The Brief

Charging an electric vehicle in Southern California often involves conditions that are less than ideal — like sitting in your hot (or cold) car in an empty parking lot. Now some companies are trying to reimagine the experience.

The company Rove recently opened a charging station off the 5 Freeway in Santa Ana that includes a 24-hour indoor lounge with bathrooms, a car wash, and a Gelson’s mini market. Kristi Ochoa, the company’s vice president of marketing, said the idea was borne out of company leaders’ own public charging woes.

“And then we just kept problem solving,” she said. “What were the challenges people were having where they were finding chargers that didn't work well? How do we fix that? And how do we make it easy to pay and how do we make them as fast as possible and how do we reduce the line?”

Rove’s Santa Ana station has 40 fast chargers, and attendants who can help newbie EV drivers figure out how to charge and address problems onsite rather than via telephone, like at most other charging stations.

And they have smaller amenities that are gas station norms but usually absent from charging stations, like squeegees to clean your windshield. “They’re kind of an underrated piece,” Ochoa said.

This reporter’s charging woes

My family entered the brave new world of electric vehicle ownership when we bought a used Nissan Leaf in 2018. We were lucky — our landlord split the bill with us to install a Level 2 charger (a typical home or work charger that takes 4-10 hours to fully charge a vehicle) in the garage of our apartment.

It was mostly great. We could charge up overnight, get to work, where I could usually find an available charger nearby, and get home to charge again. We felt like we were saving money by not buying gas and doing our part to try and usher in a cleaner energy future.

But then we moved to a place where we couldn’t charge at home and our EV journey got significantly more complicated. Charging in the wild — aka, on the streets of Southern California, outside of home and/or work — could be exasperating. There were only a few charging stations within several miles of our home. The closest one, just a block away, only had one charger that we could use for our particular vehicle and it was almost always busy.

Sometimes, I’d check the charging company’s app (charging in the wild required us to have multiple apps for different companies, and a third app to find nearby charging stations), see that the charger was open, and rush over there only to find that someone had beat me to it.

Other times, chargers would be out of service — just when I desperately needed one. I once took my 9-year-old daughter to a movie on a rainy night, planning to charge at the parking garage adjacent to the theater while we watched the film. One of the garage’s two chargers was out of service and the other was busy.

The competition for a charge can be fierce.

(

Justin Sullivan

/

Getty Images

)

After the movie, I found a charger at a nearby shopping center only to find that it was also out of service. It was now pouring and we wouldn’t make it home without charging. We finally begged a car dealership to let us use their only available Level 1 charger (the slowest) for enough time to get us home. I sat in the fogged-up car for 20 minutes trying to stay awake while my daughter dozed in the back.

We eventually gave up and sold our EV. I hope to try again when we can buy a car that gets more miles to the charge and when the public charging infrastructure for EVs, other than Tesla, is better developed. (The Tesla Supercharger network is already robust.)

More full service stations coming

The Rove-style station — if there were enough of them — seems like an answer to some of the problems we faced.

On a recent afternoon, Nick O’Malley and Caleb Ostgaard were lounging at an outdoor table at the Santa Ana station, waiting for O’Malley’s car to finish charging before heading back to L.A. O’Malley said he’d like to see more stations like Rove’s, “where it's less of just a random parking lot in the middle of nowhere.”

Tico Brown stopped at the Santa Ana station to charge up his new Tesla. “This is nice that I can grab something to eat real quick and then get back on the road,” he said.

Rove's EV charging station in Santa Ana has an indoor lounge, Gelson's mini market, and outdoor seating.

(

Jill Replogle

/

LAist

)

Rove plans to open 10 similar stations in Southern California by 2026, including in Costa Mesa, Torrance, Long Beach, and Corona.

Other companies are also trying to improve EV owners’ experience with public charging. Electrify America opened its first indoor charging station with a lounge in San Francisco in February.

“I think that and the Rove model are a reflection of charging stations realizing we need to provide a better experience when it comes to charging,” said Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the state Energy Commission.

Not to be outdone, Tesla is currently building a charging station in Hollywood that will include a diner and drive-in theater. And a new Tesla Super Charger station — with 112 fast chargers, a 7-Eleven, and a lounge — is expected to open in late 2025 near the Grapevine section of the I-5.

