energy
Seven in ten Americans oppose a data center in their town News
Gallup found that 70 percent of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their local area, with 48 percent strongly opposed, and reporting says Anthropic's confidential IPO filing is expected to name public backlash against AI as a risk factor.
The US tracks 521 gigawatts of AI-adjacent grid demand, slightly more than its average power output News
A live tracker of the US AI data-center buildout now maps 1,547 facilities across 46 states and 521.6 gigawatts of demand across seven grid markets, a figure that sits just above the roughly 506 gigawatt annual average of total US electricity generation.
The startup reactor behind the AI power story ran at zero power News
Valar Atomics' Ward 250 reached criticality in June under a Department of Energy pilot program, but the DOE record describes a zero-power demonstration and calls it the second such reactor in the program, not the first of anything.
Virginia orders Dominion to bill data centers for the power lines built to serve them News
The Virginia State Corporation Commission ordered Dominion Energy on July 31 to design, within 90 days, a tariff that charges large data-center customers directly for the substations and transmission lines built solely for them, rather than spreading those costs across every ratepayer.
Nashville voted 27-5 to take a data-center site by eminent domain News
Nashville's Metro Council gave final approval on August 5 to acquiring a 23-acre South Nashville property next to the city zoo by eminent domain if negotiation fails, blocking a planned data center that developer DC Blox bought for 23 million dollars in July.
EPA Says an Off-Grid Plant Built for One Data Center Escapes the Acid Rain Program News
An EPA guidance memorandum states that a fossil-fuel power plant with no physical connection to the utility grid, built to serve only an adjacent private data center, falls outside the federal Acid Rain Program and its permit, allowance, and monitoring requirements.
NVIDIA Is Reportedly in Talks to Guarantee $250 Billion of OpenAI's Ohio Buildout News
The Wall Street Journal reports NVIDIA is discussing a roughly $250 billion credit guarantee for the lease and construction debt behind OpenAI's planned 10-gigawatt Ohio campus, a backstop that reportedly excludes the chips themselves.
New York just froze new hyperscale data centers for a year News
Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order creating what her office calls the nation's first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, halting discretionary state environmental permits for up to a year while New York writes new development standards.
Irish data centers now eat 23% of the country's electricity -- more than every city home combined News
Ireland's Central Statistics Office reported that data centers consumed 23% of the country's metered electricity in 2025, up from 5% in 2015, using more power than all urban households combined and rising even during a moratorium on new grid connections.
AI Data-Center Tracker Tool
A live map of the US AI data-center buildout covering 1,547 facilities across 46 states, 83 frontier sites with named megawatt figures, and 530 state and federal bills, refreshed hourly from public feeds with per-figure source and confidence labels.