Meta’s Hyperion data centre in rural Louisiana has ballooned from $10bn to more than $50bn in under two years. In a parish of 20,000 people, it has made some locals a fortune and priced others out of their homes. Meta just made its biggest AI bet bigger. On Monday the company said its Hyperion data […]
Cutting the West’s reliance on China would carry a staggering price. A new study puts the cost of decoupling from China at $23.6tn over 25 years, and warns the bill would land hardest on the industries building Europe’s tech future. The West has spent three years talking about reducing its dependence on China. A new […]
France believes its cheap, low-carbon electricity is Europe’s overlooked advantage in AI. A debate has now opened over that power. Should it go to homegrown AI firms, or to the American giants building data centres on French soil? When the head of Europe’s biggest AI lab arrived at last month’s G7 working lunch on artificial […]
The AI build-out has done something the fossil-fuel industry could not do for itself. It has set off the largest-ever construction boom in natural gas-fired power plants, the Associated Press reports. Aging coal plants are being kept alive past their retirement dates too. Utilities, plant owners, and the federal government have all pushed to postpone the […]
Executives building the AI boom are unwavering. Demand is effectively bottomless, they say, even as the stocks that ride on it wobble, CNBC reports. Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel chief now at Playground Global, put it plainly. He thinks of AI demand as almost unlimited, with energy availability “the only real limiter”. The order books support […]
The fight over AI’s harms has played out state by state. One US senator wants to make it federal, all at once. Ed Markey has a long list of worries about artificial intelligence. Thirsty data centres. Workplace surveillance. Biased algorithms. Chatbots that prey on children. On Friday the Massachusetts Democrat tried to turn that list […]
The scramble to build AI data centres is pushing developers toward Native American land. Indigenous-led group Honor the Earth says it is tracking more than 100 proposed projects on or near tribal and rural territory. The appeal for developers is practical. Large land-based tribes often have space, water rights, and power access, and reservations can offer tax […]
As data centres run into unhappy neighbours and water limits on land, Samsung wants to float them offshore. Samsung Heavy Industries plans to launch its first floating data centre by 2028, Seoul Economic Daily reported. It would be a purpose-built barge parked near the coast. The design is specific. Rather than convert an old ship, […]
A Polish billionaire has laid out plans to build a fleet of small nuclear reactors across Britain, at an estimated £35bn, TechRadar reported. Michał Sołowow’s firm, SGE, says it wants to install 14 GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 reactors on three UK sites. It is targeting first power in 2034. The numbers are large. Together the […]
A Meta contractor flushed a rare, potentially deadly bacterium into Cheyenne’s wastewater system. The Wyoming city has now suspended all data centre discharge, a fresh flashpoint in the fight over AI’s thirst for water. Officials in Cheyenne, Wyoming, have stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data centres. The trigger was a contractor building Meta’s new AI […]
