AI Data Centers

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 0

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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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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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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.

EXCLUSIVE: GOP Rep Wants To Give America’s Power Plants, Data Centers An Anti-Drone Upgrade– dailycaller.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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One congressman is moving to protect the soft underbelly of America’s critical infrastructure with a new bill.

Republican Tennessee Rep. Matt Van Epps unveiled a House version of Sen. Tom Cotton’s Critical Infrastructure Airspace Defense Act Tuesday, which aims to shield hospitals, power plants, water treatment sites, and dams from potential drone attacks. The bill would make grants available to private companies to purchase government-approved anti-drone technologies, and could even extend to data centers.

“The bill gives the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy and others, the ability to determine which critical infrastructure facilities need these authorities,” Van Epps told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This could include anything from critical water systems to power plants and potentially even data centers.”

Data Center Operators Are Trying to Fix Their Water Use Problems– www.wired.com

pgnewser June 3, 2026 0

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On Monday, SpaceX amended its initial public offering to state that water conditions—including water scarcity, regulations around water, and drought—could constrain data center development.

It isn’t the only tech company trying to assess how water scarcity might impact its business. Water use is emerging as one of the most contentious data center issues. A recent Gallup poll found that seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to data center development, with water scarcity ranking as the top resource concern. Facing increasingly fierce resistance, some tech companies are scrambling to assure the public that they’re facing the issue head-on.

Australia’s Slowing Economy Propped Up by Data Center Boom– financialpost.com

pgnewser June 3, 2026 0

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G­­­ross domestic product advanced 0.3% in the first three months of the year, just one-third of the pace recorded in the final quarter of 2025 and missing estimates, government data showed Wednesday. Private investment climbed by almost 4%, led by higher outlays on data centers, with a 16% jump in spending on machinery and equipment the largest gain in almost 30 years.

Who is really behind data center opposition?– www.americanthinker.com

pgnewser May 29, 2026 0

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We are often best defined not by the company we keep, but by our enemies. Having the right—left—enemies tends to be a very good thing indeed, as it’s a reliable indicator we’re doing the right things with the right people and for the right reasons.

It’s not always easy, however, to know the motives of people, or nations, when we’re dealing with issues of technology and/or public policy. One such issue is the proliferation of data centers, necessary for the burgeoning AI revolution, but controversial for that and other reasons. Among them is the amount of water and power they require. This is particularly ironic because they tend to be built in sparsely populated states like Wyoming, which often have water usage and power issues. More densely populated states tend to have reflexive “not in my backyard” sensibilities.

Left’s Anti-Data Center Activism Plays Right Into China’s Hands– dailycaller.com

pgnewser May 29, 2026 0

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Anti-data center activists typically cite concerns about water usage, pollution, or the cost of building the data centers themselves.

Many individuals are sincere in their activism. But public opinion on data centers is likely being shaped by foreign actors, according to a report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute. (RELATED: CHRIS JOHNSON: AI Data Centers Can Win Over Skeptics. But It Must Learn From Fracking) 

BPI’s head of research Sam Lyman explained Wednesday that China uses social media as a “gain of function for their propaganda” on The Hill’s “Rising.”

Northampton County Residents Turn Out To Stop $5B Data Center– crooksandliars.com

pgnewser May 26, 2026 0

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A proposed data center expected to cost more than $5 billion ran into intense resistance Thursday night in rural Pennsylvania, where residents packed a town hall meeting and delivered a clear message: They do not want their farmland and community identity sacrificed for a largely undefined mega-project.

During a three-hour informational session at Bangor Area Middle School, residents of Lower Mount Bethel Township voiced overwhelming opposition to the proposed Lower Mount Bethel Tech Center, according to WFMZ-TV. The event was organized by the project’s major stakeholders, including Peron Development and J.G. Petrucci Co., rather than township leaders.

Americans Reject Data Centers -scitechnews.com

pgnewser May 15, 2026 2

Plans by corporate and state America to rapidly build AI data centers could meet stiff resistance is a recent Gallop poll is correct. The poll shows 70% of Americans oppose Data centers, ESPECIALLY in their local regions.

Not only do residents fear the tax on the resources, the taking of land, but also they fear the surveillance capacity of these data centers to enable the state to track the actions of citizens almost in real time.

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