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

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

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

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

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