Scotland’s governing party wants to freeze every new datacentre in the country. If ministers agree, a core pillar of the UK’s AI strategy could stall. The Scottish government is weighing a sweeping moratorium on new datacentres. Last Sunday, the Scottish National Party (SNP) voted to freeze all new builds, the Guardian reports. The motion now […]
Geothermal used to mean shallow wells and modest heat. Quaise wants to drill kilometres down and blast the rock with microwaves, and it just raised $134 million to try. Quaise Energy has raised $134 million to drill for superhot rock deep underground, Bloomberg reports. Prelude Ventures led the first close of the Series B, the […]
Freight rail is often described as the most energy-efficient way to move goods over land, yet it still runs on one of the dirtiest inputs in modern infrastructure: diesel. As rail operators face mounting pressure from volatile fuel costs, tightening emissions rules, and aging locomotive fleets, the question is no longer whether rail should decarbonize, but how. One […]
Schneider Electric is buying Cognite, a Norwegian-founded industrial AI company, for $3.1bn in cash. The French group wants software that can make factories and power grids think for themselves. Schneider Electric said on June 30, 2026 that it had agreed to acquire all of Cognite in an all-cash deal worth $3.1bn. Cognite builds software that […]
The unglamorous truth about the AI boom is that some of its hardest problems are plumbing. As data centres pack more GPUs into every rack and run them hotter, the fluid that keeps the chips from cooking has started, occasionally, to grow bacteria. That is the problem Omen AI has built a company around, and […]
In the desert outside Zhongwei, in the northwestern region of Ningxia, four dedicated power lines now run from a field of solar panels to a cluster of computers. They do not pass through the public grid. That detail, dull as it sounds, is the whole point. China is encouraging its sprawling data centre industry to […]
Congress is moving to stop households paying for Big Tech’s AI power bills. A House panel votes this week on a package of measures. The aim is to put AI data centre energy costs back on the companies that create them. As AI drives up electricity bills, Congress wants Big Tech to pick up more […]
If you live on the East Coast, you have probably opened a winter utility bill and wondered how your electricity costs could possibly be that high. Every few years, the story makes headlines: a cold snap hits the Northeast, power prices spike to hundreds of dollars, and politicians demand answers. But the real explanation rarely […]
France’s Parliament adopted a bill on Tuesday that dismantles the monopoly Électricité de France has held over the country’s hydropower market for decades, according to Bloomberg. The law converts EDF’s hydropower concessions into permits and requires the state-owned utility to auction 6 gigawatts of capacity each year under the supervision of France’s energy regulator, CRE. EDF […]
The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, a Los Angeles startup founded by a former SpaceX engineer, has raised $22mn to chase that always-on demand with geothermal, […]
