2030

Compact Equipment (Caterpillar–NVIDIA partnership) compactequip.com

Caterpillar has standardized its next-generation equipment on the NVIDIA Jetson Thor edge computing platform… processing billions of data points in milliseconds to make safety-critical decisions without waiting for a cloud round-trip.

Heavy Equipment Guide — Luck Stone Bull Run heavyequipmentguide.ca

One million tons of aggregates hauled autonomously… four Cat 777 trucks running MineStar Command reached productivity parity with human-operated machines within months.

Disruptivity Times — Built Robotics disruptivitytimes.com

Built Robotics deployed 45 fully autonomous heavy excavators across Nordic infrastructure projects at a flat rate of $200 per hour, versus a blended Caterpillar operational rate of ~$335 per hour.

Australian Mining — unions vs. Rio Tinto australianmining.com.au

CFMEU has criticized AHS as a tool primarily for cutting labor costs, citing job redundancies at sites like BHP’s Mining Area C, where automation led to a 10% reduction in headcount.

Advanced Navigation — ‘AHS stoppages frustrating you?’ advancednavigation.com

Autonomous trucks require centimeter-level RTK-GNSS accuracy; even minor signal degradation in deep pits causes trucks to ‘stop dead,’ triggering idle excavators and starved crushers.