AI Data Centers Head Out to Sea, Leveraging Seawater Cooling and Wave Power – finance.biggo.com
News Source
AI Data Centers
Abbott’s data center pause taking several months in Texas– www.washingtonexaminer.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
Around 300 proposed Texas data center projects are on hold for several months after Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) ordered an audit of new development, according to state regulators.
Between 250 and 300 projects, most of them data centers, are set to move through the audit queue, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas told the Public Utility Commission. The ERCOT is the state system that regulates the energy grid, which Abbott is aiming to boost through his order earlier this month, mandating certain reforms for data center developers looking to come to Texas.
Under standard procedure, proposed data centers undergo extensive evaluation by the ERCOT before being approved in the Lone Star State. Abbott’s order added some more standards to the process and will audit only “Batch Zero” projects, which are data center proposals that have already secured financing and land to build on, in the ERCOT’s queue.
It would take “several months” to audit the projects before greenlighting them to connect to the state grid, according to the ERCOT. Regulators are aiming to complete their study of the first batch of projects by April 2027, ERCOT Senior Vice President Chad Seely said. Regulators will send information requests to up to 300 large energy consumers to verify their eligibility for the study. They will also collect “community impact information.”
“Just from a holistic standpoint, having all that community impact information on how they’re handling water technology [and] power deliverability gives a better perspective to the state as we see these loads start to come onto the grid over the next several years,” Seely added.
Opposition to local data centers rises sharply, survey finds– phys.org
News Source
EXCERPT:
As protesters rally against data center construction in dozens of states and New York and Texas pause the issuance of permits for large data centers, a new nationally representative survey finds that Americans’ opposition to data centers in their communities has risen sharply since last spring.
Polish data center plans to send its waste heat to the neighbors – Computerworld– www.computerworld.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
As Europe swelters in a heatwave, residents probably don’t want to hear about ways to make their homes even hotter, but that’s what Polish property developer Citylink is talking about, with plans to dump waste heat from a new data center in Wrocław into the municipal district heating network.
Citylink is designing the data center so that heat from servers can be recovered instead of being dissipated via cooling systems — and as the data center grows, any increase in computing power will mean more energy available for recovery.
The collaboration with local power company Kogeneracja will provide “valuable experience in designing and operating modern data centers, with a particular focus on infrastructure dedicated to AI nodes,” said Michał Starybrat, development director at Citylink.
Data Centers Are Facing an Energy Crisis. A $550 Million Startup Thinks It Found the Answer – inc.com– news.google.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
Data Centers Are Facing an Energy Crisis. A $550 Million Startup Thinks It Found the Answer inc.com
Elon Musk’s AI Data Centers Need So Much Power He’s Buying Gas Turbine Companies — Who Else Benefits? – The Motley Fool– news.google.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
Elon Musk’s AI Data Centers Need So Much Power He’s Buying Gas Turbine Companies — Who Else Benefits? The Motley Fool
UK slows AI data center roll-out over energy crunch — RT World News– www.rt.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
The British energy regulator plans to stop firms from reserving electricity capacity for “speculative” projects
British energy regulator Ofgem on Wednesday proposed fees and stricter rules for AI data center developers to cull “unviable, stalled or speculative projects” that are taking up scarce grid capacity amid skyrocketing electricity demand.
It comes as the UK moves to grow its cloud computing and artificial intelligence industries but grapples with a sharp spike in grid connection requests – which Ofgem says have more than tripled in less than a year.
The amount of electricity capacity being sought by firms wanting to plug into the UK’s grid spiked from 41 gigawatts to 125 gigawatts between November 2024 and June 2025, driven largely by demand from data center projects, the regulator said in a press release on Wednesday.
The figure is nearly triple the UK’s 2025 peak electricity demand of around 46 gigawatts.
Under the proposed rules, developers would have to pay a refundable fee of between £237,500 and £712,500 ($316,000 to $947,000) per megawatt of electricity, Ofgem said. The fee would be forfeited if a project exits the grid connection queue before reaching energization.
The measure is expected to “tackle unviable, stalled and speculative projects,” according to the regulator.
In March, the UK government announced reforms aimed at clearing speculative grid connection requests, which it said more than quadrupled in the six months prior.