California’s big EV plans

The state has 10 years to reach its goal of having zero emission vehicles make up 100% of all new vehicles sold. The outgoing Biden administration approved California’s mandate to phase out gas-powered cars via a waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But the incoming Trump administration is likely to challenge the waiver in court.

Currently, about one in four new vehicles sold in California are zero emission.

The state also recently began tracking the number and distribution of EV charging stations. Currently, there are more than 152,000 public and shared private chargers, according to the state Energy Commission. Shared private chargers are located at workplaces or in parking garages that charge a fee to park while charging.

The state’s goal is to have 250,000 chargers installed by the end of 2026. Buckley, the agency spokesperson, said California is on track to reach that goal “in the next couple of years.”

Buckley said the state is also “laser focused on reliability” — the Energy Commission is in the process of developing standards to make sure chargers are working 97% of the time. Those standards will apply to chargers that get some amount of public funding, which Buckley said applies to about half of the state’s installed chargers.

In December, the Energy Commission announced plans to invest $1.4 billion over the next four years on new infrastructure for refueling electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles. Buckley said the bulk of that investment will be directed toward communities where chargers are even more scarce than I experienced during my years of EV ownership.

“We’re giving a little more love to rural areas and low-income areas,” Buckley said, “going where the market is not going.”

Perhaps nobody embodies artificial intelligence mania quite like Jensen Huang, the chief executive of chip behemoth Nvidia, which has seen its value spike 300% in the last two years.

A frothy time for Huang, to be sure, which makes it all the more understandable why his first statement to investors on a recent earnings call was an attempt to deflate bubble fears.

"There's been a lot of talk about an AI bubble," he told shareholders. "From our vantage point, we see something very different."

Take in the AI bubble discourse and something becomes clear: Those who have the most to gain from artificial intelligence spending never slowing are proclaiming that critics who fret about an over-hyped investment frenzy have it all wrong.

"I don't think this is the beginning of a bust cycle," White House AI czar and venture capitalist David Sacks said on his podcast All-In. "I think that we're in a boom. We're in an investment super-cycle."

White House AI adviser David Sacks speaks onstage during The Bitcoin Conference at The Venetian Las Vegas in January.

(

Ian Maule

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

"The idea that we're going to have a demand problem five years from now, to me, seems quite absurd," said prominent Silicon Valley investor Ben Horowitz, adding: "if you look at demand and supply and what's going on and multiples against growth, it doesn't look like a bubble at all to me."

Appearing on CNBC, JPMorgan Chase executive Mary Callahan Erdoes said calling the amount of money rushing into AI right now a bubble is "a crazy concept," declaring that "we are on the precipice of a major, major revolution in a way that companies operate."

Yet a look under the hood of what's really going on right now in the AI industry is enough to deliver serious doubt, said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist who is now a research fellow at MIT's Institute for the Digital Economy.

He said there is a startling amount of capital pouring into a "revolution" that remains mostly speculative.

"The technology is very useful, but the pace at which it is improving has more or less ground to a halt," Kedrosky said. "So the notion that the revolution continues with the same drum beat playing for the next five years is sadly mistaken."

The huge infusion of cash

The gusher of money is rushing in at a rate that is stunning to financial experts.

Take OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker that set off the AI race in late 2022. Its CEO Sam Altman has said the company is making $20 billion in revenue a year, and it plans to spend $1.4 trillion on data centers over the next eight years. That growth, of course, would rely on ever-ballooning sales from more and more people and businesses purchasing its AI services.

There is reason to be skeptical. A growing body of research indicates most firms are not seeing chatbots affect their bottom lines, and just 3% of people pay for AI, according to one analysis.

"These models are being hyped up, and we're investing more than we should," said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

"I have no doubt that there will be AI technologies that will come out in the next ten years that will add real value and add to productivity, but much of what we hear from the industry now is exaggeration," he said.

Nonetheless, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are set to collectively sink around $400 billion on AI this year, mostly for funding data centers. Some of the companies are set to devote about 50% of their current cash flow to data center construction.

Or to put it another way: every iPhone user on earth would have to pay more than $250 to pay for that amount of spending. "That's not going to happen," Kedrosky said.

To avoid burning up too much of its cash on hand, big Silicon Valley companies, like Meta and Oracle, are tapping private equity and debt to finance the industry's data center building spree.

