Katherine Blunt

America’s artificial intelligence (AI) boom is pushing the nation’s largest power-grid operator to the brink of a supply crisis. Sixty-seven million people in a 13-state region stretching from New Jersey to Kentucky get their power from a market operated by nonprofit PJM. So, too, do the many AI data centers springing up in Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley,” which have a bottomless appetite for electricity. Rates are going up for consumers. Older power plants are going out of service faster than new ones can be built.

A federal judge on Tuesday barred Alphabet’s Google from paying to be the exclusive search engine on devices and browsers but declined to order more drastic changes that the company had opposed. The judge didn’t bar Google from making payments for distribution of its products, saying such a move would harm downstream partners. He also declined to require other remedies sought by the Justice Department, such as divestiture of Google’s Chrome browser.

The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers. Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting.