When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, wanted to assess AI's impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of business and technical uncertainties. So she started with what she calls a "remarkable fact" that is not in question: A handful of so-called hyperscalers are investing huge amounts of money to build AI data centers. Instead of trying to predict how useful and widely deployed AI models will be, she simply asked how fast the hyperscalers' earnings will need to grow to justify their spending through 2027, when--she and her collaborator estimate--expenditures will reach nearly $1.1 trillion.

The UK's energy regulator is using a variety of tricks to keep speculative data center projects from plugging into the power grid. The country's AI ambitions hang in the balance. As data center developers compete for a cut of the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the artificial intelligence industry, the queue to join the UK's power grid has become jammed with projects that will likely never get built. The snarl is exacerbating already years-long wait times for viable projects, and it's messing with attempts to forecast energy demand and plan grid expansions. In July, the UK's energy regulator, Ofgem, laid out a proposal meant to force phantom data centers out of the swollen queue.

NTT Global Data Centers is working on 34 projects to double its capacity to 4 gigawatts within as little as two years, CEO Doug Adams said, as it races to meet surging global demand driven by the AI boom. NTT Global Data Centers, the world's third-largest data center provider outside of China, is working to double its capacity to 4 gigawatts to meet the rising global demand for the critical digital infrastructure amid an artificial intelligence boom. The unit of Japan's NTT is working on 34 projects that will double its capacity in as soon as two years, according to the data center business's Chief Executive Officer Doug Adams. Capacity will continue to increase from there, and will be "well over 5 gigawatts" in five years, Adams said in an interview. NTT GDC has seen increasing demand from companies moving more of their software and operations to the cloud as well as businesses hunting for extra capacity to run AI programs. The business's revenue is expected to keep growing at more than 20% a year, Adams said, declining to give a specific time period.

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?

The deals will bring 6.6 gigawatts of power online in the coming decade to power AI data centers. Meta has three new agreements to purchase nuclear power for its AI infrastructure as well as the, a 1-gigawatt data center being built in Ohio. The social media giant is partnering with power companies Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo to deliver an expected 6.6 gigawatts of generation to its projects by 2035. The company's agreement with TerraPower will fund the development of two new reactors capable of delivering up to 690 megawatts of power as early as 2032. The deal also gives Meta rights to energy from six other reactors that could deliver an additional 2.1 gigawatts by 2035.

The battle for AI dominance has left a large footprint--and it's only getting bigger and more expensive. When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI's Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn't kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth's circumference, the CEO and his cohort are now dotting the planet with their own latifundia--not agricultural estates, but AI data centers . Tech executives like Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison are fully bought in to the idea that the future of the American (and possibly global) economy are these new warehouses stocked with IT infrastructure. In the earliest days of computing there were giant power-sucking mainframes in climate-controlled rooms, with co-ax cables moving information from the mainframe to a terminal computer.

Things aren't great, but there are a few positive signs, we promise. Climate news hasn't been great in 2025. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit record highs (again). This year is set to be either the second or third warmest on record. Climate-fueled disasters like wildfires in California and flooding in Indonesia and Pakistan devastated communities and caused billions in damage. In addition to these worrying indicators of our continued contributions to climate change and their obvious effects, the world's largest economy has made a sharp U-turn on climate policy this year.

Amazon is set to invest up to $50bn to expand artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputing capacity for United States government customers, in one of the largest cloud infrastructure commitments targeted at the public sector. The e-commerce giant announced the investment on Monday. One gigawatt of computing power is roughly enough to power about 750,000 US households on average. "This investment removes the technology barriers that have held the government back", Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman said. AWS is already a major cloud provider to the US government, serving more than 11,000 government agencies.

Three of the biggest US tech companies reported record profits and record infrastructure spending on Wednesday, fueling speculation about a possible AI market bubble. Three of the biggest US tech giants--Microsoft, Meta, and Google--sent investors a blunt message when they reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday: Their lavish spending on AI infrastructure is only just getting started. Meta said that its capital expenditure would total between $70 billion and $72 billion this year, up from its previous lower forecast of $66 billion to $72 billion. Next year, Meta's chief financial officer Susan Li said that she expected the company's spending would be "notably larger." The social media giant's soaring investment matches its soaring revenue: Meta reported raking in $51.24 billion last quarter, up 26 percent year-over-year.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. If AMD turns to the cloud, does that mean less love for the PC market? In the ongoing war of AI investment, OpenAI has secured itself a new ally: AMD. The chip maker will trade millions of its upcoming Instinct MI450 GPUs for an investment by the AI company, worth up to 10 percent of its stock. The numbers, though, remain vague.