GoKawiil
Tech News
Between October 8 and 18, Ukrainian drone strikes hit five Russian data centers, including three Yandex facilities housing its top supercomputers, plus sites serving Sberbank and VKontakte. The attacks disrupted cloud services, banking, e-commerce and ride-hailing across Russia, following earlier Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers that knocked out internet and TV broadcasts.
Finnish authorities ordered Google affiliate Tuike Finland Oy to halt illegal logging of roughly 1,300 acres of boreal forest near Otanmäki, demanding a report on the clearing. Guardian reporting found that wildlife displaced from the felled land, including wolf packs, has since moved into nearby villages searching for prey, alarming residents.
Amazon has dropped plans to build four data centers on a 122-acre former George Washington University campus site in Loudoun County, Virginia, opting instead to redevelop most of the land for housing and mixed-use purposes. The company will donate 25 acres to the county for an arts center and recreational facility, plus $5 million toward local housing funds. The reversal follows talks between Amazon and county officials after residents raised concerns about noise and power demands from new data center construction in the area already known as 'Data Center Alley'.
Google's Finland country manager apologized after the company cleared roughly 816 acres of forest near Muhos without authorization, and Finnish regulators ordered it to stop further clearing near Otanmäki, where about 500 acres had already been cut down. Local residents say wolves and other wildlife have begun entering nearby villages after being displaced from the cleared forest, raising safety concerns alongside complaints about construction noise and streams turning brown.
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.