AI Data Centers

Here’s the Conservative Playbook for Winning the AI Data-Center Debate– townhall.com

pgnewser August 27, 2026 0

Here’s the Conservative Playbook for Winning the AI Data-Center Debate– townhall.com
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EXCERPT:

Conservatives need a coherent approach to the increasingly contentious question of AI data-center development. At the moment, the Right is all over the map, with President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance emphasizing the need to build the infrastructure required for American AI dominance, while Republican governors including Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have approached new data-center development with far greater skepticism, and, at times, open hostility.

Taylor Budowich, president of the Innovation Council, has laid out the organized approach conservatives should take. First and foremost, we must listen to people’s concerns and ensure we oppose data-center projects that could drain communities dry. But in most places, conservatives should also recognize that communities are practically begging for data-center construction because of the investment and economic benefits these projects can bring. Our policy approach should give people the freedom to decide for themselves whether they want a data center built in their community, not impose sweeping statewide or federal moratoria that deny every town that choice and control over their economic future.

“I think part of the problem is actually the premise, which is we’re thinking about it in political terms. I’m a believer of the Reaganism, good policy makes good politics. So the question should be what’s good policy here?” Budowich said. “I think good policy is not a single shovel should go in the ground, not a single slab of concrete should be laid, if there’s a data center that’s taking from the community. These data centers, this industry, shouldn’t be draining our communities, it should be feeding our communities.”

Most GOP politicians now talk negatively about data centers, data shows– www.washingtonpost.com

pgnewser August 26, 2026 0

Most GOP politicians now talk negatively about data centers, data shows– www.washingtonpost.com
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Sen. Jon Husted once promoted data centers as all upside for his state of Ohio. “Data centers are essential to our digital lives,” the Republican said in 2024, praising a planned Google project that he claimed would establish “central Ohio as an important tech hub in America.”

 

Mongolia positions itself as Asia’s next data centre hub– www.euronews.com

pgnewser August 26, 2026 0

Mongolia positions itself as Asia’s next data centre hub– www.euronews.com
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Mongolia is positioning itself as a global data centre hub, signing agreements for 863 megawatts of data centre capacity on the sidelines of a United Nations conference on desertification that brought 197 delegations to Ulaanbaatar this month.

The move to attract data centre investment was the most concrete economic outcome of the 12-day COP17 conference of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, where delegates are discussing how to restore land degraded by climate change.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Togmid Dorjkhand, Mongolia has three main competitive advantages: cheap renewable energy, a cold climate that reduces cooling costs, and a vast land area and stable legal framework.

“We have a lot of energy generation potential, above the ground and under the ground and we have all kinds of deposits, uranium and coal and other resources,” Togmid told Euronews.

“And yes, we are a very cold country, eight months a year are very cold. Cold weather is important for the data centres because they need a lot of cooling, so the colder the weather the more you save on cooling.”

Abbott’s data center pause taking several months in Texas– www.washingtonexaminer.com

pgnewser August 26, 2026 0

Abbott’s data center pause taking several months in Texas– www.washingtonexaminer.com
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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.

Most GOP politicians now talk negatively about data centers, data shows– www.washingtonpost.com

pgnewser August 26, 2026 0

Most GOP politicians now talk negatively about data centers, data shows– www.washingtonpost.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

Sen. Jon Husted once promoted data centers as all upside for his state of Ohio. “Data centers are essential to our digital lives,” the Republican said in 2024, praising a planned Google project that he claimed would establish “central Ohio as an important tech hub in America.”

 

Mongolia positions itself as Asia’s next data centre hub– www.euronews.com

pgnewser August 26, 2026 0

Mongolia positions itself as Asia’s next data centre hub– www.euronews.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

Mongolia is positioning itself as a global data centre hub, signing agreements for 863 megawatts of data centre capacity on the sidelines of a United Nations conference on desertification that brought 197 delegations to Ulaanbaatar this month.

The move to attract data centre investment was the most concrete economic outcome of the 12-day COP17 conference of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, where delegates are discussing how to restore land degraded by climate change.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Togmid Dorjkhand, Mongolia has three main competitive advantages: cheap renewable energy, a cold climate that reduces cooling costs, and a vast land area and stable legal framework.

“We have a lot of energy generation potential, above the ground and under the ground and we have all kinds of deposits, uranium and coal and other resources,” Togmid told Euronews.

“And yes, we are a very cold country, eight months a year are very cold. Cold weather is important for the data centres because they need a lot of cooling, so the colder the weather the more you save on cooling.”

Meta reaches $50 billion investment in 5-gigawatt Louisiana data center– www.washingtonexaminer.com

pgnewser July 14, 2026 0

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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.

White House to Rally Utilities, Data Centers for AI Power Cost Pledge, Sources Say– www.dailysignal.com

pgnewser July 14, 2026 0

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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.

House Advances Bipartisan Bill to Make Tech Giants Pay AI Data Center Power Costs– www.westernjournal.com

pgnewser June 25, 2026 1

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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.

‘We Will Fight to Our Very Last Breath:’ Township Leaders Vow to Fight Nuclear AI Data Center– www.404media.co

pgnewser June 23, 2026 0

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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.

Why More Data Centers Might Mean Cheaper Electricity | American Enterprise Institute– www.aei.org

pgnewser June 23, 2026 0

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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.

Amazon Data Centers In Mississippi Have Already Raised Electricity Rates for Local Customers, Report Suggests– www.404media.co

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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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.

China Opens World’s First Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center– www.wired.com

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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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.

New device may make computers 1,000 times faster without overheating while reducing data center power consumption |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser June 10, 2026 0

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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.