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The topic of data centers – those nondescript lines of buildings that enable us to run Google searches and AI models all the livelong day – has become a hot political topic this year. The NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) crowd doesn't want them in their communities, but no one really wants to scale back their digital diets in order to absorb the impact having fewer data centers would have on all of us. A real conundrum, it would seem. If we want to keep up with technological advances, they have to go somewhere. Here in Virginia, a huge intra-party...

The past few weeks have seen the bond market start asking a question the stock market has mostly been happy to ignore: Who can actually afford the AI buildout? On July 9, S&P Global Ratings gave its answer for one of the biggest spenders. It cut Oracle Corp.'s (NYSE: ORCL) long-term credit rating to BBB-, the lowest rung of investment grade and just one notch above junk. The stock has since fallen to around $125, down nearly 30% over the past month and nearly 50% over the past year. What makes the downgrade worth more than a passing glance is...

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it has attacked Amazon’s data infrastructure in Bahrain, according to a statement reported by Fars, an IRGC-linked state media outlet. Fars News Agency said on Tuesday the IRGC had “attacked the central data infrastructure of the American company Amazon in Bahrain with several cruise missiles and destroyed it,” according to a translated Telegram post. CNBC was unable to independently verify the information. CNBC has reached out to the National Communication Center of Bahrain and Amazon for comment. Hostilities between the U.S. and Iran have ratcheted up over the past 10 days as President Donald...

A new Google Search setting can save Lens images, voice searches and uploaded files. Here’s how to turn it off ... There are few emails that make your stomach drop faster than one about "new privacy settings." That usually means a company has moved another data switch, renamed a control or tucked a new choice inside an account menu you rarely visit. Google is now rolling out one of those changes for Search services. The setting is called Search Services History. It controls whether Google saves your activity from Search services when you are signed into your Google Account. That...

New York became the first U.S. state on Tuesday to halt construction of large new data centers, imposing a one-year moratorium as concerns grow that the facilities driving the artificial-intelligence boom ‌are raising power costs, straining water supplies and burdening local communities. The moratorium positions New York at the forefront of ‌a growing national debate over how to manage the infrastructure needed to support artificial intelligence. While technology companies are racing to build new data centers, lawmakers ​and regulators in dozens of states are weighing measures to limit their effect on electricity grids, utility bills and local communities. "As data...

A quiet Louisiana parish is set to become home to the world's largest data center, stirring unease among residents. Tech giant Meta announced Monday it is expanding its massive Hyperion data center in Richland Parish to five gigawatts of computing power, increasing its investment in the project to $50 billion. Local leaders hailed the project, saying it has already boosted the economy and created hundreds of jobs despite still being under construction. Governor Jeff Landry said the data center construction has ignited 'economic progress' the state has never seen before. 'It's going to create 7,500 construction jobs, more than 1,000...

Project Jade, Wyoming’s largest data center, is now Project Tembo, and the company behind the 2.7-gigawatt facility is a mystery no longer. The data center will be owned and operated by none other than Google, giving Cheyenne yet another of the world’s largest tech companies in what is fast becoming an emerging tech frontier. Cheyenne has hosted Microsoft data centers for the past decade or so and that company has announced plans for a major expansion on a 3,500-acre tract of land whose annexation is pending before the Cheyenne City Council. Meta announced last year it was joining the Wyoming...

FROM THE top of the slide, which curves into a little backyard pool, the view as recently as April would have been of lush Ohio farmland, dense forest and pretty clapboard houses. Now it is of six giant weatherproof tents of the type more commonly used by the military to house fighter jets or by aid organisers in disaster zones. These will soon contain perhaps $30bn-worth of cutting-edge semiconductors. Along with a clutch of gas turbines to provide power, they occupy a site the size of an airport terminal. If Meta, the site’s owner, stays on track to bring its...

Local moratoriums spring up after state inaction, while New Mexico and Utah fight “hyperscale” data polluters .... Local governments in Colorado are moving quickly to slap moratoriums on new data center development in reaction to a public backlash against rising electricity prices, heavy pollution and lucrative tax breaks. Denver, Jefferson County and Longmont have all moved in recent weeks to limit data centers, which house servers for mass computation that demand enormous amounts of electricity and cooling water. Cities and counties are moving in part because the state legislature failed to act in 2026, eventually letting two competing bills die...

Republican voters ousted Utah’s most powerful lawmaker, state Senate President J. Stuart Adams, Tuesday after a series of controversies and mounting criticism for his role as one of the key decision-makers advancing a proposal to build a controversial data center in Box Elder County. Two other key GOP lawmakers — Sen. Daniel McCay and Rep. Trevor Lee — were voted out as well. Hundreds of thousands of dollars poured into the competition pitting Adams of Layton against Weber State University’s ex-general counsel, Stephanie Hollist, and former Legislature attorney Braden Hess. Hollist held the lead around 11:30 p.m. with 43% of...

