Red and blue states alike have introduced legislation in recent weeks that would halt data center development, citing concerns from climate to high energy prices. An Amazon Web Services data center in Stone Ridge, Virginia.Photograph: Nathan Howard/Getty Images Two New York lawmakers on Friday announced that they are introducing a bill that would impose a three-year moratorium on data center development. The announcement makes New York at least the sixth state to introduce legislation putting a pause on data center development in the past few weeks--one of the latest signs of a growing and bipartisan backlash that is quickly finding traction in statehouses around the country. Data center moratoriums are "being tested as a model throughout states in this country," said state senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat, who presented the bill at a press conference Friday with its cosponsor, assembly member Anna Kelles, also a Democrat. "Democrats and Republicans are moving forward with exactly these kinds of moratoriums. New York should be in the front of the line to get this done."

Throughout the year we've reported on some of the larger stories, and some of the lesser-covered happenings, in our regular monthly digests. We look back through the archives and pick out one or two stories from each of our digests. This month, AI startup DeepSeek released DeepSeek R1, a reasoning model designed for good performance on logic, maths, and pattern-finding tasks. The company has also launched six smaller versions of R1 that are tiny enough to run locally on laptops. In Wired, Zeyi Yang reported on who is behind the startup, whilst Tongliang Liu (in The Conversation) looked at how DeepSeek achieved its results with a fraction of the cash and computing power of its competitors.

The influential progressive third party announced Thursday that it was putting out a recruitment call for candidates specifically opposed to data centers. The Working Families Party said Thursday that it is putting out a specific recruitment call for people who are organizing against data centers in their communities to run for office. The announcement comes amid a period of heightened political turmoil around data centers, as some high-profile Democrats wade into the fight. Earlier this week, three Democrats in the Senate sent letters seeking information from Big Tech companies about how data centers impact electricity bills, while senator Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data center construction. "We see our role as responding to what working families and working people are concerned about, what issues are keeping them up at night," says Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary for the Working Families Party. "We would be ignoring the needs of our constituents if we were not responding to the issue of data centers and their impacts on communities."

Senate Republicans are winning the AI regulation moratorium battle as debate continues over federal framework versus states' rights in artificial intelligence policy.

A legal battle is brewing, as two companies are suing to overturn the two-year ban. Last week, a legal battle over lab-grown meat kicked off in Texas. On September 1, a two-year ban on the technology went into effect across the state; the following day, two companies filed a lawsuit against state officials. The two companies, Wildtype Foods and Upside Foods, are part of a growing industry that aims to bring new types of food to people's plates. These products, often called cultivated meat by the industry, take live animal cells and grow them in the lab to make food products without the need to slaughter animals. Here's what we know about lab-grown meat and climate change Cultivated meat is coming to the US.

The moratorium could also have killed laws that have already been adopted around the country, including a Colorado law that targets algorithmic discrimination, laws in Utah and California aimed at making AI-generated content more identifiable, and other legislation focused on preserving data privacy and keeping children safe online. Proponents of the moratorium, such OpenAI and Senator Ted Cruz, have said that a "patchwork" of state-level regulations would place an undue burden on technology companies and stymie innovation. Federal regulation, they argue, is a better approach--but there is currently no federal AI regulation in place. Wiener and other state lawmakers can now get back to work writing and passing AI policy, at least for the time being--with the tailwind of a major moral victory at their backs. The movement to defeat the moratorium was impressively bipartisan: 40 state attorneys general signed a letter to Congress opposing the measure, as did a group of over 250 Republican and Democratic state lawmakers.

Earlier in the week, Blackburn attempted to forge a compromise with Ted Cruz, who led the provision. Together, they produced a new version that reduced the ten-year ban to a five-year one, and carved out exceptions for laws related to kids' online safety and personal publicity rights. But this version of the bill was promptly excoriated by vocal coalitions in both parties. A group of 140 mostly left-leaning advocacy organizations, including Encode AI and Common Sense Media, penned an open letter arguing that this new version actually shielded tech companies from the state regulation that Blackburn was attempting to protect. "The vague standards set out in the moratorium will provide Big Tech a clear path to challenge nearly any state law in court," the letter read.

A data center for cryptocurrency mining, cloud services, and AI computing in Stutsman County, North Dakota.halbergman/Getty This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world's dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned. About 1 billion tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry's enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.

As Congress races to pass President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," it's also sprinting to placate the many haters of the bill's "AI moratorium" provision which originally required a 10-year pause on state AI regulations. The provision, which was championed by White House AI czar and venture capitalist David Sacks, has proved remarkably unpopular with a diverse contingent of lawmakers ranging from 40 state attorneys general to the ultra-MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Sunday night, Senator Marsha Blackburn and Senator Ted Cruz announced a new version of the AI moratorium, knocking the pause from a full decade down to five years and adding a variety of carve-outs. But after critics attacked the watered-down version of the bill as a "get-out-of-jail free card" for Big Tech, Blackburn reversed course Monday evening. "While I appreciate Chairman Cruz's efforts to find acceptable language that allows states to protect their citizens from the abuses of AI, the current language is not acceptable to those who need these protections the most," Blackburn said in a statement to WIRED.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier joins'Fox & Friends First' to discuss a federal judge moving to halt the state's social media ban for children and weigh in on the fight to protect women's sports. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255). When my 16-year-old son Mason was going through a painful breakup, he did what many kids of his generation do: He turned to TikTok. Mason used the social media site to search for positive affirmations and inspirational quotes. Instead, TikTok's algorithm sent him the most horrific content urging suicide and self-harm.