Massive new data centers are the physical foundation for tech companies’ hopes and dreams for AI. But the rush to expand warehouses full of energy-hungry servers has also kicked up fights across the world over their impact on power grids, utility bills, nearby communities, and the environment. From audacious plans to launch data centers into […]
AI Updated May 8, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC All the latest updates on AI data centers by Verge Staff and Justine Calma Link Share RSS Gift Massive new data centers are the physical foundation for tech companies’ hopes and dreams for AI. But the rush to expand warehouses full of energy-hungry servers has also kicked up fights across the world over their impact on power grids, utility bills, nearby communities, and the environment.
From audacious plans to launch data centers into space to the latest legal battles over pollution, The Verge has the biggest news and reporting surrounding data centers.
May 6 Jay Peters 43 percent of Americans blame data centers as a major reason for rising power bills.
That’s according to a new Pew Research Center survey . Similar numbers of both Republicans and Democrats also cite data centers, which are quickly becoming a bipartisan issue , as a major reason for higher costs.
Many Americans hold utility companies responsible for their rising home energy bills [ Pew Research Center ] May 5 Jay Peters A 40,000-acre data center project was just approved in Utah, despite outcry from the community.
As reported by The Salt Lake Tribune , the planned hyperscale data center in Box Elder County, when fully completed, is expected to use 9 gigawatts of power — more than double the 4 gigawatts of power used by the state right now. The project is backed in part by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary.
Apr 27 Jess Weatherbed A political battleground is forming around data centers.
Multibillion-dollar data center developments in Georgia are sparking bipartisan backlash, with Politico reporting that 47 percent of local voters oppose the plans. Given this is just one of several states experiencing an AI boom , similar opposition may also define local and statewide elections going forward.
Georgia’s battleground races give a first look at a brewing political storm [ Politico ] Apr 16 Jess Weatherbed Are AI data centers coming to your area?
This free, crowd-sourced tracker website is one of the most comprehensive attempts we’ve seen to keep tabs on where new data centers are being proposed. Maps are currently available across 18 states, with data compiled from public sources. You can read about the Data Center Proposal Tracker creator’s methodology here .
Here’s a screenshot from the tracker showing sites around NYC.
The plans, which were revealed in a letter seen by Wired , come in response to a bipartisan push to find out how much energy data centers are sucking up. The Energy Information Administration reportedly plans to launch the nationwide surveys after it wraps up pilot surveys in data center-heavy areas, such as Texas, Washington state, Washington DC, and northern Virginia.
The US Government Will Ask Data Centers How Much Power They Use [ WIRED ] Apr 15 Andrew J. Hawkins “A data center should not be a potential death sentence for a community’s health.” The NAACP is suing xAI to block Elon Musk’s Colossus 2 data center project outside of Memphis, TN, claiming that the project is operating 27 gas turbines without an air permit and in violation of the Clean Air Act.
“By looking to evade clear air laws to operate dirty turbines that emit pollution and known carcinogens, these companies are following a shameful, familiar pattern: asking Black and frontline communities to bear the toxic brunt of ‘innovation,” said Abre’ Conner, NAACP Director of Environmental and Climate Justice.
NAACP lawsuit accuses Elon Musk’s xAI of polluting Black neighborhoods near Memphis [ The Guardian ] Apr 6 Emma Roth Iran threatens OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi An October 2025 image of OpenAI’s UAE Stargate data center under construction.
OpenAI’s overarching $500 billion Stargate project includes investments from Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank. It’s not clear how much of the Abu Dhabi data center is actually finished, as an October 2025 update showed the beginnings of the facilities that will contain 16 gigawatts of compute power. The update said construction was “well underway” and would meet its target of deploying 200 megawatts in 2026. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to The Verge ’s request for comment.
Read Article > Mar 26 Stevie Bonifield Senators are pushing to find out how much electricity data centers actually use An Amazon data center in Oregon.
