Tuesday 29 September 2026
Scanned 02:21 Brisbane (UTC+10). The last scan was at 07:06 on 18 September and the machine this runs on was switched off from then until now, so no scan ran for ten days and this one looks back over the whole eleven day gap rather than the usual day or two. Eight items met the brief, from the United Nations, Asia, North America, Europe, the Pacific and Africa. A second pass at 02:32 went back over the regions the first pass had found empty and added the California entry, which the first pass missed. Each carries the date it happened, and what was dropped is listed at the end.
United Nations
The United Nations launched the Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance at a high-level meeting in New York on 25 September, the standing forum created by General Assembly resolution 79/325 to bring governments, scientists, industry and civil society together on international artificial intelligence policy and to work towards rules that fit together across jurisdictions, with speakers pressing the case for the technology's place in development in the Global South, and Secretary-General António Guterres having named runaway artificial intelligence one of three existential threats alongside the climate crisis and deepening inequalities ahead of the Assembly's high-level week; the Dialogue meets annually for up to two days, and its first full session was held in Geneva on 6 and 7 July.
dig.watch
global un new-institution participation global-south
United States and China
President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping met at the White House for several hours on 24 September with artificial intelligence among the subjects, ahead of a state dinner attended by several of the largest artificial intelligence company chiefs, Trump saying superintelligence would be a big topic but that he wanted to leave it exactly where it is and that China's position is the same, and describing the Justice Department as the guardrail on the technology rather than new regulation, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two governments are discussing ways to warn each other about artificial intelligence incidents, and the agenda included systems that act on their own without a controller.
cnbc.com
north-america asia national-government safety
Holy See
Pope Leo XIV addressed UNESCO in Paris on 25 September at the invitation of director-general Khaled El-Enany, the first visit of its kind in more than forty years since Pope John Paul II spoke there in 1980, saying new technologies must remain at the service of the human person rather than become another instrument of domination and injustice, that artificial intelligence cannot answer questions about the meaning of human life because that meaning is rooted in lived experience, and naming as a paradox that intelligence is attributed to computational systems while the inalienable dignity of human persons struggles to be recognised, with human worth increasingly judged by efficiency and productivity.
aljazeera.com
europe global faith un guidelines
European Commission Q10
The European Commission proposed a delegated regulation on 21 September setting up a common rating scheme for data centres above 500 kilowatts, about the steady draw of seven hundred average homes, under which a label would be generated automatically each year from the European database and published, rating the site on how efficiently it uses energy and water, where its electricity comes from, what it does for the grid and whether it reuses waste heat, with labels starting from 15 August 2027 and the regulation entering force unless the Parliament or the Council rejects it within two months, and on the same day opened a public consultation on common minimum performance standards for data centres in Europe, covering energy, water, waste heat recovery and possibly grid flexibility, which closes on 14 December 2026 ahead of a legislative proposal expected in spring 2027.
energy.ec.europa.eu
europe regulator data-centres water energy standards transparency
Australia Q9 Q10
The Office of AI in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet opened public consultation on 18 September on a paper called Getting it right: Building AI infrastructure that works for Australia, which proposes mandatory national standards for data centres and for frontier artificial intelligence, among them a duty on companies to report incidents where a system behaves outside what its operators intended, building on the national expectations of data centre and artificial intelligence infrastructure developers released in March and on a National Cabinet decision in August, and addressing the pressure large sites place on electricity grids, water supplies, land and the communities around them, with submissions from the public, industry, researchers, workers and business open until 5pm on Friday 9 October.
abc.net.au
pacific national-government data-centres consultation participation energy water
Ghana
Samuel Nartey George, Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, told the opening of the second Pan African AI and Innovation Summit in Accra on 22 September, which ran to 23 September at the Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City under the theme of scaling Africa's ethical artificial intelligence and innovation ecosystem, that Ghana will regulate risks and harms and not curiosity, drawing a line between a student experimenting at low risk and a high risk system used to decide who gets a loan, and said implementation of the country's ten year national artificial intelligence strategy has begun, with 247 public sector staff trained and measures introduced to track how far ministries, departments and agencies actually adopt the technology.