Data centers have become the chic new enemy among activists. Critics claim the centers are using inordinate amounts of electricity and water to power artificial intelligence, inspiring protesters to take to the streets and Democratic lawmakers to head to Albany to stymie their development. However, some experts say the anti-data center push is more of a moral panic than an empirical one, often based on speculative and sometimes bunk projections. It seems that data centers are the boogeyman onto which larger fears about the impact of AI are being projected. “The estimates of future data-center development may be overestimated by...

Data centers have become the chic new enemy among activists. Critics claim the centers are using inordinate amounts of electricity and water to power artificial intelligence, inspiring protesters to take to the streets and Democratic lawmakers to head to Albany to stymie their development. However, some experts say the anti-data center push is more of a moral panic than an empirical one, often based on speculative and sometimes bunk projections.

Back in 1999, 87 acres of land in Taylor, Texas, was donated (nominal fee $10) to the city by a farmer, with a condition in the deed that it would be used for community parkland. In 2025, the land was sold for $10M to a data center developer, who has won several legal battles against the nearby residents who are trying to stop the massive construction project, reports 404 Media. Now, the disgruntled locals are planning to take their case to an appeals court. To introduce this case, let’s go back to 1999, when the $10 deed was inked. For...

We are often best defined not by the company we keep, but by our enemies. Having the right—left—enemies tends to be a very good thing indeed, as it’s a reliable indicator we’re doing the right things with the right people and for the right reasons. It’s not always easy, however, to know the motives of people, or nations, when we’re dealing with issues of technology and/or public policy. One such issue is the proliferation of data centers, necessary for the burgeoning AI revolution, but controversial for that and other reasons. Among them is the amount of water and power they...

We uncovered something far bigger than I ever expected. After seeing coordinated false attacks against the Utah data center project, we brought in an advanced data science team to trace where the content was coming from and the results were shocking. What we found led back to organized networks, political activist groups, and funding trails tied to massive international entities. We dug through IRS 990 filings, tracked IP data from around the world, and uncovered what appears to be a coordinated campaign targeting energy and data center projects across multiple regions. I shared 90 pages of evidence with federal law...

BOX ELDER COUNTY, Utah — Kevin O’Leary, an investor in the proposed 40,000- acre Stratos data centre campus in Box Elder County, accused two Utah groups opposing the project of being funded by the Chinese government. O’Leary made the accusation on Fox News, targeting Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies. “Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one. It’s China.” O’Leary said. In a social media exchange, Gabi Finlayson of Elevate Strategies pushed back on...

An artificial intelligence data center was running up a water bill for the ages, and local residents were the ones to point out the problem. In November, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Microsoft had a new “superfactory” named Fairwater spanning over 1 million square feet outside of Atlanta. Chief Technical Officer Mark Russinovich explained why the site is so massive. “To make improvements in the capabilities of the AI, you need to have larger and larger infrastructure to train it,” he said in a statement. The site developer, Quality Technology Services, purchased the plot in 2022 for $154 million. Ironically, Microsoft...

Last December, in a piece called “The Data Center Backlash Is Global,” I reported that residents around the world were rising up against Big Tech just as they have risen up against Big Wind and Big Solar, rejecting applications to use land.Sure, AI may be a world-changing technology, but the rush to build massive new data centers has resulted in dozens of rejections or restrictions on projects from Indianapolis to Dublin, Ireland. People are worried about property values, water usage, electricity costs and what it means for the neighborhood: “quality-of-life impacts,” as a member of the Indianapolis council, who led...

Georgia residents were left outraged when they discovered a massive data center had been guzzling up nearly 30 million gallons of water without paying for it. The issue began last year when residents in the affluent subdivision of Annelise Park in Fayetteville noticed their water pressure was unusually low, Politico reports. When the county utility then investigated the problem, officials discovered that developer Quality Technology Services (QTS) had installed two industrial-scale water hookups to the approximately 6.2 million square foot data center campus - located about 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One of the water connections appeared to have...

In the town of Festus, Missouri, a community of 14,000 people near St. Louis, residents have ousted four city council members who backed plans for a massive AI data center, replacing them with candidates who openly opposed the project. At a packed City Hall meeting following the election, newly sworn-in officials were greeted with cheers - while the city's mayor Sam Richards, who still supports the development, was met with boos and jeers from the crowd. 'You're next!' one resident shouted, underscoring how heated the fight has become. At the center of the dispute is a proposed $6 billion data...