The latest in data centers, AI, and energy 

On Thursday, senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) asking it to collect “comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures” on data centers and make that information publicly available, as first reported by Wired. They’re urging the agency to “establish a mandatory annual reporting requirement for data centers,” saying the data is “essential for accurate grid planning,” and ensuring the seven tech companies that signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge earlier this month adhere to their commitments.

The EIA announced Wednesday that it’s launching a voluntary pilot program to evaluate data center energy use in Texas, Washington, Northern Virginia, and Washington, DC. What Warren and Hawley are calling for in their letter is broader, mandatory reporting on data center energy consumption.

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Leaders from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, OpenAI, Amazon, and xAI met with President Donald Trump today to sign a “rate payer protection pledge.” It’s one way they’re responding to growing bipartisan concerns about electricity rates rising as tech companies and the Trump administration rush to build out a new generation of AI data centers.

“[Tech companies] need some PR help because people think that if a data center goes in, their electricity prices are going to go up,” Trump said during the event. “Some centers were rejected by communities for that and now I think it’s going to be the opposite.”

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President Donald Trump tried to quell Americans’ concerns about rising electricity costs during his State of the Union speech — and now we’re learning that the deals he promised could land next week. Trump claimed that he’s negotiated a “rate payer protection pledge” with major tech companies, which would see them build out or pay for new electricity generation for their data centers. Leaders from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle and OpenAI are expected to attend a March 4th event to sign the pledge, Fox News reported today.

There are very few details at this point on what the pledge entails, nor how companies would be held accountable for following through on any commitments. “Under this bold initiative, these massive companies will build, bring, or buy their own power supply for new AI data centers,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email to The Verge.

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Anthropic is the latest AI company promising to limit the impact its data centers have on nearby residents’ electricity bills.

The company said it would pay higher monthly electricity charges in order to cover 100 percent of the upgrades needed to connect its data centers to power grids. “This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers,” the announcement says.

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Donna Collins lives about 20 miles from where Meta’s biggest data center is being built, in a house her family has lived in for five generations. Construction has thrown the small agricultural community in North Louisiana into the spotlight as a high-profile example of how the infrastructure behind generative AI could impact nearby residents.

For Collins, this place is “a little piece of heaven.” “It’s all I’ve ever known as a home. It’s quiet. It’s rural. It is beautiful,” she says. “We can’t imagine the changes that are coming.”

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Microsoft wants to design more efficient data centers using materials that allow electricity to flow with zero resistance. If these new materials, called high-temperature superconductors, can make it to market, Microsoft thinks it could be a game changer for how data centers and the energy infrastructure they connect to are built.

Tech companies are facing backlash over how much power generative AI demands, delays connecting to power grids that lack the infrastructure to meet those demands, and the impact construction of new data centers has on local residents. High-temperature superconductors (HTS) could potentially shrink the amount of space needed for a data center and the transmission lines feeding it power.

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New York’s state legislature is set to consider a pair of bills that would require labels on AI-generated content and would put a three-year pause on new data center construction.

The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act (NY FAIR News Act, for short) would require that any news “substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence” carry a disclaimer. It would also require that any content created using AI be reviewed and approved by a human with “editorial control” before being published.

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On Monday, Elon Musk announced that he was merging two of his companies, SpaceX and xAI, in a deal said to be worth $1.25 trillion. The reason, Musk said in an announcement, was that in order for AI to grow, it needed to go to space.

AI relies on “large terrestrial data centers” that run on “immense amounts of power and cooling,” he said, which comes at great expense to the environment and community opposition. The solution: data centers in space. “In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk said.

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The US is now leading a global surge in new gas power plants being built in large part to satisfy growing energy demand for data centers. And more gas means more planet-heating pollution.

Gas-fired power generation in development globally rose by 31 percent in 2025. Almost a quarter of that added capacity is slated for the US, which has surpassed China with the biggest increase of any country. More than a third of that growth in the US is expected to directly power data centers, according to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

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Over the last few months of 2025, Meta spent $6.4 million on an ad campaign running in cities across the country, from Sacramento to Washington, with a clear mission: win over viewers on the construction of new data centers. As the New York Times reports, the ad campaign is anchored by short, folksy video spotlights on Meta’s data centers in Altoona, Iowa, and Los Lunas, New Mexico.

The ads make the case that Meta’s data centers create jobs, revitalizing rural communities.

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OpenAI says it will minimize water use and pay for energy infrastructure upgrades needed to power its data centers. “We’re being good neighbors,” the company said, directly addressing the growing opposition to AI projects amid rising utility bills.

“We commit to paying our own way on energy, so that our operations don’t increase your electricity prices,” OpenAI said. The company promised to work with local communities to minimize the impact of its Stargate data centers. OpenAI was not specific but said plans could involve securing its own energy supplies or paying for local grid upgrades.

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It looks like the wave of campaigns against data centers are getting under big tech companies’ skin — and Microsoft is the latest giant to promise to address frustrations on the ground in communities around their data centers.

