Dozens of students walked out of their Stanford University graduation ceremony as Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage to deliver a keynote address. Video filmed by the BBC shows the students protesting against the company's controversial work with the US government. A group named Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine encouraged the walkout. This follows other recent campus protests against tech leaders, but those have largely focused on artificial intelligence and concerns about jobs. Pichai largely sidestepped the issue of AI in his remarks, though he appeared to make light of the expected protests.

China-based actors are likely behind the use of ChatGPT for "covert influence operations" aimed at stoking opposition to data centres in the United States, OpenAI has said. In a research report released on Wednesday, the company behind the world's most popular AI chatbot said it had banned a cluster of accounts likely based in China for attempting to "manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI". Among other content, the accounts generated a comic strip showing a cigar-chomping businessman holding bags marked with dollar signs as a family reacted in shock to their electricity bill, according to the San Francisco-based company. OpenAI said a second cluster of accounts had generated content casting US tariffs as an effort to "dominate technological competition" with China, and specified that the material should not mention Chinese leader Xi Jinping. While the campaign sought to "exploit and amplify existing public concerns" about energy prices, OpenAI found no evidence that it had a "meaningful" influence, the company said.

ChatGPT now processes around 2.5 billion queries every day UN researchers are urging people to be less polite to artificial intelligences after a report found that cutting words from prompts could reduce ChatGPT's energy consumption by up to 25 per cent. Removing "please", "thank you" and other unnecessary words from AI prompts could save 87 to 98 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, the report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) found. That is the equivalent of the annual residential electricity use of up to 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa. 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day To reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint, people should write concise prompts, avoid getting sucked into conversation loops and refrain from starting relationships with AI, the researchers said. "We are not saying be rude to your AI. But don't fall into the interaction trap and don't go falling in love with it either," says Kaveh Madani at UNU-INWEH.

In the race against China for AI supremacy, the United States dominates when it comes to access to the most cutting-edge semiconductors. But when it comes to powering the huge data centres that run on AI chips, China holds the clear advantage. A typical data centre can consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, while next-generation "hyperscale" facilities can gobble up as much power as two million homes, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). China's access to an abundant supply of cheap electricity places it in the ideal position to meet such colossal energy demands. China already generates more than twice as much electricity as the US, a lead that is expected to widen amid an aggressive state-led investment in the country's energy grid.

NextEra Energy is seeking to acquire Dominion Energy in an all-stock deal valued at about $67bn, creating a massive power company as the energy needs of artificial intelligence (AI) drive demand higher in the United States. It is one of the biggest proposed mergers so far this year and would create the world's largest regulated electric utility business by market capitalisation, the companies said on Monday. The region has a fast-growing population and the world's biggest data centre hub, which is in Virginia. The deal will enable a swifter build-out of power infrastructure to deliver electricity to data centres proposing to connect to NextEra and Dominion, which total about 130 gigawatts of electricity demand, the companies' executives said. One gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. The merger builds on NextEra's efforts to tap into surging demand for supplying electricity to data centres developed by Big Tech, largely for training and rolling out AI technologies.

The ninth edition of the Artificial Intelligence Index Report was published on 13 April 2026. Released on a yearly basis, the aim of the document is to provide readers with accurate, rigorously validated, and globally-sourced data to give insights into the progress of AI and its potential impact on society. The 2026 AI Index Report comprises nine chapters, covering: research and development, technical performance, responsible AI, economy, science, medicine, education, policy and governance, and public opinion. AI capability is accelerating and reaching more people than ever. Model performance continues to improve against benchmarks, and 80% of university students now use generative AI.

How worried should you be about an AI apocalypse? Fears that artificial intelligence could rise up to wipe out humanity are understandable given our steady diet of sci-fi stories depicting just that, but what is the real risk? Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics are not a practical guide Super-intelligent artificial intelligence rising up and wiping out humanity has been a common trope in science fiction for decades. Now, we live in a world where real AI seems to be advancing faster than ever. Does that mean you should start worrying about an AI apocalypse?

Visualising AI spending: How does it compare with history's mega projects? World leaders and tech executives are convening in New Delhi for the India-AI Impact Summit 2026, focusing on the role of artificial intelligence in governance, job disruption and global collaboration. However, behind these discussions lies the financial reality. Over the past decade, AI has drawn one of the largest waves of private investment in modern history, totalling trillions of dollars. According to Gartner, a United States-based business and technology insights company, worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.5 trillion in 2026, a 44 percent increase over 2025.

Why did SpaceX just apply to launch 1 million satellites? We are only a month into 2026, yet it's already clear what one of the major space stories of the year is going to be: mega-constellations, and the ongoing attempts to launch thousands of satellites into Earth's orbit. The latest development is that SpaceX has asked the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch 1 million orbital data centre satellites. The previous largest filing with the FCC, also by SpaceX, was for 42,000 Starlink satellites in 2019. "This is beyond what's been proposed by any constellation," says Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation in the US.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has acquired his AI company xAI as part of an ambitious scheme to build space-based data centres to power the future of artificial intelligence. The billionaire, who is also the CEO of Tesla, announced the merger in a statement on Tuesday on the SpaceX website. AI demand will require "immense amounts of power and cooling" that are not sustainable on Earth without "imposing hardship on communities and the environment," he said. Space-based data centres that harness the power of the Sun are the only long-term solution, according to Musk. "In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. To harness even a millionth of our Sun's energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilisation currently uses!" he wrote.