The reforms come as Brits face an ongoing energy price crunch; electricity and gas prices more than doubled in the UK in 2022 following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, when most European nations imposed sanctions on Russia and began phasing out cheap Russian gas supplies for more expensive alternatives. According to Ofgem, this year’s average household energy bill is expected to be around £1,862, almost 50% higher than in 2021.
While the Western restrictions had a detrimental impact on the Russian economy, it has adapted to them and learned to “minimize their effects,” according to Moscow. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has warned that “sanctions are a double-edged sword” and hurt both Russia and the countries that impose them.
Judge dismisses Trump lawsuit seeking NJ voter data – New Jersey Monitor
News Source
California’s largest AI data center is suing for access to 287 million gallons of Colorado River water a year– www.techspot.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
A hot potato: Once again, an AI data center is embroiled in controversy. This time, it’s not land, electricity, or tax breaks under the spotlight, but water – specifically, water from the Colorado River. And the company behind the facility is suing to get it.
Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM), the company behind what could become California’s largest AI data center, is suing the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) after the publicly owned utility rejected its application for water.
The proposed $10 billion, 950,000-square-foot, 330-megawatt facility would require roughly 750,000 gallons per day for cooling, or about 287 million gallons annually.
That amount equals around 880 acre-feet, just 0.03% of IID’s 3.1 million-acre-foot annual entitlement. However, the Colorado River is Imperial Valley’s only source of fresh water and supplies between 35 million and 40 million people across the West. Federal officials are preparing new operating rules as reservoirs remain under pressure from prolonged drought and weak runoff.
Developer Sebastian Rucci argues that the project wouldn’t increase overall demand. IVCM has leased 160 acres of nearby farmland and plans to stop irrigating it, redirecting roughly the same amount of water to the data center.
Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico proposes regulations, guardrails for data center industry – KVUE– news.google.com
News Source
Meta’s data center plans could help solve its AI spending problems – Yahoo Finance
News Source
Data Center backlash grows across US as political pressure mounts – Communications Today– news.google.com
News Source
China influence fears grow as anti-AI data center protests spread nationwide – Fox Business
News Source
News Source
EXCERPT:
The legislation, signed into law on Tuesday, is a one-year pause on permitting and construction of new “hyperscale” (larger than 50 megawatts) data centers, facilities that power large AI systems, while the state develops stricter rules on energy use, environmental impacts, local control, and rules on mitigating AI’s effect on jobs.
“These hyperscale AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, truly threatening to outpace our grid’s capacity, and they drive up costs for local ratepayers,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Tuesday.
“I refuse to let those costs be passed on to New Yorkers who already pay too much for their utility bills.”
The legislation follows widespread fearmongering about AI data centers, including concerns about their water and energy usage that have been massively overblown.
For example, few people know that all current AI data centers combined use less than 0.5 percent of the United States’ freshwater for cooling. Typically, even a large data center uses less fresh water than a single square mile of farmland.
Another common concern, what I’d call a myth, is the power usage of AI data centers. While they are massive consumers of electricity, that’s simply a reason to build more power generation. And so far, data centers have failed to drive residential price increases on any scale larger than your average Democrat-driven climate policy, according to groups like the Manhattan Institute. Other critics have likened the concern about power usage to halting the construction of computers because they use electricity.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Meta announced Monday that its Louisiana data center investment has grown from $10 billion to $50 billion and that it expects to generate substantial local tax revenues as it pursues artificial superintelligence.
The Richland Parish Data Center, nicknamed “Hyperion,” will be a nearly 10 million-square-foot, five-gigawatt facility, equivalent to a power plant capable of supplying enough electricity to power roughly 4 million average U.S. homes simultaneously. Altogether, that is about as much energy as New York City uses on a winter day.
“We’re delivering real economic impact alongside the AI infrastructure that will power the future,” Meta Vice President of Data Centers Rachel Peterson said in a statement.
News Source
EXCERPT:
WASHINGTON, July 13 (Reuters)—The White House plans to bring together utility companies and data center developers to make a voluntary pledge designed to ensure that rapid growth in electricity demand from artificial intelligence does not drive-up power bills for households and businesses, according to three people familiar with the plans.
