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Crusoe has ended its agreement to buy 29 of Boom Supersonic's 42-megawatt Superpower gas turbines, a deal worth $1.25 billion with deliveries originally set to start in 2027. Boom CEO Blake Scholl confirmed the split on X, saying turbines are no longer part of Crusoe's near-term power plans for sites like its Abilene, Texas campus. Crusoe confirmed to TechCrunch it is no longer working with Boom.
British AI cloud company Nscale announced a $3.36 billion convertible financing round on Friday, led by hedge fund Third Point. Of that, $2.36 billion is available immediately, with another $1 billion coming from Nvidia in mid-November; the notes will convert to equity once Nscale's planned IPO closes.
Seven-month data on the US grid through July 2026 shows electricity use rising about 2 percent year over year, down from 3 percent growth over the same period last year, despite rising data-center and EV/heat-pump demand. Solar power generation, which had been growing more than 30 percent annually in many quarters, is showing a smaller increase so far this year.
A commentary argues that artificial general intelligence has effectively arrived, describing it as a threshold where machines can reason across domains and act with meaningful autonomy rather than a state of perfection or superintelligence. The author points to a recently released model, called Astra, as an example that has crossed this threshold, while noting that even more capable systems are already in development.
Oracle issued a force majeure notice to the developer of its Project Jupiter data-center site in New Mexico, according to reporting on the project. The company has also dropped one key development partner amid the buildout, while local residents have pushed back against the project.
Apple has continued reducing its overall emissions even as it invests in AI infrastructure, a trend that contrasts with rivals whose emissions are rising due to power-hungry data centers. The company has previously pledged to become carbon neutral across its entire supply chain and product life cycle by 2030.
Google will launch its first Project Suncatcher test satellite, called MVP, on October 1 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare mission. The refrigerator-sized craft carries four of Google's custom TPU AI chips and roughly one kilowatt of solar power, and it uses a spacecraft body built by satellite imagery firm Planet Labs rather than a custom-built Google design. The test mission will run for only a few months.
An Entrepreneur op-ed argues that electricity, not chip supply, is becoming the binding constraint on AI growth, citing IEA projections that global data-center power use could nearly double from 485 to 950 terawatt-hours by 2030, with AI-specific demand tripling. It notes that by 2027 a single advanced server rack could draw as much peak power as 65 households, and that grid constraints could delay roughly 20% of planned data-center projects.
In an interview on The Ezra Klein Show, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argued that AI will require heavy fossil fuel use in the near term because renewable energy capacity is insufficient, likening the resulting pain to surgery necessary to save a patient. He also criticized the US for not building enough fossil fuel plants to meet AI's energy demands.
Google plans to launch a fridge-sized prototype satellite carrying roughly the computing power of one server, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as soon as October 1. The satellite is part of Project Suncatcher, an effort to test whether AI data center hardware can operate in orbit powered by continuous sunlight, and could remain in space for up to six years.
Elon Musk's companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and X, have concentrated major new capital projects—such as chip foundries, rocket launch facilities and data centers—across Sunbelt states. State governments are reportedly competing to attract these investments, which represent billions of dollars in planned spending.
Investment in AI data centers has surpassed the combined historical spending on canals, railroads and the electrical grid, according to reporting on the current buildout. The surge is generating jobs and lifting stock valuations tied to AI infrastructure, even as it strains construction resources and materials markets.