Fox News anchor Bret Baier examines the U.S. power supply on'Special Report.' If your electricity bill seems shockingly high, you're not imagining it. A big part of the spike is being driven by rising artificial intelligence electricity demand. PJM Interconnection, the largest power grid operator in the United States, says electricity usage is climbing sharply this summer. Some areas may see bills increase by as much as 20%.

Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier delves into the demand for energy amid developing artificial intelligence technology on'Special Report.' There has been little change in U.S. energy consumption over the past decade. Increased efforts to make energy use more efficient have kept levels low. But over the next five years, demand for electricity to power data centers is expected to more than double. Some estimates show the facilities are expected to require as much energy in 2030 as the entire country of Japan does today.

Nvidia has unveiled a "superchip" for training artificial intelligence models, the most powerful it has ever produced. The US computing firm, which has recently rocketed in value to become the world's third-largest company, has not yet revealed the cost of its new chips, but observers expect a high price tag that will make them accessible to only a few organisations. The chips were announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a press conference in San Jose, California on 18 March. He showed off the company's new Blackwell B200 graphics processing units (GPUs), each of which has 208 billion transistors – the tiny switches at the heart of modern computing devices – compared to the 80 billion transistors of Nvidia's current-generation Hopper chips. He also revealed the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which combines two of the B200 chips.

The datasets I worked with were a combination of publically-available information on weather and load for regions covered by ISO New England, the corporation responsible for distributing energy across the 6 New England states. I used hourly data from October 2018 to present, which at the time of this project constituted 3 years of data. Since the regions controlled by ISO-NE were likely to have different energy demands due to each area's specific geographical attributes, I decided to simplify the problem by honing in on only one of the 8 regions. I selected the Connecticut ISO zone. The challenge at hand was to see if I could accurately forecast one-hour-ahead load for the Connecticut ISO zone given past values of the features I had available.

All this means that utilities, policy makers and regulatory bodies need to start thinking about what role they want to play when it comes to decentralized energy resources. The patchwork of distributed energy producers will depend on coordination and management. Utilities can take the lead here as they face a shrinking pool of customers purchasing electricity as more homes and businesses become energy producers themselves – thanks to rooftop solar panels and the like. Already, the size of a median power plant in Europe has fallen from 800 megawatts in 2012 to 562 megawatts in 2020, and BloombergNEF projects this will plummet to 32 megawatts by 2050.

Are you ready for robots swapping out high-density servers immersed in fluid? TMGcore believes the market is indeed ready for its OTTO data center platform, which is launching at the SC19 conference in Denver. The two-year old company has been refining its technology in a Dallas-area data center, test-driving its two-phase immersion cooling with bitcoin mining hardware, and developing custom servers, a series of micro-data center enclosures, and a robotic system to replace servers. "We've redefined what a data center looks like," said John-David Enright, the CEO of TMGcore, which is partnering with Vertiv, Jabil, Corgan, 3M and Dell Technologies to bring its offering to the data center market. TMGcore says the OTTO platform offers extreme density and efficiency that can radically reduce the space and cost to deploy IT infrastructure. The OTTO system is perhaps the most ambitious effort yet to create an autonomous data center that can be managed by software and robotics.

Gone are the days of turning stones into spears. With the advent of new technologies, we've learned to develop tools that not only make living faster and easier every day, but also improve the future of humanity as a whole. Today's Chart of the Week draws from the MIT Technology Review, which features Bill Gates' predictions for the top 10 breakthrough inventions that will capture headlines in 2019. Companies would see measurable benefits, with just one breakthrough here garnering a 5% jump in productivity. Sanitation that doesn't require sewers would not only prevent exposure diseases but also help turn waste into useful products like fertilizer.

Projections for the global energy storage market are extremely bullish, with one estimate suggesting that the market will double six times between 2016 and 2030. Such growth would put it at approximately 125,000 megawatts (MW - for comparison's sake, the Texas market is just about 80,000 megawatts of generating capacity) and 305,000 megawatt-hours. That represents an awfully large number of batteries out there in the near future, releasing and absorbing energy as needed by the grid and providing critical services both in front of and behind the meter. A battery without smarts isn't worth too much - enter Athena However a battery by itself, while it may involve somewhat complex chemistry, is still a relatively dumb building block. It's what you do with it – telling that battery when to charge and discharge, at what rate, and how far up or down to go - that matters.

Last week was an exciting one with some rumors about Apple's AAPL iPhone manufacturing in the U.S., Cisco's CSCO earnings report, Intel's INTC first AI Day plus lots more. In June this year, Apple requested its iPhone assemblers Pegatron and Foxconn to evaluate the feasibility of making the devices in the U.S. While Pegatron refused outright on cost considerations, Foxconn has decided to do the job. The study is likely to show that the cost increase, skill mismatch and supply chain problems (the supply chain is largely in Asia) would make this cost prohibitive. This would raise iPhone prices for consumers/squeeze Apple's margins.