An event to announce the initiative is expected in the coming weeks, with several companies taking part and vowing to protect current ratepayers from shouldering all the costs of AI expansion. The guest list is still being finalized, the sources said.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Technology companies that propose to build data centers to provide the computing power for artificial intelligence would have to pay any costs to upgrade local power grids under a bill that took a step forward in the House on Wednesday
The Ratepayer Protection Act, H.R. 9340, would authorize states to charge companies building data centers the full cost of new power generation to support the electricity-gobbling centers and transmission upgrades.
The Subcommittee on Energy, a panel that is part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, moved the bill, which had bipartisan support, forward. The full committee will now consider it.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Board members of a small township in Michigan agreed to “fight to our very last breath” against an AI data center planned in their community. America’s nuclear scientists and the University of Michigan want to build a massive data center in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan. If built, the data center will, among other things, run simulations to help America build nuclear weapons.
The residents of Ypsilanti Township overwhelmingly oppose the construction of the data center and voiced their opposition to the computer warehouse during a public board meeting on June 16. In a show of support that’s often rare from local leaders in communities with data centers, Ypsilanti Township’s board vowed to fight UofM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is partnering with the university, with everything they had.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Economics is full of counterintuitive insights. Rent control can make housing less affordable. Business failures can strengthen an economy. And, yes, higher demand can sometimes lower prices. That’s a possibility worth remembering in the ongoing debates over data centers and electricity bills.
It sure seems like we’re going to build a whole lot more data centers in this country—at least, that’s what Wall Street is expecting. JPMorgan just raised its forecast for data-center capacity growth to 138 gigawatts through 2030, up from 122 gigawatts in its forecast last November. The bank also said it expects $5.5 trillion in AI-related capex through 2030, up from its previous forecast of $5.1 trillion.
News Source
EXCERPT:
The AI industry has been pushing a narrative that the technology is a “black box” whose inner workings are so complex that they remain unknown even to the people making it. But another black box of AI is the underlying cost of the technology, and, specifically, what the AI boom is costing people who live near massive data centers. The data centers and energy plants that power large language models and other generative AI tools are subject to contracts cloaked in non-disclosure agreements and in many cases shielded from public scrutiny on the pretext that they contain competitive information.
A new report written by consultancy Synapse and commissioned by advocacy groups Earthjustice and Environmental Advocates Mississippi attempts to calculate the cost of 3 planned Amazon data centers to Entergy Mississippi customers, who share an energy utility with the centers. These hidden costs may offer a window into the broader burden borne by residents living near data centers around the country. The report estimates that residential customers of Entergy Mississippi, one of the state’s regional energy monopolies, have paid $38 million as of March 2026 for infrastructure and other costs related to data centers and will have paid $74 million by the end of the year.
News Source
EXCERPT:
China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country’s strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.
The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.
With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Inside a modern data centre, performance is already constrained less by raw transistor capability and more by heat removal. Server racks packed tightly together push thermal systems to their limit, and operators often throttle workloads not because chips can’t compute faster, but because cooling systems can’t keep up. Against that backdrop, the claim that processors can become 1,000 times faster through a light-driven switching device sounds like it belongs to a different category of computing altogether.What makes this result interesting is not just speed, but the mechanism: information switching triggered by light pulses rather than sustained electrical current, with experimental cycle times measured in picoseconds rather than nanoseconds.
According to the research published in Science, ‘Picosecond ultralow-power switching device based on an antiferromagnet’, a non-volatile switching element that can change state in about 40 picoseconds, which is roughly 40 trillionths of a second. For context, conventional semiconductor logic typically operates in the sub-nanosecond range, and even high-end CPU clock cycles are orders of magnitude slower once pipeline and memory effects are accounted for.That difference is not incremental. It shifts the conversation from “how do we shrink transistors further” to “how do we switch information using physics that isn’t bottlenecked by charge movement through silicon channels.”The device, demonstrated under lab conditions, uses ultrafast optical pulses routed through a photodetector (a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode), which then triggers a change in electron spin states within a magnetic material stack. That switching event is what encodes information.
