RAIN — Week of June 15, 2026

Upcoming Events with the Center for Rural AI

AI Fundamentals for Rural Communities (Workshop)

June 22, 2026 · 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM · Kendall Mountain Recreation Center, Silverton, Colorado · $50 · Capacity: 30

Get a non-technical, hands-on introduction to AI in a half-day workshop built for how rural communities work. Hosted by the San Juan Development Association and the Center for Rural AI, you will leave with practical skills and a simple action plan you can use right away to stretch capacity without adding staff, whether you work in small business, agriculture, hospitality, nonprofits, or local government.

CRAI News

The Center for Rural AI is proud to be a participating organization in the Colorado Thrives AI Fellows Program, a first-of-its-kind initiative launched in partnership with Anthropic and CodePath that embeds AI-native emerging talent inside Colorado companies and organizations. CRAI team members Emaliah Sawyer and Holden Bronson are helping bring the effort to life.

Read More Here: Colorado Thrives launches AI Fellows Program to empower Colorado talent and accelerate AI impact

Stories of the Week

AI in schools: 3 ways Congress can help

A bipartisan Senate Subcommittee on Education and the American Family heard testimony Tuesday on how the federal government can support AI in K-12 schools. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., named the core risk plainly: AI could leave behind rural schools that lack access to the technology. The Government Accountability Office plans to study AI's effects on K-12, prompted by a June 4 letter from Tuberville, Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

Witnesses pushed three asks: fully fund Title II and Title IV for teacher training (barely half of schools have offered AI professional development since 2022), reconstitute the shuttered Office of Educational Technology to fund research, and protect the FCC's $3 billion annual E-Rate program.

E-Rate is the line item rural leaders should watch. The FCC just opened a "top-to-bottom" review of it, and witness Erin Mote called it vital connectivity money for rural schools. Cuts there widen the divide before AI tools ever reach the classroom.

Inside One of America's Largest Ag Co-Op's Practical Approach to AI

GROWMARK, one of North America's largest agricultural cooperatives, is scaling AI across its federated FS system, and Agronomy Director Brendan Bachman describes the unglamorous reality on the Ag Tech Talk podcast. The work is less about a flashy product launch than building data infrastructure, aligning systems, and earning grower trust across many local FS locations.

Bachman's framing is useful for skeptics. AI layered on a curated, agronomy-specific dataset delivers real value, he argues, while AI on the open web does not. The MyFS Agronomy platform reshapes the agronomist's role rather than replacing it, and large language models are lowering the barrier to entry across ag tech.

The warning for rural growers and ag retailers: Bachman expects a performance gap to open between farmers who use these tools well and those who don't. That makes it a competitiveness question, not just a technology one.

Rural broadband providers expect AI to make a significant impact: Telecompetitor's AI study

Telecompetitor's 2026 Rural Broadband State of AI study surveyed 132 providers, and 91% said they expect AI to significantly affect both their own companies and the wider industry. Adoption lags the expectation. Nearly half describe their AI use as limited or informal, about half are experimenting, and only 1% have integrated AI into core systems.

Strategy is the bigger gap: 82% have no formal AI plan, and only 4% have one tied to business priorities. Smaller operators were least likely to have a roadmap, because writing one takes time and staff that lean teams lack. Where AI is deployed, it stays in the back office, led by internal knowledge base search at 43% and targeted marketing at 39%.

The top obstacle, cited by 68%, is a lack of internal skills or confidence. For rural telcos, that points to a workforce problem more than a technology one.

On the historic route from Selma to Montgomery, an AI cloud looms

In Lowndes County, Alabama, developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure wants to build Project Red Clay, a hyperscale data center campus of more than 3 million square feet on roughly 800 acres along Highway 80. The company has requested 1,500 megawatts from Alabama Power, enough to power about a million homes, and up to 100,000 gallons of water per day from a small rural utility.

