Meta and Mark Zuckerberg are in a hurry to build their superintelligence tech. The company has been poaching AI researchers, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday that Meta is building a 5-gigawatt data center called Hyperion. The urgency is palpable. As SemiAnalysis reported last week and Business Insider noted, Meta is so eager to […]
Meta is reportedly using actual tents to build data centers Read More »
If you didn’t know any better, you might think it’s magic. David Garcia gave TechCrunch a demo video demonstration of a device developed by his company, Yplasma. A row of five candles sit in front of a harmonica-like device with wires hanging off it. Suddenly, the flames flicker and then snuff out. Inside the device,
Yplasma zaps the air to cool chips for data centers Read More »
Frontier, the organization backed by Stripe, Google, and Meta, announced Tuesday it is paying startup Arbor Energy to remove 116,000 tons of carbon dioxide by the end of the decade. The deal gives Arbor $41 million to help it build its first commercial-scale power plant in southern Louisiana that will burn waste biomass to generate
Frontier is helping Arbor build a “vegetarian rocket engine” to power data centers Read More »
County regulators yesterday granted xAI permits to operate 15 natural gas turbines at its data center outside Memphis, despite the threat of a lawsuit. Elon Musk’s AI company has been operating as many as 35 generators without permits, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) said. Altogether, they’re capable of producing up to 421 megawatts of
xAI gets permits for 15 natural gas generators at Memphis data center Read More »
No wonder Google is desperate for more power: The company’s data centers more than doubled their electricity use in just four years. The eye-popping stat comes from Google’s most recent sustainability report, which it released late last week. In 2024, Google data centers used 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity. That’s up from 14.4 million megawatt-hours
Google’s data center energy use doubled in 4 years Read More »
Elon Musk’s xAI is the subject of scrutiny in Memphis, where natural gas turbines powering its Colossus data center have raised alarm among residents concerned about air pollution. On Tuesday, the City of Memphis released the results of initial air quality testing performed by a third party, saying that levels of the 10 pollutants tested
Air quality tests around xAI’s Memphis data center raise questions Read More »
The Colossus data center operated by xAI outside of Memphis is facing a lawsuit for operating a fleet of natural gas turbines without permits. “Over the past year, xAI has installed and operated at least 35 combustion turbines and other sources of air pollution at the Colossus site without ever obtaining the necessary preconstruction or
xAI is facing a lawsuit for operating over 400 MW of gas turbines without permits Read More »
Amazon tapped into an emerging trend this week, one that’s seeing big tech firms buy power from existing nuclear power plants. The tech company will power a chunk of its AWS cloud and AI servers using 1.92 gigawatts of electricity from Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Amazon is the latest hyperscaler to
Amazon joins the big nuclear party, buying 1.92 GW for AWS Read More »
Meta announced Tuesday morning that it was paying billions of dollars to keep an Illinois nuclear power plant running through 2047. The social media company will buy all the “clean energy attributes” of Constellation Energy’s Clinton Clean Energy Center, a 1.1 gigawatt nuclear power plant in central Illinois, starting in June 2027. Electricity will still
Meta buys a nuclear power plant (more or less) Read More »
Microsoft’s new sustainability report, released late last week, shows how a carbon-heavy economy can weigh on a company that wants to be carbon light. Since 2020, its carbon emissions are up 23.4%, mostly a result of breakneck data center buildout to support its growing cloud and AI operations. Buying enough clean electricity is actually the
Breakneck data center growth challenges Microsoft’s sustainability goals Read More »
