Fears about AI data centers' water use have exploded. Experts say the reality is far more complicated than people think. Last month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread in which she acknowledged that there was a substantial error in her blockbuster book Empire of AI. Hao had written that a proposed Google data center in a town near Santiago, Chile, could require "more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population"--a figure which, thanks to a unit misunderstanding, appears to have been off by a magnitude of 1,000. In the thread, Hao thanked Andy Masley, the head of an effective altruism organization in Washington, DC, for bringing the correction to her attention. Masley has spent the past several months questioning some of the numbers and rhetoric common in popular media about water use and AI on his Substack.

The new sites will boost Stargate's planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts--about equal to the output of seven large nuclear reactors. An aerial view shows construction underway on a Project Stargate AI infrastructure site in Abilene, Texas on April 23, 2025. OpenAI is planning to build five new data centers in the United States as part of the Stargate initiative, the company announced on Tuesday. The sites, which are being developed in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, bring Stargate's current planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts--roughly the same amount of power as seven large-scale nuclear reactors . "AI is different from the internet in a lot of ways, but one of them is just how much infrastructure it takes," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a press briefing in Abilene, Texas on Tuesday.

President Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House on July 15, 2025, in Washington, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt watches in reverence.. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. AI is "not my thing," President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI. "You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that," Trump said, recalling a conversation with "David"--most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. "I said, what, are you kidding? That's double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it."

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has positioned himself as an unabashed bull on America's need to dominate AI. Yet the president has also tied this newfound and futuristic priority to a more traditional mission of his: to go big with fossil fuels. A true AI revolution will need "double the energy" that America produces today, Trump said in a recent address to the World Economic Forum, days after declaring a national energy emergency. And he noted a few ways to supply that power: "We have more coal than anybody. We also have more oil and gas than anybody."

Google revealed today that it has given control of cooling several of its leviathan data centers to an AI algorithm. Over the past couple of years, Google has been testing an algorithm that learns how best to adjust cooling systems--fans, ventilation, and other equipment--in order to lower power consumption. This system previously made recommendations to data center managers, who would decide whether or not to implement them, leading to energy savings of around 40 percent in those cooling systems. Now, Google says, it has effectively handed control to the algorithm, which is managing cooling at several of its data centers all by itself. "It's the first time that an autonomous industrial control system will be deployed at this scale, to the best of our knowledge," says Mustafa Suleyman, head of applied AI at DeepMind, the London-based artificial-intelligence company Google acquired in 2014. The project demonstrates the potential for artificial intelligence to manage infrastructure--and shows how advanced AI systems can work in collaboration with humans.