Paving the AI future with debt and other risky financing

One assessment, from Goldman Sachs analysts, found that hyperscaler companies — tech firms that have massive cloud and computing capacities — have taken on $121 billion in debt over the past year, a more than 300% uptick from the industry's typical debt load.

Analyst Gil Luria of the D.A. Davidson investment firm, who has been tracking Big Tech's data center boom, said some of the financial maneuvers Silicon Valley is making are structured to keep the appearance of debt off of balance sheets, using what's known as "special purpose vehicles."

An aerial view of a 33 megawatt data center with closed-loop cooling system in Vernon, California.

(

Mario Tama

/

Getty Images

)

The tech firm makes an investment in the data center, outside investors put up most of the cash, then the special purpose vehicle borrows money to buy the chips that are inside the data centers. The tech company gets the benefit of the increased computing capacity but it doesn't weigh down the company's balance sheet with debt.

For example, a special purpose vehicle was recently funded by Wall Street firm Blue Owl Capital and Meta for a data center in Louisiana.

The design of the deal is complicated but it goes something like this: Blue Owl took out a loan for $27 billion for the data center. That debt is backed up by Meta's payments for leasing the facility. Meta essentially has a mortgage on the data center. Meta owns 20% of the entity but gets all of the computing power the data center generates. Because of the financial structure of the deal, the $27 billion loan never shows up on Meta's balance sheet. If the AI bubble bursts and the data center goes dark, Meta will be on the hook to make a multi-billion-dollar payment to Blue Owl for the value of the data center.

Such financial arrangements, according to Luria, have something of a checkered past.

"The term special purpose vehicle came to consciousness about 25 years ago with a little company called Enron," said Luria, referring to the energy company that collapsed in 2001. "What's different now is companies are not hiding it. But having said that, it's not something we should be leaning on to build our future."

Enormous spending hinging on returns that could be a fantasy

Silicon Valley is taking on all this new debt with the assumption that massive new revenues from AI will cover the tab. But again, there is reason for doubt.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that Big Tech companies will dish out about $3 trillion on AI infrastructure through 2028, with their own cash flows covering only half of that.

"If the market for artificial intelligence were even to steady in its growth, pretty quickly we will have over-built capacity, and the debt will be worthless, and the financial institutions will lose money," Luria said.

Twenty-five years ago, the original dot-com bubble burst after, among other factors, debt financing built out fiber-optic cables for a future that had not yet arrived, said Luria, a lesson, it appears, tech companies are not worried about repeating.

"If we get to the point after spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers that we don't need a few years from now, then we're talking about another financial crisis," he said.

Circular deals raise even more concern

Another aspect of the over-heated AI landscape that is raising eyebrows is the circular nature of investments.

Take a recent $100 billion deal between Nvidia and OpenAI.

Nvidia will pump that amount into OpenAI to bankroll data centers. OpenAI will then fill those facilities with Nvidia's chips. Some analysts say this structure, where Nvidia is essentially subsidizing one of its biggest customers, artificially inflates actual demand for AI.

"The idea is I'm Nvidia and I want OpenAI to buy more of my chips, so I give them money to do it," Kedrosky said. "It's fairly common at a small scale, but it's unusual to see it in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars," noting that the last time it was prevalent was during the dot-com bubble.

Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 at Moscone Center in June.

(

Justin Sullivan

/

Getty Images

)

Lesser-known companies are getting in on the action, too.

CoreWeave, once a crypto mining startup, pivoted to data center building to ride the AI boom. Major AI companies are turning to CoreWeave to train and run their AI models.

OpenAI has entered deals with CoreWeave worth tens of billions of dollars in which CoreWeave's chip capacity in data centers is rented out to OpenAI in exchange for stock in CoreWeave, and OpenAI, in turn, could use that stock to pay its CoreWeave renting fees.

Nvidia, meanwhile, which also owns part of CoreWeave, has a deal guaranteeing that Nvidia will gobble up any unused data center capacity through 2032.

"The danger," said the MIT economist Acemoglu,"is that these kinds of deals eventually reveal a house of cards."

Some high profile investors see bubble-popping on the horizon

Some influential investors are showing signs of bubble jitters.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel sold off his entire stake in Nvidia worth around $100 million earlier this month. That came after SoftBank sold a nearly $6 billion stake in Nvidia.