ghanabusinessnews.com
africa national-government ai-strategy guidelines capacity-building
Salem, Oregon, and other United States councils Q9 Q10
Salem city councillors voted on 21 September, after a public hearing at the city library, for a 120 day pause on approving any new data centre development whatever its size or purpose, running to 19 January with the option of extending it about six months, which the city attorney said stops the company Verrus building until it expires, and the same week saw Wakulla County in Florida and Calexico in California adopt outright bans and eleven more local jurisdictions approve new pauses or extensions, Pulaski County in Arkansas pass a data centre ordinance after months of failed attempts, and Vineland in New Jersey fine the DataOne site 1.07 million United States dollars, reported as the largest data centre enforcement action in that state's history.
salemreporter.com
north-america local-government data-centres moratorium planning water energy
California, United States
Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on 18 September directing the state's Government Operations Agency to bring forward the timelines for SB 813 and AB 1405, the two artificial intelligence laws he signed the week before, to convene a group of experts within two months to recommend how the state's artificial intelligence law could be strengthened, to look at requiring frontier artificial intelligence companies to host independent verification organisations on site for regular audits, to advance work on a kill switch for frontier models along with checks that it still works, and to widen the definition of a critical safety incident so that it covers a system going outside its operators' control, with the Governor's Office of Emergency Services also named in the order.
gov.ca.gov
north-america national-government safety standards transparency
The European Commission carries Q10 because water use and waste heat are written into the label a site will have to publish, which is measurement rather than a decision, and the rating applies whether or not anyone objects. Australia carries Q9 because the standards are open to submissions from the public before they are drafted into law, and Q10 because grids, water, land and neighbouring communities are named as the pressures the standards exist to address. Salem carries Q9 because the pause followed a public hearing and the councillors named residents' objections, and Q10 because water and electricity are among the grounds across the jurisdictions that moved in the same week.
Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East outside the Paris address, and the rest of Asia beyond the White House meeting produced nothing new inside the window that met the brief on this scan. Searches covered the African Union, Smart Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa; CARICOM, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union and the Caribbean AI Task Force; China in Chinese as well as English, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and ASEAN; the Pacific Islands Forum and Australia; Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Colombia in Spanish and Portuguese; Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Egypt; the European Commission, the European Parliament and Ireland; and the United Nations, UNESCO and the Holy See. The second pass searched those same empty regions again, in Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic as well as English, covering Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay on data centre water and siting, CARICOM and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, the League of Arab States and the Arab Information and Communication Technologies Organisation, ASEAN, India, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia, and the Pacific Islands Forum, Fiji, Samoa and Papua New Guinea, and found nothing inside the window that met the brief, so those gaps are real rather than an artefact of the first pass.
Dropped as older than it looked: the Chilean Chamber of Deputies vote approving the anti-deepfake bill in general by 128 votes to 2 with 5 abstentions and returning it to the Commission on Future, Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation, which a news aggregator placed on 19 September but which the reporting dates to 23 July 2026; Japan's updated METI AI Guidelines for Business of 10 September; Thailand's pause on data centre projects, which this page has already recorded; and Microsoft's 2026 Responsible AI Transparency Report of 1 September. Also left out: the agreement between Mexico's Conagua and the International Water Management Institute of 18 September to build artificial intelligence tools for water security, which is the technology used for a purpose rather than a decision about governing it. The second pass dropped four more as older than they looked: CloudHQ's announcement of a 4.8 billion United States dollar hyperscale campus in Querétaro, Mexico, which dates to September 2025; the Global Call for AI Red Lines, signed by more than 200 politicians and scientists and launched at the United Nations General Assembly, which dates to 22 September 2025; Governor Newsom's veto of California's companion chatbot bill AB 1064, which dates to 14 October 2025; and Uttar Pradesh's Data Centre Policy 2026, which dates to July 2026. The Arab region's work on a unified artificial intelligence strategy also sits outside this window, the summit in Hammamet having run from 7 to 10 September and the regional workshop on responsible artificial intelligence governance in Manama on 16 and 17 September, both before the last scan. Nothing was left out under the defence rule, though the White House meeting was kept to its civil content and the national security side of those talks is not recorded here.
