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.

Empirically, MiTSformer achieves consistent SOTAonfivemixedtime series analysis tasks, including classification, extrinsic regression,anomalydetection,imputation,andlong-termforecasting.

A.1 Dataset Description We describe the additional details of each dataset in the followings. For electricity, we take 500k training windows between 2014-01-01 to 2014-09-01 by reference [14, 24]. And we use the first 90% for the training set and the last 10% as the validation set. Testing set is the next 7 days after the training set. We apply the z-score normalization to the real-valued inputs of each time series.

In 1916, hybrid cars could've changed history. But Ford wouldn't allow it. Henry Ford's monopoly on the automobile industry meant that hybrids wouldn't see the light of day for decades. In 1916, Clinton Edgar Woods, a forgotten automobile inventor, designed the first commercial hybrid cars. But Ford's Model T had already cornered the market.

As the data center backlash grows, support is growing for server factories and the hundreds of jobs they're expected to bring. Last month, Pamela Griffin and two other residents of Taylor, Texas, took to the lectern at a city council meeting to object to a data center project. But later, they sat back as council members discussed a proposed tech factory. Griffin didn't speak up against that development. A similar contrast is repeating in communities across the US.

Plus: Trump has climbed down from his plan for the US to take Greenland. Yann LeCun's new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry's current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately fail to solve many pressing problems. Instead, he thinks we should be betting on world models--a different type of AI that accurately reflects the dynamics of the real world. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that he recently left Meta, where he had served as chief scientist for FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), the company's influential research lab that he founded. LeCun sat down with MIT Technology Review in an exclusive online interview from his Paris apartment to discuss his new venture, life after Meta, the future of artificial intelligence, and why he thinks the industry is chasing the wrong ideas.

The president wants big tech to pay more for electricity, but he's curbing renewable projects that could boost supply Donald Trump is worried about datacenters. Specifically, he is concerned about their effects on an already expensive electricity market in the United States. Will Americans' resentment of sharply rising energy costs scuttle his party's November election ambitions? The US president's anxiety is evident in two actions in recent weeks. On 13 January, Trump and Microsoft's president jointly announced that the tech giant would pay more for its datacenters, paying full property taxes and accepting neither tax reductions nor electricity rate discounts in towns where it operates datacenters.

A large Russian aerial strike on Ukraine has again left half of Kyiv's residential buildings without heating or power as temperatures across the country continue to hover around -10C. Drones, ballistic and cruise missiles targeted several locations in Ukraine, including Kyiv, Dnipro in the centre and Odesa in the south. Air raid alerts in the capital lasted for most of the night. On Tuesday, sirens rang out again as Russian drones and cruise missiles approached the capital. President Volodymyr Zelensky said a significant number of targets had been intercepted.

China's Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World A global onslaught of cheap Chinese green power is upending everything in its path. No one is ready for its repercussions. There's a particular kind of sci-fi nerd who equates fusion tech with utopia. If we could only harness the engine of the stars, it would uncork near limitless energy and neatly sweep away a whole mess of humanity's problems. But how would that work exactly? What would the transition look like?