I traveled to Las Vegas in May to watch the Enhanced Games — a one-of-a-kind sports competition that lets athletes compete while using the kind of performance-enhancing drugs typically banned in professional sports. The games, derided as the “steroid Olympics,” were put on by a telehealth company backed by the likes of Peter Thiel and staffed by veterans of the crypto, AI, and biotech industries.

The event ended up being more than a little anticlimactic. Hailed by its creators as an event that would fundamentally transform the world of organized sports, the games resulted in few exciting feats. Only one world record fell, and it came in swimming, a sport where records are broken often.

Now it can be said that, in addition to the games being a competitive flop, they were a commercial failure, too. Earlier this week, the Enhanced Group, the company that put on the games, posted its second-quarter earnings report, revealing that the company had suffered a net loss of nearly $62 million. Much of that loss came from hosting the games.

Enhanced Group, founded only several years ago in 2023, enjoyed an IPO earlier this year at a $1.2 billion valuation, and sells personalized health treatments via a a digital telehealth platform. The treatments it sells are all FDA-approved, including peptides, testosterone injections, GLP-1s for weight loss, and other similar products.

The company’s Q2 earnings report says it brought in $17.7 million in the last quarter, but most of that money came from sponsorships tied to the games, not the telehealth business on which the company was built. Scant information is available about how that core business is doing. The report casts doubt on claims previously made by Enhanced executives that the games will be an annual event (the company will either have to start making a whole lot more money or be comfortable losing tens of millions of dollars a year).

Enhanced may already be signaling a pivot. The company’s report also highlights the recent launch of a new online series, Enhanced Breakers, which it says “operates at a fraction of the cost of a full Games event” while still keeping “athletes competing, audiences engaged, sponsors interested, and performance medicine in front of the world year-round.”

Enhanced’s own woes aside, the industry around it is gaining ground. The peptide business is booming, helped along by a recent decision from the Trump administration’s Food and Drug Administration to reclassify a number of substances that have long resided in a legally gray area. The government’s support doesn’t open the floodgates for the sale of those substances quite yet — an additional review process still needs to take place — but it highlights the government’s interest in deregulating the industry.

The FDA’s parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is notably overseen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long been known for his unconventional views on health. Kennedy’s ideas have been castigated by health professionals both inside and outside of the government who have routinely characterized his thinking as dangerous — criticism that hasn’t slowed the industry’s momentum.

Silicon Valley remains one of the hotbeds for peptide startups, where companies like Superpower and Noho Labs are capitalizing on the tech industry’s penchant for biohacking and trendy health supplements. And the sector’s growth is outpacing the rules meant to govern it, with state governments struggling to keep up with regulatory schemes.

In a cheeky marketing campaign, Liquid Death teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce to share a solution to mitigate the environmental impact of AI data centers, which require massive quantities of water to prevent servers from overheating.

“AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water,” Kelce quips in the video campaign. “That’s why Liquid Death and Garage Beer have teamed up. We want your pee to cool these data centers.”

Then, as a crowd of people walk through a field sipping their branded beverages, they sing in unison: “Let’s pee on computers together to save humanity!”

It’s a funny commercial. What’s even funnier is that Kelce has unwittingly stumbled upon a real tactic for cooling down data centers.

“The Liquid Death commercial is funny and tongue-in-cheek,” Michael Obradovitch, vice president of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, told TechCrunch. “But in reality, there is a fair amount of alternative water sources already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers.”

These alternative water sources, when used in data centers, at least partially offset the demand for potable drinking water. One such alternative water source is recycled water, which is made by treating wastewater and sewage water so that they’re safe to use again. Wastewater and sewage water contain many things, including — you guessed it! — human urine.

“You wouldn’t just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water, and that’s what we advocate,” Bruno Pigott, executive director of the WateReuse Association and former acting assistant administrator in water for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told TechCrunch.

To be clear: you should not actually contribute gallons of your pee to help cool data centers, as Kelce facetiously suggests. But just for the sake of the thought experiment: what would happen if you did try to cool a data center with a steady stream of pee?

“Pee contains all sorts of stuff. It contains salts, it contains urea, bacteria, organic matter of all sorts that can leave mineral deposits. If you just put that into a cooling tower or something else, it would require constant cleaning,” said Pigott. “One of the methods of cooling is called evaporative cooling, where hot air is passed through water to remove heat through evaporation. Can you imagine if you just poured urine through hot air?”

We do have the technology to turn our urine into potable drinking water — that’s what astronauts do in space, since they can only bring so much water with them on their spacecraft. But that isn’t efficient at a large scale, and even if it were, it’s not like scientists can just access millions of gallons of pee at will (well, not unless Kelce really commits to the bit). Instead, our toilet water ends up in wastewater and sewage.

