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After a year of holding back on new hires, companies from tech and transportation to defense now say they need more people to work alongside AIAmerica’s biggest companies say they might need more people after all. For months, major employers treated hiring as an expensive last resort. Now, a shift is emerging across industries. Companies ranging from railroad giant CSX to Google parent Alphabet GOOGL have told investors in recent days that they plan to hire to meet growth goals or to seize on emerging technologies.The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing...

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...

They’re bot for teacher. A rural upstate New York school district will be one of the first in the nation to bring a humanoid robot into the classroom. The Salamanca City Central School District, located on Seneca Nation territory, will be introducing $57,000 AI-powered “Sally” in high school classes in September as a teaching assistant, it announced last week. “Sally” will have brown hair, latex skin and will be able to move its arms and hands — but won’t be able to cruise around the classroom since her legs don’t move. “It’s exciting but also a bit nerve wracking,” superintendent...

A humanoid robot is being introduced as part of a pilot program, along with an AI teaching assistant, at Salamanca high school in Salamanca, New York, located on the Allegany territory of the Seneca nation. Teachers have criticized the program, deeming it “inappropriate” and claiming it dehumanizes the profession with the introduction of human-like robots. Some local Native American residents have also criticized the pilot program, citing its implementation as “culturally tone deaf”. The robot, named Sally, was purchased by the Cattaraugus county school district – which includes Salamanca high school – for $57,590. According to a presentation on the...

The upshot of Wang’s creative fervor is the GD01, which Unitree bills as the world’s first mass-produced, transformable mecha robot. Standing 9 ft. tall and weighing half a ton, it can transport a pilot in its torso-mounted cockpit, walk on either two legs or four, and wield fists powerful enough to knock down walls. Heavy-duty mechanical hinges connect titanium-alloy limbs to a protective casing of carbon fiber, enabling smooth, deliberate strides on brutish red legs.

Project would be one of the largest AI computing hubs and involve power controlled by the U.S. governmentNvidia NVDA is in talks to provide a roughly $250 billion backstop for OpenAI as part of a massive data center project, one of the most ambitious financial transactions yet in America’s artificial-intelligence boom.The guarantees from Nvidia would help the ChatGPT maker lease a 10-gigawatt project that SoftBank’s 9434 energy subsidiary is developing in southern Ohio, people familiar with the matter said. In total, the project could cost more than $500 billion, including the chips that would go inside the data centers. It...

The Army has warned that a House-approved defense measure aimed at restricting certain foreign-made components in commercial data centers built on War Department land could jeopardize more than $1.3 billion in planned private investment as the Pentagon expands its data center footprint. The provision, sponsored by Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., was added to the House Armed Services Committee's version of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act before the bill passed the House this week. If enacted, the measure would bar companies leasing War Department land from installing or operating data center equipment containing certain printed circuit boards, advanced semiconductors,...

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to data centers seems to be water use. I just saw this: "One of the most common questions we get about AI data centers is how much water do they use? Fair question. Older designs cooled servers by evaporating water and people naturally assume ours do too. They don't. IREN's sites are different. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling in a closed loop. Same idea as a car radiator or a fridge. Fill it once and the water just goes round and round.Over the life of a 200MW site, the initial fill plus every top-up averages out to about...

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...

President Donald Trump is marching full steam ahead in support of “absolutely incredible” data centers being built across the United States, and told Americans: “You’re becoming a utility.” The remarks came during Trump’s roughly 20 minute remarks during a Thursday visit to Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C., during which he called data centers a “really important subject.” “It is something that you’re very familiar with. The people in the room are real doers. It’s an amazing group,” Trump continued. “We are here today to continue the incredible progress we are making in communities nationwide, to ensure that as...

Fox Business anchor Dagen McDowell explains local opposition to data centres is rooted in public backlash against Google and Amazon, which profit off user data, which causes the frustration. McDowell points out the significant increase in data centre restrictions across the U.S., including New York's moratorium, reflecting concerns over energy, water, and job displacement.

When New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data centers via executive order, it became the nation's first statewide ban. It will likely be popular. Polls find widespread opposition to data centers, and the objections seem to be growing. Around 70% oppose the construction of a new artificial intelligence data center in their area, with 48% strongly opposed. Only 27% favor it. Even in Texas, the energy-rich state with the most data centers, Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a ban on new developments in rural areas. The panic surrounding data centers is highly reminiscent...

The potential spread of massive water and electricity-consuming data centers into Florida has sparked fierce opposition from thousands of residents and drawn dividing lines between its most powerful politicians. But, experts say, the projects popping up in Miami-Dade are unlike those that grab headlines for fouling drinking water and driving up power bills — for now. The best example yet of Florida’s pushback against the spread of data centers may have been Thursday’s Palm Beach County Commission meeting, where officials gave a firm no to a proposed project called “Project Tango” that would have placed a data center using as...

President Donald Trump on Wednesday blasted New York's new pause on AI data center development, arguing the state is turning away one of the biggest economic opportunities of the AI boom. "One of the biggest Driving Forces in the Future for Jobs, are Data Centers," Trump wrote on Truth Social, calling the facilities "Money Machines" and "Cash Cows" that generate jobs and tax revenue. He urged New York to reverse course "IMMEDIATELY," arguing companies would instead build projects in states such as Texas, Arizona, Alabama, and Florida.

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...

The assessment comes from Antonio Gracias, one of SpaceX's earliest investors, who was speaking Wednesday at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit in Carlisle on the broader implications of Artificial Intelligence, technology and warfare..."The Chinese are very good at copying. Everyone knows this. And they have great industrial capacity," he said. "SpaceX landed its first rocket in 2015. It took them 11 years to catch us. We just need to stay ahead. And we are ahead." ..."If it took them 11 years to copy the Falcon 9 reusable rocket, it'll take them a lot longer to copy Starship. It's much...

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...

The digital economy runs on data centers, a vital core of modern infrastructure most people never see. But there’s a debate brewing about data centers, with plenty of misinformation aimed at slowing data center development and, in some cases, halting it altogether. The Goldwater Institute has put together the following Free-Market Guide to Data Center Infrastructure to dispel some of the data center misconceptions.Is it just “Big Tech” that needs data centers? What is really driving their growth?No, it’s not just about “Big Tech.” Data centers are the 21st-century version of a power plant or water tower, providing the essential...

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...

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried Apple’s recent $200 price hikes on computers and tablets, which the tech giant blamed on a memory chip crunch — and called for breaking up Big Tech. “We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big, and we need to be instituting consumer protections for people,” the New York Democrat told Fox News. Most analysts believe the so-called “RAM-ageddon” crisis is a result of the rapid build-out of data centers to power artificial intelligence, which has turbocharged demand for memory chips. Citing memory chip shortages, Apple jacked...