Residents packed an open house to say no. In a county that is more than 70% Black and where about a quarter live below the poverty line, many still lack working septic systems. The proposed site sits on a national historic trail, about a mile from where 1965 marchers camped on their way to Montgomery.

The fight shows how AI's compute demand lands hardest on poor rural communities with little leverage over the power and water that would be diverted.

NRHA Artificial Intelligence Policy Paper

The National Rural Health Association has published a policy paper laying out its position on artificial intelligence in rural health care. As the leading advocacy voice for rural hospitals, clinics, and providers, NRHA's framing here will shape how the sector talks to regulators and funders about AI.

For rural health leaders, a policy paper from NRHA is a planning document, not just a position statement. It signals which AI uses the association is prepared to defend, where it sees patient safety and access risks, and what federal guardrails it wants.

Rural hospital administrators and rural health funders should read it before their next AI procurement or grant decision, because it is the framework NRHA will carry into policy fights on their behalf.

AI tutor access alone doesn't equate to student gains, study says

A new Stanford study found that simply offering AI tutoring tools does not produce meaningful engagement or better reading outcomes. Across two districts, only 61% and 53% of students used the tutor even during scheduled time, averaging 2.18 and 5.23 minutes a week, far below the 30 minutes the platform says is needed for measurable gains.

Pairing the AI tutor with a human tutor helped only marginally. The study also found that students who used the tool were higher achieving and less likely to use special education services, raising equity questions.

States are spending real money on these pilots: Arizona put $1.5 million into Khanmigo, Iowa $3 million into Amira. Rural districts weighing similar buys should treat implementation and student engagement as the deciding factor, not the tool's quality, before committing scarce dollars.

Federated Looking to Boost CBRS Capacity

Federated Wireless will release a tool in mid-July called Spectrum AI that it says can open up 50% more shared spectrum without new equipment or airwaves. Built on Nvidia's open-source Sionna RT model, it uses machine learning to simulate interference site by site, replacing the worst-case assumptions Federated's systems have used to assign CBRS channels.

Federated manages 85% of the more than 450,000 CBRS devices in use. The company claims field tests in Philadelphia and Phoenix delivered up to five times the network capacity at a given site. Access costs an extra 10 to 11% per month, applied county by county where customers opt in.

CBRS underpins many rural fixed wireless and private networks. More usable spectrum without a hardware buildout is exactly the kind of efficiency lean rural providers can use, and the tool is available to them, not just the big carriers.

$130 billion in data center projects blocked by protests so far this year

Data Center Watch, a project of AI intelligence firm 10a Labs, reported that protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects worth about $130 billion from January through March 2026, the most in any three-month period since tracking began in 2023. The number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states.

Researchers call this a structural shift, not a cyclical spike. Communities have internalized an opposition playbook, and new state legislative sessions have added regulatory uncertainty. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, who spent time with North Carolina organizers, describes residents holding their own education sessions on water rights, land use, and thermodynamics.

For rural leaders facing a data center proposal, this is the practical takeaway: opposition is now organized, cross-partisan, and increasingly effective, with a transferable playbook neighbors are already sharing.

DOJ intervenes on behalf of xAI in data center gas turbine lawsuit

The Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to dismiss a Clean Air Act lawsuit over xAI's gas-fired plant in Southaven, Mississippi, near the Tennessee border south of Memphis. The NAACP sued in April, alleging xAI and subsidiary MZX Tech ran 27 gas turbines totaling 495 MW without an air permit. The plant powers the Colossus 2 supercomputer that trains xAI's Grok models.

The novel move is the national security argument. A Department of Defense official testified that Grok is one of only four frontier AI models capable of supporting national security work and was used during operations in Iran. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves cited thousands of jobs. Also covered by Route Fifty and Ars Technica.

Critics warn the filing could let the executive branch veto citizen pollution lawsuits whenever they conflict with the AI agenda, a precedent that would weaken every rural community's leverage against a nearby data center.