Storyflo Daily Top 10 — May 20, 2026 · Blackstone bets on Google, Massie loses, the IRS settlement, and an Ebola response under fire

ONE. Blackstone and Google announced a collaboration to spin up a new US entity selling access to Google's Tensor Processing Units along with the data center, cooling, and operations stack to run them. Equity commitment of $5 billion, total investment potentially $25 billion with debt, first 500 megawatts online in 2027. Per Storyflo's coverage citing the Wall Street Journal, this is Google admitting its TPUs are now competitive enough that an outside operator will bet a balance sheet on them — while also conceding it can't out-build Microsoft and Amazon on data-center capex alone. TWO. Thomas Massie lost his Kentucky primary by 54.4 to 45.6, falling to Trump-backed Ed Gallrein. Per Zeteo, this is now the most expensive House primary on record after pro-Israel donors poured millions in following Massie's defection on the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Iran strike, and the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The signal: a single high-profile Republican defector can no longer survive a primary cycle. THREE. The DOJ expanded its Trump tax-returns settlement Tuesday with a one-page waiver that "forever bars" the IRS from pursuing examinations of Trump, his family, or his businesses for any returns filed before this week. Per Axios, the extension was signed by Acting AG Todd Blanche — Trump's former personal lawyer in the New York criminal fraud trial. The Bulwark's Andrew Weissmann calls the entire $1.776 billion fund a fraud on taxpayers. State AGs are reportedly testing whether federal settlement preempts state tax claims; it likely doesn't. FOUR. Per Axios's exclusive on the Corporate Energy Buyers Association report, companies contracted 13.4 gigawatts of clean energy capacity in Q1 alone — more than all of 2021. CEBA CEO Rich Powell calls it the biggest year ever, driven by AI demand plus the rush to lock in expiring wind and solar tax credits under Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act before the July 4 construction deadline. FIVE. The Bulwark reports the Trump administration banned non-American travelers from DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan in response to what's now likely the third-worst Ebola outbreak on record. The 2014 Obama administration rejected the same approach on epidemiological grounds. Meidas+ has a parallel piece on Rutgers's Dr. Perry Halkitis walking through how the US public health infrastructure has been hollowed out since COVID. SIX. Former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne responded publicly for the first time Tuesday to allegations in Theo Baker's new book "How to Rule the World," per STAT. Baker reports the Stanford board concluded his "admit-nothing, deny-everything approach" did not reflect well on him or the institution, with a junior female colleague's dismissed concerns contributing to a unanimous board vote to replace him. SEVEN. Inside Medicine has a scoop: an MV Hondius passenger named Angela Perryman, currently held at the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha after Andes hantavirus exposure, intends to challenge the federal quarantine order signed by CDC's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. This will be the first significant legal challenge to a US federal quarantine order in years and will set evidentiary precedent. EIGHT. The Female Edge has a piece on chronically elevated cortisol in women over 40 and the new research linking it to long-term Alzheimer's risk. The practical ask is clinical: most primary-care visits don't run a four-point salivary cortisol curve, and that's the test that catches rhythm dysregulation as opposed to acute crisis. If the symptom cluster fits — 4 AM wake-ups, persistent fatigue, loss of drive — request it explicitly. NINE. Business Insider reports 25 Democratic-led states sued the Department of Education Tuesday over the borrowing caps in Trump's bill — $100K lifetime on grad students, $200K on "professional" degrees, with nursing notably excluded from the professional definition. If the suit succeeds, a real headwind comes off healthcare worker supply. If it fails, expect private-lender originations in healthcare-education to step up. TEN. Per Carbon Brief, the UK Climate Change Committee's new "well-adapted UK" report concludes £11 billion per year in adaptation spending — flood defenses, water reservoirs, cooling infrastructure — would be "cheaper than facing the damages." Twenty objectives, more than 100 actions. A useful policy template for any country weighing adaptation against catastrophe-response economics.