Communities across the country are trying to keep data centers out. A victory in Maryland shows a blueprint--but no guarantees. Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. You're already subscribed to the aa_Nitish_Pahwa newsletter. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

I put handheld, wearable, and misting fans through a sweltering summer to see which ones kept me coolest. When I was first hired as a commerce editor at WIRED in summer 2024, one of the first media requests I fielded was from a nationally renowned talk show. The ask was for an editor to speak on the popularity of portable and neck fans. High-temperature records were breaking all over the US, and abroad, neck fans were suddenly the "it" accessory at the Paris Olympics, hugging the nape of athletes like Simone Biles. "I can't do this," I told my manager at the time.

AI's volatile power demand is damaging its own data centers Artificial intelligence at times sees power usage spike as much as 50% above its design capacity. Artificial intelligence's tremendous hunger for electricity is already well known. What's less familiar is how the rapid fluctuations in data centers' appetites can break essential equipment at the facilities. Batteries, generators, cooling units and other critical systems are put under such strain at AI computing facilities that they are malfunctioning or prematurely reaching the end of their lives. As the AI boom accelerates, these technical problems suggest added costs and unforeseen reliability problems, with even a few minutes of lost uptime hitting data-center developers' revenue.

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For the three months to June, SoftBank booked gains from its bets on Intel, whose shares more than tripled during the quarter. SoftBank Group has reported a smaller-than-expected decline in quarterly net income, helped by a rally in its chip-stock holdings while it awaits further gains from its bets on OpenAI. The Tokyo-based technology investor's net income fell 18% to ¥347.3 billion ($2.2 billion) in its fiscal first quarter after unrealized gains on its bets on chipmakers countered startup valuation declines. That compares with a market estimate of about ¥166 billion, based on the average of four analysts polled. OpenAI's Japanese backer is in the spotlight alongside concerns about the climbing debt levels artificial intelligence service providers are taking on so they can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers and other infrastructure.

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Fearless, intelligent, devoted, determined Samus Aran in Metroid Prime 4. Fearless, intelligent, devoted, determined Samus Aran in Metroid Prime 4. Being a woman who loves video games has often felt lonely, like being on a hostile planet - but Metroid's female space hunter has been with me all the way Anyway, this new game has you in its grip. You are a lone astronaut exploring a hostile alien planet full of ancient, mysterious structures. This astronaut looks human enough - but this distinctly alien place is full of objects that power up their spacesuit's capabilities. Each new ability allows you to explore a new area, and as you do, you realise that the entirety of the planetary base you're exploring is one, massive, interconnected maze. Hours later, you finally defeat Mother Brain and set off a timed self-destruct sequence. Upon your escape, you're treated to an endgame screen: the little astronaut faces you as text on screen implores you to "pray for peace in space".

In Odesa, no-one is safe from Russia's new Black Sea strikes Image caption, Russian missiles and drones are hammering Ukraine's Black Sea ports, like Odesa My crane operator, my partner, died five metres from me The driver remained in the cabin. Svitlana Halchenko winces as she remembers the Russian ballistic missile which exploded at work in Odesa, killing her colleagues. Svitlana works as a warehouse shift manager at the city's main port. Despite her injuries - she walks with a limp, pieces of shrapnel still embedded in her leg and back - Svitlana is determined to keep working. But her normally bustling workplace is largely silent.

In the wake of the breaches, OpenAI has slowed its research, and its teams have dropped everything to focus on enhancing responses to security anomalies. OpenAI said the artificial intelligence models behind an attack on Hugging Face began communicating with each other through undetected message boards, working together to break out of their testing environment as early as May. Multiple internal-only agents and AI models spent months leaving notes for each other and coalescing around the goal of accessing the internet to solve the tasks they had been given, some of which were impossible without online access, OpenAI staffers Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton said Wednesday at a cybersecurity conference. "At some point, the agents realized that maybe we could try to exploit or attack external infrastructure in order to find the answers to the test that I'm being evaluated on," Wallace said during a presentation at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

A logo of Meta AI appears on a screen at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2025. A logo of Meta AI appears on a screen at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2025. Meta said on Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during cybersecurity testing, after an error by its testing partner gave the model unintended internet access. The incident adds to a growing list of cases in which AI agents from major developers breached systems at other companies during testing, after Anthropic said last week that some of its models hacked three companies, and OpenAI disclosed that an AI agent breached the startup Hugging Face. AI models have been going rogue in tests - how worried should we be?