The DOJ joined Elon Musk's xAI in suing Colorado, alleging a state AI regulation law violates the First and Fourteenth amendments by forcing developers to adopt DEI ideology.

This story appears in the April 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world. Three Mile Island's cooling towers have until recently served as grave markers for America's nuclear-power industry. A s we drove through southwest Memphis, KeShaun Pearson told me to keep my window down--our destination was best tasted, not viewed. Along the way, we passed an abandoned coal plant to our right, then an active power plant to our left, equipped with enormous natural-gas turbines. Pearson, who directs the nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution, was bringing me to his hometown's latest industrial megaproject.

As AI drives extraordinary power demands, energy intelligence is rapidly becoming a core business metric. Loudoun County, Virginia, once known for its pastoral scenery and proximity to Washington, DC, has earned a more modern reputation in recent years: The area has the highest concentration of data centers on the planet. Ten years ago, these facilities powered email and e-commerce. Today, thanks to the meteoric rise in demand for AI-infused everything, local utility Dominion Energy is working hard to keep pace with surging power demands. The pressure is so acute that Dulles International Airport is constructing the largest airport solar installation in the country, a highly visible bid to bolster the region's power mix. Data center campuses like Loudoun's are cropping up across the country to accommodate an insatiable appetite for AI.

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The influential progressive third party announced Thursday that it was putting out a recruitment call for candidates specifically opposed to data centers. The Working Families Party said Thursday that it is putting out a specific recruitment call for people who are organizing against data centers in their communities to run for office. The announcement comes amid a period of heightened political turmoil around data centers, as some high-profile Democrats wade into the fight. Earlier this week, three Democrats in the Senate sent letters seeking information from Big Tech companies about how data centers impact electricity bills, while senator Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data center construction. "We see our role as responding to what working families and working people are concerned about, what issues are keeping them up at night," says Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary for the Working Families Party. "We would be ignoring the needs of our constituents if we were not responding to the issue of data centers and their impacts on communities."

An image made with a drone shows air handling units on the roof of a CloudHQ data center in Ashburn, Virginia. An image made with a drone shows air handling units on the roof of a CloudHQ data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Mon 8 Dec 2025 07.00 ESTLast modified on Mon 8 Dec 2025 08.41 EST A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis. The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress to halt the proliferation of energy-hungry datacenters, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and for exacerbating electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year. The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI.

An aerial view of an Amazon Web Services Data Center known as U.S. East 1 in Ashburn, Virginia, on Oct. 20 | REUTERS STOCKHOLM/LONDON - The global boom in data centers as companies increasingly outsource information storage and ramp up use of energy-intensive artificial intelligence is creating a key challenge for the industry -- how to keep cool. An outage at the world's biggest exchange operator CME Group from late Thursday that halted trade on its popular currency platform and in futures spanning foreign exchange, commodities, Treasuries and stocks has put a spotlight on data centers overheating. The problem was a cooling issue at data centers operated by Dallas-headquartered CyrusOne, which operates more than 55 centers in the U.S., Europe and Japan. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Several large tech firms that are active in AI have set goals to hit net zero by 2030, but a new forecast of the energy and water required to run large data centres shows they're unlikely to meet those targets As the AI industry rapidly expands, questions about the environmental impact of data centres are coming to the forefront - and a new forecast warns the industry is unlikely to meet net zero targets by 2030. Fengqi You at Cornell University in New York and his colleagues modelled how much energy, water and carbon today's leading AI servers could use by 2030, taking into account different growth scenarios and possible data centre locations within the United States. They combined projected chip supply, server power usage and cooling efficiency with state-by-state electrical grid data to conduct their analysis. While not every AI company has set a net zero target, some larger tech firms that are active in AI, such as Google, Microsoft and Meta have set goals with a deadline of 2030. "The rapid growth of AI computing is basically reshaping everything," says You. "We're trying to understand how, as a sector grows, what's going to be the impact?"

An aerial view of an Amazon Web Services Data Center known as US East 1 in Ashburn, Virginia on 20 October 2025. An aerial view of an Amazon Web Services Data Center known as US East 1 in Ashburn, Virginia on 20 October 2025. Thu 30 Oct 2025 16.50 EDTLast modified on Fri 31 Oct 2025 05.25 EDT Amazon has made its first financial disclosures since the disastrous outage suffered by its cloud computing division that brought everything from smart beds to banks offline. In spite of the global outage, Amazon Web Services has continued to grow, and this quarter reported a 20% increase in revenue year over year. Wall Street estimated that AWS would bring in $32.42bn in net sales in the third quarter, with the company reporting actual revenue of $33bn.

A data center, which can use as much electricity as Philadelphia, is the new American factory, creating the future and propping up the economy. "I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers," Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has said. Drive in almost any direction from almost any American city, and soon enough you'll arrive at a data center--a giant white box rising from graded earth, flanked by generators and fenced like a prison yard. Data centers for artificial intelligence are the new American factory. Packed with computing equipment, they absorb information and emit A.I. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022, they have begun to multiply at an astonishing rate. "I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time," Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, recently said. The leading independent operator of A.I. data centers in the United States is CoreWeave, which was founded eight years ago, as a casual experiment. In 2017, traders at a middling New York hedge fund decided to begin mining cryptocurrency, which they used as the entry fee for their fantasy-football league. To mine the crypto, they bought a graphics-processing unit, a powerful microchip made by the company Nvidia. The G.P.U. was marketed to video gamers, but Nvidia offered software that turned it into a low-budget supercomputer. "It was so successful, from a return-of-capital perspective, that we started scaling it," Brian Venturo, one of CoreWeave's co-founders, told me. "If you make your money back in, like, five days, you want to do that a lot." Within a year, the traders had quit the hedge-fund business and bought several thousand G.P.U.s, which they ran from Venturo's grandfather's garage, in New Jersey.