What is standing rather than moving: Australia's consultation on mandatory national artificial intelligence standards closes at 5pm on 9 October and Tasmania's draft statement of expectations for data centres closes at 11.59pm on 12 October; the European Commission's consultation on minimum performance standards for data centres closes on 14 December, with a legislative proposal expected in spring 2027 and the first labels due from 15 August 2027; Senator Ted Cruz's Commerce Committee markup on the bipartisan artificial intelligence safety bill had not been held when the Senate left Washington for the November elections; Thailand's standards for its paused data centre projects were due about the start of October; Indonesia's two presidential regulations on the artificial intelligence roadmap and on ethics still await signature; Kenya's artificial intelligence bill is published but not yet tabled before its Senate; Brazil's PL 2338 sits with the Chamber of Deputies special committee, with a floor vote forecast no earlier than December; South Africa's revised national artificial intelligence policy is due to go to Cabinet by November after the first draft was withdrawn over invented citations; the Council of Europe framework convention on artificial intelligence is still not in force, with one ratification deposited of the five it needs; Scotland's national planning guidance for data centres is promised by the end of the year; the appeal by the Housing Assembly and Foxglove against the Cape Town data centre approval sits with the Planning Appeals Authority; the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation's water licence review is expected to be heard in December; the Pacific Islands Forum's artificial intelligence governance framework goes to leaders in 2027; and the Australian Senate inquiry into artificial intelligence and data centres reports on 16 November.
Scanned again at 07:08 Brisbane (UTC+10), five hours after the scan above, which is why this second pass looks back over the usual week for everywhere outside the big powers rather than repeating the eleven day catch-up. Ten more items met the brief, from Europe, Africa, the Pacific, North America and Latin America, several of them inside the eleven day gap and missed by the earlier pass. Each carries the date it happened.
Finland and Norway
President Alexander Stubb of Finland and Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway launched a statement called A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models on the sidelines of the General Assembly in New York on 21 September, asking that companies building the most advanced systems run mandatory testing before release and accept independent evaluation, that governments agree common standards and share reports of serious safety incidents, and that United Nations member states build on existing arrangements and look at creating an international institution able to set standards and carry out verification, with the Finnish presidency's page listing 34 signatories from Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania and the Secretary-General welcoming the initiative.
presidentti.fi
global europe national-government safety standards transparency new-institution
Kenya and Finland
President William Ruto of Kenya and President Alexander Stubb of Finland co-chaired a leaders' roundtable of the AI Middle Powers coalition on the sidelines of the General Assembly in New York, reported on 22 September under the theme of shared sovereignty in the artificial intelligence era and joined by President Julius Maada Bio of Sierra Leone, where Ruto put a voluntary framework for countries that cannot build a full stack alone to pool computing power, data and talent, agree common terms when buying models and compute, test systems jointly and build datasets in local languages, saying political sovereignty without technological agency risks becoming sovereignty in law and dependency in practice.
streamlinefeed.co.ke
africa europe national-government ai-strategy global-south capacity-building
Kenya
Kenya's Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Korir Sing'Oei and Elizabeth Kelly, head of beneficial deployments at the United States company Anthropic, signed a joint declaration in New York on 22 September, reported the following day, covering skills, research, public sector deployment, and safety testing and evaluation with work in education and health, with any data programmes governed by Kenyan law, no funding announced and pilots named as the next step.
the-star.co.ke
africa national-government industry safety capacity-building
South Africa
Communications Minister Solly Malatsi said on 21 September that the redrafted national artificial intelligence policy will now reach Cabinet by the end of the 2026/27 financial year in March 2027, rather than the November 2026 date the department had previously given Parliament, with the independent expert panel chaired by Wits professor Benjamin Rosman rebuilding the draft withdrawn on 26 April after fabricated citations were found in its reference list; this page has been carrying the November date, which has now moved.
dailymaverick.co.za
africa national-government ai-strategy guidelines
Australia Q9 Q10
The Senate Environment and Communications References Committee heard residents and councils in Melbourne on 23 September, where Jacqui Glover of Citizens for Tottenham asked for voluntary home buybacks for people living within 500 metres of a data centre, compensation at council rates or market value whichever is higher, stamp duty and moving costs, a one-off payment of 10,000 Australian dollars for the disruption of moving and 5,000 dollars a year for boundary residents during construction, describing fumes and noise from dozens of diesel backup generators at NextDC's West Footscray site, which sits 15 metres from homes with about 2,500 people living within 500 metres, while Hume City Council Mayor Carly Moore criticised the government's proposed buffer zones and committee chair Sarah Hanson-Young backed the compensation calls.
abc.net.au
pacific parliament civil-society data-centres planning environment participation
Australia and the labs
The same committee asked OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei to appear before it, reported on 27 September, after confirmation that an OpenAI agent reached Australian government websites including the Medicare portal in June, which the company says it found in August and which was not disclosed publicly until September, OpenAI saying it found no evidence that patient records were accessed, chair Sarah Hanson-Young saying there are serious questions for Altman to answer about the hack, and Bloomberg reporting the following day that neither chief executive will attend, with OpenAI sending chief strategy officer Jason Kwon to a parliamentary committee hearing in Sydney on 6 October instead.
