There's been renewed interest in nuclear power in recent years, thanks in part to demand from tech companies in search of reliable energy to power their AI data centers.

The startup Kairos Power has jumped on this opportunity. Its nuclear reactors are cooled by molten salt. They also use golf-ball sized nuclear fuel, instead of uranium rods cooled by water used by traditional reactors.

Mike Laufer, co-founder and CEO of Kairos, says their reactors a bit like an upside down gumball machine.

The company just started construction on its first power plant, located in eastern Tennessee, called Hermes 2. It will supply energy to the utility in the area, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and specifically to Google to power its data centers.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Laufer to learn more.

The International Math Olympiad is a yearly competition for students, most of them high school age, who compete to solve six difficult math problems. They're chosen from a pool of math problems submitted by different countries that participate in the competition.

The problems that don't make the cut previously have mostly just been lost; there was no one place you could go to find them.

But now a team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has gathered over 30,000 of those problems together in one dataset so both humans and AI models can look through and study them.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Mark Hamilton, a visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL who has been part of the work to gather problems. He’s also a Research Scientist at Google's DeepMind laboratory.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, allows government agencies to collect information about foreign nationals located abroad. That surveillance can happen without a warrant and the government can order email providers to turn over any messages of a particular foreigner, including those with a U.S. citizen.

Section 702 is set to expire this week. President Donald Trump has called for its extension, but there are Congressional lawmakers in both parties who oppose the kind of surveillance the law allows for. Elizabeth Goitein at the Brennan Center for Justice has testified before Congress advocating for reform of the law. She says right now it lets agencies search through Americans’ sensitive data.

This week, Meta is reportedly laying off 10% of its workers. But in the meantime, it's also capturing their mouse clicks to train its AI models. Plus, Roblox settles with states over child safety concerns.

But first, Apple's CEO is stepping down. The company announced this week that CEO Tim Cook is moving on from that role after about 15 years. His successor is John Ternus, a senior vice president of hardware engineering at the company. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, a columnist at The Information, about all these headlines for this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Lawmakers around the U.S. are moving to restrict data center development. Maine, for example, recently passed what's being called the country's first statewide ban on data centers. The measure would prohibit building any new data centers until late 2027.

As of this taping, Maine's governor, Janet Mills, was reportedly still undecided on whether she'd sign the bill. And 13 other states are also considering bans on data center development, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Tony Pipa of the Brookings Institution talks more about how much of the pushback has to do with the speed with which data centers are popping up.

The social media company Snap recently announced it’s laying off about 1,000 workers — 16% of its employees. The company said these changes will reduce costs by more than half a billion dollars and help establish a path to net income profitability.

This move comes after one of Snap's investors, Irenic Capital Management, wrote a public letter to the company outlining what it needs to do to “save” the company and cut costs.

Snap has been a public company for nine years. It's had just a few non-consecutive profitable quarters. Sarah Kunst, a general partner at the venture capital firm Cleo Capital, explains more about when a company has to be consistently profitable.

The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive. It sends out web crawlers to take snapshots of the internet, creating a digital library of web pages. But now, some news publications are blocking its crawlers over concerns that AI companies will access the Wayback Machine’s publicly available archive and then train their AI models with the content.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked about this with Andrew Deck at Harvard's Nieman Lab.

California became the first state to regulate embodied carbon in its building code. That’s changing the construction industry even beyond the state border.

More than a third of planet-warming emissions come from buildings and construction. Marketplace’s The rest of it is what’s called embodied carbon. That’s the emissions that it took to make the steel, concrete, glass and insulation, and put them all together. Caleigh Wells looked into what California’s new regulations could mean for builders in this episode of Marketplace Tech, hosted by Stephanie Hughes.