Monterey Park residents gathered at city hall on 21 January to speak out against the construction of a datacenter. Monterey Park residents gathered at city hall on 21 January to speak out against the construction of a datacenter. Sat 7 Feb 2026 11.00 ESTLast modified on Sat 7 Feb 2026 16.55 EST When a southern California city council proposed building a giant datacenter the size of four football fields last December, five residents vowed to stop it. Through a frenetic word-of-mouth campaign, the small group raised awareness about the proposed facility in Monterey Park, a small city east of Los Angeles known affectionately as the country's first suburban Chinatown. No Data Center Monterey Park organizers - working in tandem with the grassroots racial justice group San Gabriel Valley (SGV) Progressive Action - held a teach-in and rally that drew hundreds of participants, knocked on doors, and distributed flyers on busy streets.

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a $50bn investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday that will include new datacenters in Texas and New York . "We're getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren't possible before," Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, said in a press release. Building the massive information warehouses takes an average of two years in the US and requires copious amounts of energy to fuel the facilities. The company, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, popular with businesses adopting AI, said in a statement that the "scale of this investment is necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses while keeping our research at the frontier". Anthropic said its projects will create about 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs.

State's Republican-led public service commission to decide on power expansion and prices, as Democrats vie for voice Georgia is facing the largest demand for electricity in its history, driven by nation-leading datacenter construction. The Georgia Power company has made an unprecedented bid to the agency that oversees the utility for about 10 additional gigawatts of energy in the coming years - enough to power 8.3m homes, at an estimated cost of nearly $16bn, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center . But those huge numbers are not primarily for homes or local businesses in Georgia . Instead about 80% of the company's ask is driven by datacenters, primarily for artificial intelligence, according to Tom Krause, spokesperson for the state's public service commission, or PSC. It is the largest increase ever considered by the commission in a multiyear plan and comes as the Atlanta metro area led the nation in datacenter construction last year - a phenomenon playing out across the US and increasingly sparking protests and pushback.