The valley’s data-center pauses got a longer clock this week. On September 30 the Palm Springs City Council voted unanimously to extend its pause by 22 months and 15 days, KESQ reports, and The Palm Springs Post reports it now runs through August 25, 2028. The city has adopted no zoning standards specifically for data centers, and staff want the time to write them.
Elsewhere the week was about who gets in. Expedia says travelers will soon book hotels inside Meta’s Muse agent, and a trade site reports that Meta publishes no way for a hotel to ask for the same hookup. Meta’s own platform page describes a connector review and says nothing about who may use it, which is the question we raised in an earlier note.
One item this week is about newsrooms rather than AI. On September 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2222, which gives news outlets a refundable tax credit of $20,000 for each of their first five full-time journalists, $15,000 for each after that and $7,500 for each part-time reporter. The credit covers journalist employment from January 1, 2027, but the sponsor, Rebuild Local News, says the first payments are likely in 2028. Riverside County, which includes the valley, has 2.3 local journalists per 100,000 residents, the third-lowest rate among U.S. counties with more than 500,000 people, according to Poynter’s reporting on the Local Journalist Index.
The other two items are about learning the tools. OpenAI and America’s SBDC plan to train about 150 advisors and reach at least 1,000 small businesses in person; the announcement does not name which local centers will take part. And the Riverside County Fair & National Date Festival is adding a generative AI art contest for 2027 that asks entrants to explain their prompts, their process, their editing and their own contribution.
Each of these has a gatekeeper: a council deciding how long to wait, a platform deciding which hotels are connected, a state deciding which newsrooms qualify for a credit on the reporters they employ, a fair deciding what counts as your own work.