• A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion over how it handled its users' data.
• It could be the largest penalty against Meta in history.
• Meta recently agreed to an $18 billion settlement over the impact of its tech on kids.

A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading users about how it handled their data and for failing to prevent misinformation on Facebook.

The ruling could be the largest penalty in Meta's history. Last month, Meta settled a child-safety lawsuit brought by a group of US states for $18 billion.

The New Mexico case focused on Meta's handling of user records that Cambridge Analytica used for campaign purposes during the 2016 election. New Mexico alleged that Facebook misrepresented the extent of users' control over their data on the app.

"Facebook's wrongdoing—over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public—goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote in the ruling. "It relates to the way in which Facebook induces people onto the platform and ultimately keeps them there."

In a statement, Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the penalty "makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico."

"At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online," Mahoney said. "We are confident we will prevail on appeal."

A jury ruled against Meta last month, finding the company committed nearly 50 million violations of a New Mexico law prohibiting deceptive trade practices. Each violation carries a penalty of up to $5,000.

Some Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were deposed in the case. New Mexico first sued the company in 2021, and the case went to trial last month.

In internal Meta communications presented at the trial, Zuckerberg appeared to obfuscate methods for users to hide their data.

"Give them a chance to change their privacy settings but obviously don't encourage it," Zuckerberg wrote in one internal message.

Meta's next move remains unclear. The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

This is a breaking news story. It will be updated.

• Elon Musk said AI rivals are clamoring to rent SpaceX's compute.
• SpaceX plans to split compute between its internal uses and outside customers.
• The company could rent out its compute "several times over if we said yes to everyone," Musk said.

SpaceX's AI rivals are clamoring to rent computing power from the artificial intelligence and rocket company, CEO Elon Musk said.

"We are also, frankly, hounded relentlessly by every hyperscaler and by dozens of smaller companies to rent more of our compute," Musk said during SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call Tuesday.

Musk said SpaceX could rent out the company's compute "several times over if we said yes to everyone."

SpaceX, however, is reserving a chunk of that capacity for its own AI ambitions, including scaling its AI chatbot Grok and Cursor, the coding startup it recently acquired.

Musk said SpaceX is seeking to devote roughly half of its compute to internal uses and rent out the other half to third parties. That balance could change month to month, he said.

"It's going to be dynamic," said Musk. "And obviously, our approach is to rent at the — effectively the spot market rate as opposed to sign these long-term deals."

The company expects the value of compute to increase as AI models improve and ultimately generate "more useful intelligence per watt," said Musk.

"And the value of that compute is proportionate to the useful intelligence per watt," Musk said, adding that rental rates for older Nvidia H100 chips have climbed from when they were new.

"I think that's likely to continue," said Musk. "I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time."

Musk likened the situation to Monty Python's famed cheese shop sketch, in which a customer repeatedly asks for different cheeses only to find that none are available.

"We've actually tried to offload some of our inference compute to other cloud providers so that we can use more compute for training," the CEO said. "And we get the cheese shop sketch."