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Amazon received warrants to buy up to 1.69 million Generac shares at $200.93 each, potentially worth up to $8 billion, as part of a deal for Generac to supply backup power generators to Amazon's data centers. Generac shares jumped more than 40% in after-hours trading following the news, with initial generator deliveries expected to total $2.4 billion between 2027 and 2028.
A new report from the nonprofit Basel Action Network estimates that AI infrastructure will generate far more electronic waste than previously projected, potentially amounting to enough discarded material to fill 23 million shipping containers by 2050. Unlike earlier estimates that only counted servers and GPUs, this analysis includes power supplies, cooling systems, backup power, and networking equipment tied to data centers, plus a category BAN calls 'AI Waste Contagion.' The group attributes 15-20 percent of the world's projected 211 million metric tons of annual e-waste by 2050 to AI-related infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates regions was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes on its data centers months earlier. An AWS status update posted September 15 said the company could not restore data in one UAE availability zone and across all three availability zones in Bahrain, though recovery work continues elsewhere.
A new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute finds that 53% of Americans are extremely or very concerned about AI's environmental impact, up from 41% a year ago. The rise is driven largely by Democrats, though the poll also shows widespread unease about the local effects of data centers that power AI and cloud computing.
In an interview, a Syensqo executive described a 'performance pyramid' framework, where commodity materials sit at the bottom and high-performance specialty materials sit at the top. He explained that AI's rapid advancement is piling on technical requirements—heat tolerance, purity, electrical performance, chemical and plasma resistance, long-term stability—that push semiconductor and data center materials toward the top of that pyramid, an area where Syensqo focuses its work.
Startup Rune has deployed a modular data center in southwest Texas that connects directly to a solar farm rather than the electric grid. It runs on solar output that would otherwise go unused, avoiding the need to construct any new power generation to support it.
Amazon Web Services has told customers to relocate their data away from its Abu Dhabi and Bahrain facilities, more than six months after drone and missile strikes damaged both sites during regional conflict involving Iran, the US and Israel. AWS gave no timeline for repairs, and Bahraini state media reported that site was destroyed by cruise missiles.
An investigation by The Guardian found that nearly all of the world's ten largest producers of PFAS, or 'forever chemicals,' intend to expand production to supply the booming data center industry. These chemicals are widely used in cooling systems, AI chips, circuit boards, fire suppression equipment, and cable coatings inside data centers.
Activists in Philadelphia, led by Shawmar Pitts of Philly Thrive, are pushing for a moratorium on new AI data centers after city officials identified potential construction sites in Northeast Philadelphia and Grays Ferry, a neighborhood near a shuttered oil refinery. Pitts and his neighbors, many of whom suffered health problems linked to decades of industrial pollution, worry that data centers could bring similar environmental and energy burdens despite promises of jobs and growth.
A New York Times/Siena University poll of 1,503 likely voters conducted in early September found 61 percent opposed building data centers for AI, with only 14 percent strongly supportive. Opposition skewed heavily among Harris voters and non-voters, while 2024 Trump voters were nearly evenly split between support and opposition. Environmental and water-use concerns topped the list of reasons for opposition, followed by community impact and general distrust of AI.
A new BloombergNEF report forecasts that US data centers will consume roughly 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, nearly double its estimate from nine months earlier. That figure would exceed the combined natural gas consumption of Germany and Japan, with grid-connected facilities accounting for the bulk of the growth rather than onsite gas plants built by companies like Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Bloomberg forecasts that U.S. AI data centers will consume up to 15 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, more than double an earlier projection of 6.9 billion cubic feet. The surge stems from operators turning to onsite gas turbine generators as grid power buildouts lag behind AI compute demand, with data centers expected to draw roughly 194 gigawatts, or 20% of U.S. power, by that year.