aljazeera.com
pacific parliament industry safety transparency
Texas, United States Q10
Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on 21 September to stop issuing environmental permits for data centre projects, covering air, water and waste permits, which extends a pause that until then applied to grid connections, and instructed that no state agency proceed with regulatory approvals for data centre development until the audits under way are finished, with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas expecting to complete its audit of about 300 planned sites in December and the commission to report on compliance to the Governor's office by 19 October.
texastribune.org
north-america national-government regulator data-centres moratorium water energy
Osage Nation, United States Q9
Congresswoman Angela Pratt introduced a bill, ONCA 26-70, in the Osage Nation Congress on 28 September that would require tribal government entities to obtain the approval of the twelve member Congress before agreeing to any hyperscale data centre on the reservation, which would reach the talks between the Nation's Minerals Council and Google over Project Spring, an 827 acre site at Sand Springs that the Sand Springs city council approved in February and that still needs leasing permission from the council overseeing 1.47 million acres of subsurface rights, with committee chair Maria Whitehorn saying she opposes data centres on the reservation and Pratt saying the bill stops the conversation being siloed in one part of the government; the Natural Resources Committee postponed its decision.
kosu.org
north-america indigenous parliament data-centres consent land
United States industry and unions
Blackstone, OpenAI, QTS and SoftBank joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and other unions in a coalition called the American Infrastructure Alliance, reported by Axios on 28 September, which says it will spend several million dollars campaigning in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Indiana and South Carolina to work with state and local officials on standards and guardrails for data centres in 2027, and which hopes to head off further moratoriums on new construction.
axios.com
north-america industry civil-society data-centres moratorium planning
Mexico
José Antonio Peña Merino, head of the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency, told President Claudia Sheinbaum's press conference that Tulancingo in Hidalgo will host a new federal public data centre with about five times the capacity of the existing site at Aguascalientes, reported on 28 September, to run government systems including the civil registry, social programme payments, the Beca Rita Cetina scholarship platform and the Llave MX digital identity service used by more than 30 million people, against roughly two million government digital transactions a day.
criteriohidalgo.com
latin-america national-government data-centres data-sovereignty
Australia carries Q9 because the committee took evidence directly from residents and a residents' group set out in figures what it thinks living beside a data centre is worth, and Q10 because the fumes, the noise and the diesel generators are the grounds the evidence rests on. The Osage Nation bill carries Q9 because it is an argument about which body inside a nation may give consent on the nation's behalf, and whether a council that holds subsurface rights can settle a question that reaches everybody on the reservation.
Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East produced nothing inside the window on this second pass. Searches covered China in Chinese as well as English, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and ASEAN; CARICOM and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union; the League of Arab States and the Arab Organisation for Communications and Information Technology in Arabic; the African Union, Smart Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa; Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil in Spanish and Portuguese; the Pacific Islands Forum and Australia; the European Commission, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom; and the United Nations, the Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation.
Dropped as older than it looked: the Africa AI Governance Index 2026 and the summit that launched it, which a September search returned as current but which ran in Geneva in July; the Iswe Foundation whitepaper A Citizens Track on AI Governance, of 6 July; the founding of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation by 29 countries in Shanghai on 16 July; India's AI Governance Guidelines from its Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, published earlier in the year; the European Parliament and Council votes on the digital omnibus amending the AI Act, on 16 and 29 June; and Thailand's pause on data centre projects, decided on 4 September and already on this page. Left out as outside the brief: Google's Project Suncatcher satellite, announced on 24 September, which is a company testing computing hardware in orbit rather than a decision about governing it. Nothing was left out under the defence rule.
Also standing after this pass: Columbus, Ohio, held the second reading on 28 September of an ordinance directing Columbus Water and Power to work out higher rates for data centres and other high volume water users, with rates to come back to the council by the end of October, and the result was not reported at the time of this scan; Sioux County in Iowa held the first reading on 28 September of data centre standards requiring independent environmental studies and closed loop cooling, with second and third readings on 13 and 27 October; Jasper County in South Carolina passed the second reading of a one year moratorium on 21 September, with a third to come; and the Pine Island data centre in Minnesota remains halted under court order after a challenge by the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, with the next hearing on 16 November.
GAJRA Earth