And in recent weeks, AI bubble pessimists have rallied around Michael Burry, the hedge-fund investor who made hundreds of millions of dollars betting against the housing market in 2008. He was the subject of the 2015 film The Big Short. Since then, though, he's had a mixed reputation for market predictions, having warned about imminent collapses that never came to pass.

For what it's worth, Burry is now betting against Nvidia, accusing the AI industry of hiding behind a bunch of fancy accounting tricks. He's homed in the circular deals between companies.

"True end demand is ridiculously small. Almost all customers are funded by their dealers," Burry wrote on X. He later wrote: "OpenAI is the linchpin here. Can anyone name their auditor?"

As tech companies sink billions into data centers, some executives themselves are freely admitting there looks to be some over exuberance.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters in August: "Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes."

And Google chief executive Sundar Pichai told the BBC recently that "there are elements of irrationality" in the AI market right now.

Asked how Google would fare if the bubble burst, Pichai responded: "I think no company is going to be immune, including us."

Copyright 2025 NPR

A record number of people are expected to travel within the U.S. for Thanksgiving, be it plane, train or automobile.

Nearly 82 million are projected to travel at least 50 miles from Nov. 25 to Dec. 1, an increase of 1.6 million people compared to last year's holiday, according to an AAA report released on Monday.

Most of them will be hitting the road in a car, with about 73.2 million people expected to drive, AAA said. That's 1.8% more car travelers compared to the 2024 holiday period.

AAA projected 6 million people to travel by plane within the country for the holiday, a 2% increase from last year. Due to concerns over recent flight delays and cancellations, however, AAA also said that number could end up dropping slightly if travelers make last-minute arrangements to use other forms of transportation. Staffing shortages during the prolonged government shutdown earlier this month resulted in mass flight disruptions.

The FAA lifted its directive that called for an emergency reduction in flights, allowing airlines to return to operating normally. Aviation experts warned it could take some time before flights return to normal, but industry leaders appeared confident that airline operations would return to normal pre-shutdown levels in time for the Thanksgiving travel frenzy. Weather forecast to bookend the holiday in some parts of the country could cause flight disruptions and delays.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Friday it expected the upcoming holiday rush to be the busiest Thanksgiving travel time for air travel in 15 years, with Tuesday being the busiest flying day.

Travel across other transport modes — bus, train and cruise — was forecast to increase 8.5% this year, with a likely uptick in last-minute bus and train bookings

"People are willing to brave the crowds and make last-minute adjustments to their plans to make lifelong memories, whether it's visiting extended family or meeting up with friends," Stacey Barber, vice president of AAA Travel said in a statement on Monday.

Here is what else to know:

Driving in the afternoon? Think again

Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon are expected to be the most congested times for drivers in major metro areas, according to INRIX, a transportation analytics firm.

If driving, the best times to hit the road for the holiday will be before noon on Tuesday and 11 a.m. on Wednesday to avoid backups, according to the firm. Thanksgiving Day will have minimal road traffic impacts.

When returning home after the holiday, travelers are advised to start driving before noon on any day except Monday. The Sunday after Thanksgiving will likely have heavy traffic most of the day and the best time to travel Monday will be after 8:00 p.m., INRIX said.

Weather could be messy, but should clear up for your trip back

During peak travel times, from Monday through Wednesday, rain extending from Southern Texas up to Minnesota will move across the country to the east, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

"Monday into Tuesday will probably be a little problematic anywhere from Texas, eastern Oklahoma, into Arkansas and northwestern Louisiana," Bob Oravec, lead forecaster for the NWS, told NPR.

By Thanksgiving Day, things will be a little drier across the U.S. Temperatures will be colder than average for a majority of the country on Thanksgiving morning, with central parts of the U.S. seeing temperatures in the teens. On Black Friday, there will be warmer than average temperatures from the Great Plains to the West Coast, with places like Denver, Colo., seeing temperatures in the mid-50s, Oravec said.

Some of the worst weather will be across much of the central and eastern U.S. where there will be lake-effect snow showers coming off the Great Lakes, Oravec said.

For holiday travelers returning home on Friday and Saturday, the weather should be decent for a large portion of the country, he said. But a storm system is expected to develop over the weekend.

On Saturday and Sunday, the system could bring heavy snow across western Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota as well as parts of Minnesota into Wisconsin, according to Oravec. On Sunday, from Texas up into Missouri and Illinois, chances of rain are forecast to increase.