The company announced a five-point plan today that it calls “Community-First AI Infrastructure.” That includes paying more to try to prevent data center energy demands from raising other customers’ electricity bills, minimizing the company’s water use, training workers and creating jobs, and contributing to the local tax base in locations it operates.

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If there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats came together on in 2025 — at least at the local level — it was to stop big, energy-hungry data center projects.

For communities sick of rising electricity bills and pollution from power plants, data centers have become an obvious target. Fights against new data centers surged this year as grassroots groups, voters, and local lawmakers demanded more accountability from developers. Already, they’ve managed to block or stall tens of billions of dollars’ worth of potential investment in proposed data centers. And they’re not letting up.

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Tech billionaires have been obsessed with space for a long time. Now, as the largest AI companies race to build more data centers in a frenzied pursuit of profitability, space is looking less like a pet project and more like a commercial opportunity. In 2025 alone, six proposals for giant AI data centers needing multiple gigawatts of power — a capacity only rumored of in 2024 — have been announced. Earthlings are catching on to the fact that power-hungry data centers take up land and water, while providing few jobs, too much pollution, and rising electricity costs.

Hence the idea to put the data centers in orbit around the Earth, not on the Earth. Space-based data centers — in the form of satellites with solar panels — are Big Tech’s latest fad and Silicon Valley’s newest investable venture. In space, they theorize, the sun’s unlimited rays could provide endless amounts of energy to power your latest AI-generated Sora video. But it’s not likely to be that easy.

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AI created as much carbon pollution this year as New York City and guzzled up as much H20 as people consume globally in water bottles, according to new estimates.

The study paints what’s likely a pretty conservative picture of AI’s environmental impact since it’s based on the relatively limited amount of data that’s currently available to the public. A lack of transparency from tech companies makes it harder to see the potential environmental toll of AI becoming a part of everyday tasks, argues the author of the study who’s been tracking the electricity consumption of data centers used for AI and crypto mining over the years.

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In the span of a decade and a half, from 2010 to the end of 2024, the number of data centers in the US quadrupled. The trend is similar worldwide: more data centers, bigger, now or soon. The number of the construction projects of centers over 100 megawatts announced over the last four years total 377, according to data center certification and research agency Uptime Institute.

But before we allow Big Tech’s feverish race toward more compute, which environmentalists would not like us to allow, let us pause and consider another option: making do with what we have. Can we retrofit our current data centers to match the needs of our newest technology? Perhaps the building frenzy is not merited; perhaps we have all the facilities we need. A few upgrades here, some fresh servers over there, a new lick of paint, and voilà — an AI data center built from the shell of a legacy one.

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A startup developing technologies to harness solar power in space is throwing its hat in with big tech companies attempting to build out data centers that orbit Earth. The US-based company, Aetherflux, announced on Tuesday that it plans to launch its first data center satellite in early 2027 — the first piece of a larger constellation of satellites it’s calling the “Galactic Brain.”

Tech companies are running into physical limits to their AI ambitions on Earth — namely needing more space and electricity for data centers. One potential solution they’re exploring is to try sending some of those data centers into orbit, where they could run on solar energy around-the-clock.

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More than 230 groups including Food & Water Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Greenpeace are demanding a pause on the construction of any new data centers in the US until stronger regulations are in place to prevent soaring electricity rates, water use, and pollution.

“The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security,“ the groups say in a letter sent to Congress on Monday.

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Morrow County, Oregon, is home to mega farms and food processing plants. But it’s also home to several Amazon data centers. And now, some experts believe, that combination is leading to an alarmingly high concentration of nitrates in the drinking water that is driving up cancer and miscarriage rates in the area.

Rolling Stone’s exposé details how Amazon, despite not using any dangerous nitrates to cool its data centers, is accelerating the contamination of the Lower Umatilla Basin aquifer, which residents rely on for drinking water. It’s a combination of poor wastewater management, sandy soil, and good old physics that has led to nitrate concentrations in drinking water as high as 73 ppm (parts per million) in some wells, which is 10 times the state limit of 7 ppm and seven times the federal limit.

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Google’s latest pledge to support a new clean energy technology is… a gas project? To be precise, it’s a gas-fired power plant outfitted with filtering devices to capture its planet-heating carbon emissions. Is this just a polluting fossil fuel project in sheep’s clothing?

Google just inked an agreement to support the development of a new gas-fired power plant in Illinois called the Broadwing Energy Center. It’ll be paired with carbon capture and storage (CCS), technology meant to filter carbon dioxide from smokestack emissions and then store it underground so that the greenhouse gas doesn’t build up in the atmosphere.

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One of the top civil rights organizations in the US is putting the tech industry “on alert,” issuing a call to action for communities to demand more accountability from companies building new data centers.

Electricity demand is rising in the US for the first time in nearly two decades, thanks in large part to massive new data centers that are being built to support advancements in AI. Utilities and some tech companies are increasingly meeting that demand with fossil fuels that worsen air quality and exacerbate the climate crisis — prompting the NAACP to issue “guiding principles” to help local community members to fight back.

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