Why China Is the Bogeyman Data Center Enthusiasts Just Can't Quit Polls show that overwhelming majorities of Americans hate data centers. China makes a perfect scapegoat for tech leaders and their allies--the only problem is a lack of evidence. Welcome to the first edition of Power Play! From now until the midterms, senior writer Molly Taft will be sharing their thoughts every Sunday on this political season's hottest issue: data centers. We welcome reader comments, and will be answering questions from the comments section in future editions. Be sure to catch WIRED's first livestream on data centers this Thursday, September 10, featuring Molly, senior politics correspondent Hugo Lowell, and senior business writer Max Zeff!

Things to Do in L.A. Darian Orduno holds her baby, Gael, as her husband, Antonio, looks on during a town hall meeting at the Episcopal Church of the Savior in Hanford, Calif., which was convened in opposition to a possible data center proposal at the county fairgrounds. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Data centers are becoming the political flash point of the midterms as candidates race to respond to tanking public opinion.

Trump's embrace of AI data centers adds to GOP's midterm peril U.S. President Donald Trump's fervent support for artificial intelligence data centers has put him at odds with voters who increasingly oppose them and comes despite direct warnings that his stance threatens to deepen Republicans' peril in the November midterm elections. Over the past few months, political strategists have warned administration officials they were in danger of losing the public opinion war over data centers, people familiar with the matter said. Recent polling has shown around 7 in 10 Americans don't want the facilities built near them, and Democratic candidates have sought to outflank their GOP opponents by tying rapid growth in AI infrastructure to voter concerns about the cost of living. Trump has frequently boasted of American AI prowess and asserted that speedy development of the technology is essential to "beat China." Yet administration officials were advised that the president needed to focus more on AI's benefits, including for voters whose jobs might be at risk, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Drone operator Carlos Gauna, known as'TheMalibuArtist,' captured footage of a great white circling a swimmer off the coast of Santa Barbara. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.

Delivery riders (from left) Graeme Frances, Bijyan, Xabier Villares and Michael Angus in central Edinburgh. Delivery riders (from left) Graeme Frances, Bijyan, Xabier Villares and Michael Angus in central Edinburgh. Food delivery riders call on platforms to open up AI'black box' they say has cut pay G ig economy workers are urging delivery platforms to open up the "black box" of computer-driven algorithms that determine the jobs they are offered and how much they are paid, blaming increased use of AI for lowering wages. A group of food delivery riders in Edinburgh say their rates of pay have fallen and their working conditions have deteriorated at the same time as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat, the three dominant gig economy platforms in the UK and Ireland, have increased their use of automation. "I am making half the money I was making four years ago, for the same amount of hours. It makes no sense," said David, a food delivery rider in Edinburgh for the past seven years who did not want to share his surname.

With AI inference now driving enterprise workloads, organizations must rethink infrastructure for speed, efficiency, scalability, and performance per watt to unlock AI's real-world potential. The era of AI inference has arrived. Imagine a healthcare system analyzing millions of data points in real time to accelerate life-saving medical research, or an intelligent assistant instantly resolving thousands of complex customer needs at once. These real-world breakthroughs rely on advanced infrastructure acting as the engine of continuous intelligence, powering real-time services while also supporting an increasingly intelligent edge of IoT and consumer devices. However, in this inference-driven landscape, every delay, bottleneck, or wasted watt directly affects human outcomes and operating costs. This shift changes what infrastructure must deliver.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all suffered outages at nearly the exact same time for reasons that remain murky. Frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all experienced rare outages on Thursday morning, creating downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots. SpaceX, xAI's parent company, said on Thursday afternoon that the issues with Grok resulted from "an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning." The issues initially appeared to be linked because they coincided--perhaps the result of a shared third-party service provider--but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic cited an external source in comments to WIRED on Thursday. SpaceX, xAI's parent company, did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.

AI data centres are booming in Australia - but at what cost? The sheer size and noise of data centres are what people tend to notice first. Some say they sound like a jet plane about to take off, others complain of a high-pitched whine. When Lucy* puts her child to bed, she hears a constant humming. I'll hear it and think, 'What is that?

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