Copyright 2025 NPR

I wasn’t expecting the internet’s biggest Chinese rapper to make his Southern California debut (we are not counting the earlier San Diego show) at a sprawling, sterile business park in Santa Ana.

But there I was Wednesday night along with hundreds of people at the Observatory to watch the viral sensation perform his brand of hip-hop blending Memphis trap with lyrics rooted in Cantonese folk and everyday culture across southeastern China.

You may not know the name, SKAI Isyourgod, but if you have been on Instagram or TikTok in the last couple years, you can’t escape the sound — or the memes.

" He's really famous on Instagram," said Julie Sun, who came to the gig from Irvine. " He popped up a lot throughout all different kinds of video content."

That’s how I learned of his music — through a reel that had nothing to do with his music. But it was grabby from the first note, opening as it did by sampling a vintage Cantonese opera. That inventive touch sent me searching for the whole song, “Blueprint Supreme,” which turned out to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek send up on the nouveau riche.

It’s a theme the 27-year-old from Guangdong Province goes back to with humor and deft wordplay in the track “Stacked On All Sides.”

Throughout the night, the crowd yelled out the name of that tune. When it was finally performed, all the phones were raised.

“His lyrics [are] mostly very positive and kind of give the good fortune to people,” Sun said.

Like Sun, the vast majority of the audience were Chinese.

"Where’s everyone from?" SKAI asked during one of his interludes, and the crowd shouted back: "Dongbei…. Fushan…."

But there were also plenty of non-Chinese speaking fans at the club, a testament to the rapper’s global virility.

(

Fiona Ng

/

LAist

)

SKAI Isyourgod performs in Santa Ana in 2025.

(

Fiona ng

/

LAist

)

Noah Rosen lives in Santa Ana, but he first learned about SKAI two years ago through friends and people he worked with at the company he cofounded, which has a satellite office in China.

"We blasted [it] in carpool karaoke and stuff like that," said Rosen, who doesn’t speak Chinese.

"There's something so catchy and so inventive, and it's a fantastic melody," he continued. "Which is why they're so good on TikTok and Instagram and everything. Doesn't matter if you understand the lyrics or not."

Some of the red ink in California’s budget deficit is coming from unplanned spending in state prisons, according to a new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is on track to exceed its budget by roughly $850 million over three years despite recent cuts that include four prison closures and some labor concessions that trimmed payroll expenses. The state budget included $17.5 billion for prisons this year.

The office attributed the corrections department’s shortfall to both preexisting and ongoing imbalances in its budget. The analyst’s annual fiscal outlook projected a nearly $18 billion deficit for the coming year, which follows spending cuts in the current budget.

The corrections department last year ran out of money to pay its bills. In May, it received a one-time allocation of $357 million from the general fund to cover needs including workers’ compensation, food for incarcerated people and overtime.

Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco in a June 17 letter to the Department of Finance said he was “shocked and disappointed that (the corrections department) overspent its budget by such a significant amount” while the state faced a $12 billion general fund shortfall that resulted in cuts to key health care and social service programs.

“These were dollars that could have been used to provide basic services to some of our most underserved communities,” wrote Wiener. “While this year’s budget included measures requiring departments to ‘tighten their belts’ and reduce state operating expenses by up to 7.95%, (the corrections department) did the opposite, and overspent by nearly three percent.”

Without having any new dedicated funding to align its actual costs with its budget, Wiener warned, deficits “will likely persist” and put additional pressure on the general fund in years to come.

That’s despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s attempts to save the state money through prison closures. Newsom in May moved to close the state prison in Norco in Riverside County next year, the fifth prison closure under his tenure.

Newsom’s administration estimates it saves about $150 million a year for each prison closure, which lawmakers and advocates regard as the only way to significantly bring down corrections spending. A spokesperson for Newsom’s Finance Department declined to comment on the analyst’s projection. Newsom will release his next budget proposal in January.

“We are allowing wasteful prison spending to continue while Californians are being told to tighten their belts and brace for deep federal cuts to core programs,” said Brian Kaneda, deputy director for the statewide coalition Californians United for a Responsible Budget in a statement to CalMatters. “We are spending millions on prisons that could be safely closed. That is government waste, not public safety.”