Big Tech Signs White House Data Center Pledge With Good Optics and Little Substance

Several key technology companies signed a nonbinding pledge at the White House on Wednesday that the Trump administration claims will ensure that tech companies do not pass the cost of data centers on to consumers’ utility bills. “Data centers … they need some PR help,” President Donald Trump said at the event. “People think that … Read more

The Data Centers Have Arrived at the Edge of the Arctic Circle

On the bank of the river that runs through the Swedish town of Borlänge, construction is underway on a sprawling new data center. The site previously housed a paper mill. When the developer, EcoDataCenter, broke ground in September, its CEO Peter Michelson declared“The facility once produced paper, the raw material of the newspaper information age. … Read more

Could AI Data Centers Be Moved to Outer Space?

here ε is the emissivity of the object—how effective it is as a radiator (0 < ε < 1), σ is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, A is the surface area, and T is the temperature (in Kelvin). Since we have temperature to the fourth power, you can see that hotter things radiate much more power than ... Read more

The Small English Town Swept Up in the Global AI Arms Race

A short drive from London, the town of Potters Bar is separated from the village of South Mimms by 85 acres of rolling farmland segmented by a scribble of hedgerows. In one of the fields, a lone oak serves as a rest stop along a public footpath. Lately, the tree has become a site of … Read more

A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web

Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s effort to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, which crawl the internet for text and other information to feed to data-hungry large language models. But there are some key differences … Read more

New York Is the Latest State to Consider a Data Center Pause

Lawmakers in at least five other states—Georgia, Maryland, oklahoma, Vermont,and Virginia—have also introduced bills this year that would impose various forms of temporary pauses on data center development. While Georgia, Vermont, and Virginia’s efforts are being led by Democrats, Oklahoma and Maryland’s bills were largely sponsored by Republicans. These bills mirror several moratoriums that have … Read more

Data Centers Are Driving a US Gas Boom

Data centers have caused the demand for gas-fired power in the US to explode over the past two years, according to new research released Wednesday. More than a third of this new demand, the research found, is explicitly linked to gas projects that will power data centers—the equivalent of energy that would power tens of … Read more