GoKawiil
Tech News
The Hermantown, Minnesota city council unanimously approved Google's proposed 200-acre data center after two delayed meetings and hours of public opposition. Google reduced the project from four buildings to three, capped building height at 33 feet, agreed to monitor nearby private wells, and withdrew its request for up to $80 million in property tax breaks.
A federal judge denied SpaceX's motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the NAACP over gas turbines powering xAI's Colossus 2 data center in Southaven, Mississippi. The court rejected xAI's claim that the 27 turbines qualify as exempt 'mobile sources,' ruling they remain subject to Clean Air Act permitting requirements. The NAACP, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, alleges the turbines were installed without proper permits and emit harmful pollutants.
A federal judge, Debra M. Brown, rejected xAI's motion to dismiss a lawsuit from the NAACP accusing the company of operating unpermitted methane gas turbines at its Memphis data center campus in violation of the Clean Air Act. xAI had argued the turbines were exempt because they were mobile, but Brown ruled the power plant supplying the data center is stationary and thus subject to permitting rules. The NAACP filed suit in April, and xAI has since added more turbines at a nearby site in Southaven, Mississippi.
Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order in July creating a one-year pause on new data center development in New York, after the state legislature had passed a broader moratorium bill. Activists like Adrienne Yocina, who has spent two years fighting a proposed 600-megawatt facility near the Tonawanda Seneca Nation's reservation, say nearly four months into the pause they remain uncertain whether Hochul will sign stronger legislation or ensure proper environmental review.
A federal judge ruled that the NAACP's lawsuit against xAI can proceed, denying the company's motion to dismiss claims it operated gas turbines at its Memphis-area Colossus data center without required air permits. Judge Debra M. Brown rejected xAI's arguments that the turbines qualify as exempt mobile sources and that the plaintiffs lack standing, also upholding the constitutionality of citizen suits under the Clean Air Act.
Google has put its first satellite designed to host data center-style compute into orbit, according to reports. The spacecraft is reportedly operational and has been used to run basic AI workloads, including generating text output as a demonstration.
Nvidia is reportedly negotiating to back billions in debt financing for Nscale's planned Anthropic data center in West Virginia, according to The Information and corroborated by Bloomberg. Under the proposed residual value guarantee, Nvidia would cover construction costs if Nscale defaulted, temporarily take over the site, and help find a new buyer or tenant. Anthropic has already signed a $44.6 billion contract for the first building alone, per Nscale's IPO filing.
Google confirmed its first Suncatcher prototype satellite, which carries a single Tensor Processing Unit and generates up to 1 kW of power, is online and communicating with ground engineers after launching this month on a SpaceX Falcon 9. Following roughly three weeks of subsystem checks, engineers sent the satellite its first prompt, having it run Google DeepMind's Gemma model to generate a haiku and report on orbital conditions; a Google spokesperson said the satellite is operating nominally.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that keeping DRAM concentrated in data centers is more efficient than letting individuals run local inference on personal computers. He argued that memory sitting idle in personal machines most of the time represents poor use of a globally constrained resource, while cloud-based memory can be utilized at much higher rates.
Romania-based Runware says it is building a second factory to manufacture its modular Sonic Inference Pod data centers on a production line, similar to automobile manufacturing. CEO Flaviu Radulescu told TechCrunch the company aims to scale to 30 megawatts of data center capacity per day by 2028, with pods installable on customer sites within 48 hours.
Tom's Hardware tested Nvidia's new Vera data center CPU in standalone form against AMD's EPYC Turin and Intel's Granite Rapids-AP chips. Vera posted leading results in Python performance and memory bandwidth, and also held its own in general-purpose server workloads, though x86 rivals retained an edge in core-density-driven frontend tasks.
Finland's police, backed by the Licensing and Supervision Authority, have launched a criminal investigation into Google subsidiary Tuike Finland Oy after five complaints over its Muhos data center project. The probe covers suspected environmental law violations and environmental damage, including unauthorized clearing of roughly 816 acres of forest, plus alleged shortcomings in drainage and water management.