That’s where water treatment facilities come in, providing recycled water to spare us from the smell of evaporated urine. These facilities use membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light, and other processes to treat water until it’s clean enough for industrial use. In some cases, this water can even be treated to the point that it’s drinkable.

“We use recycled water for cooling for all kinds of industries, and we have for decades,” Dr. Greta Zornes, practice leader for water reuse at the engineering firm CDM Smith, told TechCrunch. “So this is only one application, but definitely, there’s been a boom in recycled water for data center cooling.”

Though Zornes has worked on water reuse technology for more than two decades, her day-to-day work has shifted with the rising demand for data centers.

“Every day right now, I’m working on recycled water for data centers,” she said.

When data centers use more recycled water, they don’t pose as much of a burden to the local potable water supply. But industries can only pivot to recycled water use when there is proper infrastructure in place to treat millions of gallons of water every day.

“You have to be somewhat near a waste water treatment facility that’s sizable enough that you have enough water to use,” Zornes said. “So when data centers go out into rural areas, a lot of times the wastewater treatment plants just aren’t big enough — they’re not treating enough water for them to be able to take it and treat it and use it.”

Loudoun County, Virginia, located outside of Washington, D.C., is home to more than 250 data centers, with plans to construct at least another two dozen. As of 2025, Loudoun data centers collectively used about 200 million gallons of recycled water each day, but the water footprint of these data centers is so extreme that this only accounts for 43% of daily data center water usage in the area. The other 260 million gallons, or 57% of daily data center water usage, come from potable water supplies, according to Loudoun Water.

“There’s a lot of infrastructure that has to be built out and usually isn’t existing today, and that takes time” Zornes said. “That’s one of the problems — it’s just the time that it takes to get that done.”

Obradovitch thinks that the AI industry could even drive resources toward building out this kind of infrastructure to scale water treatment. Meta, for example, will invest at least $270 million in wastewater infrastructure projects near its data centers (the company also loses about $4 billion each quarter on its Reality Labs division).

“That’s where data centers can actually come in and be anchors of water infrastructure,” Obradovitch said. “There’s a number of cases and examples where data centers, as part of their engagement with communities, have committed funding and capital to some of these municipalities to help in addressing some of those exact challenges.”

On the policy side, Pigott is advocating for legislation that would provide a 30% tax credit to help industries scale their recycled water infrastructure.

“We think it would greatly accelerate the pace with which data centers and other industries entered into this area,” he said.

While there’s some unintentional science behind Liquid Death’s joke, the commercial and its virality serve as a reminder to the tech industry that the environmental demands of data centers have become a mainstream concern. According to a recent Gallup poll, about seven out of ten Americans oppose data centers in their communities, and AI products continue to face backlash from consumers who feel as though the technology is being forced into their lives.

“I’m glad that people are concerned about water, and anything that raises awareness of water, however crude it may be, could actually be beneficial,” Pigott said. “It gives us a chance to educate the public about what we’re doing today.”

If you are a malicious hacker, cybersecurity professionals may very well be the worst people in the world to try to hack, as there is a very good chance they are going to catch you.

A person pretending to work for a leading crypto news site targeted several cybersecurity professionals around the time of the hacking conferences Black Hat and Def Con earlier this month. The hacker approached attendees on social media site X, both via public replies and DMs, and then leveraged Google Docs in an attempt to trick the targets into installing malware, according to researchers. 

On Wednesday, security firm Huntress published a blog post detailing the hacking campaign, which targeted one of its researchers, who pretended to go along with it to learn what the hacker was trying to do. 

In broken English, the hacker asked the researcher if they had plans to attend a conference next, and then mentioned a conference allegedly organized by the crypto news website, according to a screenshot of the conversation.

After that, the hacker shared a legitimate Google Doc that looked like it was a planning document for the fake conference. The document displayed a sidebar designed to make the target think it was encrypted. The goal was to first trick the target into entering a fake decryption key provided by the hacker. That was the first step in a process that would lead to the installation of malware for macOS and Windows, depending on the operating system used by the target, according to Huntress.

To make the sidebar appear real, the hacker used Google App Script, a platform that allows developers to customize the user interface of Google Docs with menus and sidebars, for example.

The hacker tried to trick Huntress’ researcher into installing an infostealer for Apple computers; a remote desktop viewing tool repurposed as malware for Windows; and a fake installer for the cryptocurrency wallet Ledger.  

The person behind the account identified by Huntress researchers as the hacker did not respond when TechCrunch sent them a private message on X. 

Hackers of all kinds — be them unknown government hackers using advanced spyware, or North Korean government hackers using fake Twitter profiles — have targeted cybersecurity professionals before. What made this campaign a bit more believable was the use of a legitimate Google Doc and Google feature. 

Google did not immediately when TechCrunch reached out asking if the company had seen this hacking campaign, or similar ones.