Energy and Climate

If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers’ insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling.

Hyperscaler capex is poised to set records in 2026, as cloud giants scramble to build enough compute capacity to meet growing demand. Energy remains a key constraint—and point of public contention—but an upcoming regulatory decision is poised to offer either grief or relief. There are two key energy issues: power generation and years-long interconnection queues, and how large-load customers like data centers impact other users on the grid.

In the wake of the hurricanes and flooding that affected North Carolina in 2024, Rebecca Jinnette, a digital skills agent with North Carolina Cooperative Extension, has worked to close digital skill gaps in communities impacted by disasters. Through training, technical support, and guidance, she helps residents access information and resources on disaster preparedness and recovery. Between April 15, 2024, and May 18, 2026, Jinnette delivered 345 informational class sessions.

A new style of architecture is rising in the sprawling suburbs of the Sonoran Desert: windowless data centers that hum 24 hours a day and guzzle as much electricity as a midsize city.

With backlash against AI gathering steam in some places—including university campuses—plenty of attention is being paid to its negative impacts, with even the pope weighing in on the subject.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are teaming up with a nonprofit investor to accelerate new technologies using data centers as test cases. The initiative, led by Elemental Impact, is among the clearest attempts yet to turn the massive buildout of AI infrastructure into a proving ground for new technologies rather than just a new source of emissions.

The Wi-Fi signal is weak outside the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Anacostia, a historic African-American section of Washington (DC) The abolitionist leader’s former home sits serenely atop a grassy hill in the otherwise bustling neighborhood. It is one of Monica Sanders’s final stops on an overcast December afternoon. Facing the property, she holds her iPhone out to measure Wi-Fi speeds.

NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy entered into a definitive agreement to combine in an all-stock transaction. The combination will create the world's largest regulated electric utility business, fortified by North America's premier energy infrastructure platform and developer. The combined company will be more than 80% regulated, serve approximately 10 million utility customer accounts across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina and own 110 gigawatts (GW) of generation across a broad mix of energy sources.

Europe is bracing for a "long-lasting” energy crisis. The price per gallon for diesel in the U.S. jumped by nearly $2 across the board in March.

Data centers built to power AI produce so much heat that they can raise the surface temperature of the land around them by several degrees—creating so-called data center heat islands that may already be affecting up to 340 million people. Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data center had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to “explode” in the coming years, and set out to quantify the impact. The researchers