What It Will Take to Make AI Sustainable

Building AI sustainably seems like a pipe dream as tech giants that previously made promises to cut emissions have been racing to build out massive data centers powered by fossil fuels. The rush to build out AI at all costs has been reinforced by the Trump administration, which is also rolling back environmental protections. Despite … Read more

Anthropic Gets in Bed With SpaceX as the AI Race Turns Weird

Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX said on Wednesday that the two entities have signed an agreement for Anthropic to use computing resources from xAI’s data center in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s the latest tie up in an industry that is scrambling to find enough computers to run complex AI software. SpaceX and xAI were previously separate … Read more

A New Google-Funded Data Center Will Be Powered by a Massive Gas Plant

“Grid growth can’t match AI demand, so a pragmatic ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy is essential—with gas as a critical bridge,” Cully Cavness, the cofounder and president of Crusoe, told WIRED in a statement. “This isn’t the destination; it’s the foundation we build on while investing in batteries, solar, wind, and small modular nuclear reactors. We’re not waiting … Read more

Senators Demand to Know How Much Energy Data Centers Use

Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican senator Josh Hawley are urging the US’s central energy information agency to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use. In a joint letter sent to the Energy Information Administration Thursday morning, seen by WIRED, Hawley and Warren press the agency to publicly collect “comprehensive, annual … Read more

New Bernie Sanders AI Safety Bill Would Halt Data Center Construction

Dozens of cities and counties across the US have introduced local moratoriums on data center development in response to local pushback. At least a dozen state legislatures—in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—have introduced state-level moratoriums this year. But Sanders’s bill marks a significant departure … Read more

Arm Is Now Making Its Own Chips

Arm, one of the world’s leading chip design firms, announced Tuesday that it is producing its own semiconductors. The move is a departure from its long-standing model of licensing intellectual property to companies that manufacture and sell chips themselves. Speaking to a live audience in San Francisco, Arm CEO Rene Haas made his pitch for … Read more

The AI Race Is Pressuring Utilities to Squeeze More From Europe’s Power Grids

European countries are racing to bring new data centers online as AI labs across the globe continue to demand more compute. The primary limiting factor is energy—and specifically, the ability to move it. Though Europe is on track to generate enough energy, utilities experts say, grid operators widely lack the infrastructure needed to transport it … Read more

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