Elon Musk’s SpaceX committed to spending over $2.8 billion in recent months to buy gas turbines to power data centers for its artificial intelligence unit, the company revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. The relatively large investment shows that Musk is continuing to double down on gas turbines, even after SpaceX’s use of them … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
But a lot of these claims, it turns out, have very little—if any—actual proof behind them. Joshi is the author of a new report, released Monday with support from several environmental organizations, that attempts to quantify some of the most high-profile claims made about how AI will save the planet. The report looks at more … Read more
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 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
Anjali Bansal is the founder of Avaana Capital, which invests in frontier tech and innovation-led startups in energy, advanced materials, supply chains, agriculture, and food systems. In her previous role, Anjali served as the non-executive chairperson of Dena Bank, appointed to steer the resolution of the stressed bank. She was also a global partner and … Read more