Google has broadened its partnership with energy company Voltus to create one of the largest virtual power plants in the US, covering the Mid-Atlantic PJM grid. Rather than building new generation, Voltus will pay homes and businesses to reduce electricity use during peak demand—often automatically via smart thermostats or batteries—freeing up grid capacity equivalent to a large nuclear reactor's output for Google's data centers.
A Consumer Reports survey found that most Americans who have lived in their homes for over three years are paying more for electricity than they did three years ago, with three-quarters saying the increases have strained their household finances. Respondents most often blamed utility company profits and AI data center growth for the hikes, and over 75% said they don't trust state lawmakers to protect them from further rate increases.
Facing growing local opposition, Google, Amazon and Meta are offering communities increased financial incentives, pledging to accept fewer tax breaks, and promising greater transparency about planned data center projects. The companies also say they are working to reduce environmental impact and are assuring residents that the facilities will raise local property values.
The Financial Times reports that 47 large data center projects have fallen through this year, citing data from RegLayer. Bernstein analysts estimate only about 35 percent of currently planned facilities are actually feasible, with people involved in the buildout telling the FT that high interest rates and volatile bond markets are threatening their plans.
MIT Technology Review's latest coverage explores how researchers are seeking new approaches to advance computing performance now that transistor miniaturization has slowed, pushing the industry toward larger data centers instead. A separate report from the outlet's James Temple covers fieldwork in Alaska examining how wildfires are affecting permafrost and the climate implications of that thawing.
Google has struck a deal described as the largest virtual power plant agreement by a hyperscaler, aggregating flexible demand and distributed resources rather than building new generation capacity. The arrangement is intended to supply the equivalent of about a gigawatt of power to support its data center growth.
Google and Meta jointly released a PyTorch-native version of the SGLang inference engine, called TorchTPU, letting Google's tensor processing units serve AI workloads without requiring a switch to Google's JAX framework. Meta's PyTorch-TPU lead Zongwei Zhou said the engine is already running in production at Meta, built with help from RadixArk, the startup founded by SGLang's creators. A matching PyTorch-native version of the vLLM inference engine was also released as open source.
Carrier Global announced plans to build a $600 million manufacturing plant in Texas dedicated to producing cooling systems for data centers. The company described it as the largest single investment in its history, tied to rising demand from customers operating AI-focused data centers.
A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos survey finds 57% of Americans believe AI is harmful to society, while 66% oppose new data center construction nationally and 72% would oppose one in their own community. Political strategists tell CNET that opposition spans party lines and could influence midterm election outcomes, particularly for candidates who backed data center projects without community input.
Jas Khaira, who leads Blackstone's new San Francisco-based AI unit BXN1, said at TechCrunch Disrupt that concerns about debt tied to AI infrastructure buildout are exaggerated. He described Blackstone as the largest non-hyperscaler owner of compute, citing deals including a $5 billion commitment to neocloud Crux AI and backing for chip startup Etched, alongside its pioneering 2023 lending structure with CoreWeave that uses GPUs and customer contracts as collateral.
Ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, tech policy topics like AI regulation, data center construction, privacy and child online safety are becoming prominent campaign issues. Tech executives are making large political donations, including Elon Musk's roughly $366 million to conservative causes, Andreessen Horowitz's $91.3 million to Republican-aligned groups, and a $25 million gift from OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife to a pro-AI PAC. A Gallup poll found 70% of US adults, across party lines, oppose local data center construction due to concerns about electricity and water use.
A new study from the Houston Advanced Research Center models what happens to Texas air quality if all currently planned data centers connect to the grid using its expected energy mix. Under that scenario, fine particle pollution would more than triple to its highest level since 2006, NOx emissions would rise 136 percent, and CO2 pollution would climb 90 percent above 2025 levels within five years.
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