The EIA announced Wednesday that it’s launching a voluntary pilot program to evaluate data center energy use in Texas, Washington, Northern Virginia, and Washington, DC. What Warren and Hawley are calling for in their letter is broader, mandatory reporting on data center energy consumption.
Meta says it’s both the lead partner and co-developer , and plans to work on “multiple generations” of the data center CPUs, for use along with hardware from other vendors like Nvidia and AMD . Arm customers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft, Google, Marvell, Nvidia, Samsung, and others included congratulatory notes with the announcement. However, Qualcomm, which said it had achieved “complete victory” over Arm with a court ruling last fall in their case over the terms of licensing agreements, was not one of them.
Read Article > Mar 24 Justine Calma Lake Tahoe has to look for a new power source as data center demand soars.
Facing “unprecedented times,” NV Energy has decided to stop selling power to a small power utility serving 49,000 customers in Lake Tahoe, CalMatters reports . Data center requests are driving a tripling of expected peak power demand, according to NV Energy .
Lake Tahoe isn’t sure where it’s power will come from after the next ski season [ CalMatters ] Mar 10 Justine Calma How the spiraling Iran conflict could affect data centers and electricity costs A commercial ship is viewed anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, in the Strait of Hormuz, Dubai, on March 2nd, 2026. Increased maritime traffic led to a buildup of vessels waiting near Dubai, highlighting the strategic importance of the strait, which handles 20 percent of global energy trade.
Photo: Getty Images Soon after the Trump administration launched its war on Iran, I called up Reed Blakemore, director of research and programs at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center, to talk about the consequences . While oil and gas prices were already on the rise, there was still more hope then that the impact of the conflict might be short-lived. At the end of our conversation, Blakemore said plainly: “Let’s have a call again [next week] … We’ll have a much clearer picture of what the conflict is going to look like and what the story really is going to be for energy moving forward.” It’s a week later and the conflict has only escalated since the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Energy infrastructure has become a key leverage point in the unfolding war, with Israel hitting Iranian fuel depots and Iran targeting Gulf neighbors’ oil and gas infrastructure in its own strikes. Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard threatened on Tuesday not to “ not allow the export of even a single liter of oil from the region to the hostile side and its partners until further notice .” Iran has reportedly also started to lay mines in the strategic Strait of Hormuz , through which one-fifth of global petroleum consumption and liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade used to move.
Read Article > Mar 5 Justine Calma Seven tech giants signed Trump’s pledge to keep electricity costs from spiking around data centers Trump summoned tech leaders to the White House on Wednesday, March 4, 2026 to sign pledges committing their companies to foot the electricity bill for energy-hungry data centers.
Photo: Getty Images Leaders from Google , Meta , Microsoft, Oracle, OpenAI, Amazon , and xAI met with President Donald Trump today to sign a “ rate payer protection pledge .” It’s one way they’re responding to growing bipartisan concerns about electricity rates rising as tech companies and the Trump administration rush to build out a new generation of AI data centers.
There are very few details at this point on what the pledge entails, nor how companies would be held accountable for following through on any commitments. “Under this bold initiative, these massive companies will build, bring, or buy their own power supply for new AI data centers,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email to The Verge .
The company said it would pay higher monthly electricity charges in order to cover 100 percent of the upgrades needed to connect its data centers to power grids. “This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers,” the announcement says.
Read Article > Feb 11 Justine Calma How an ‘icepocalypse’ raises more questions about Meta’s biggest data center project Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Donna Collins lives about 20 miles from where Meta’s biggest data center is being built, in a house her family has lived in for five generations. Construction has thrown the small agricultural community in North Louisiana into the spotlight as a high-profile example of how the infrastructure behind generative AI could impact nearby residents.
For Collins, this place is “a little piece of heaven.” “It’s all I’ve ever known as a home. It’s quiet. It’s rural. It is beautiful,” she says. “We can’t imagine the changes that are coming.” Read Article > Feb 10 Justine Calma Microsoft wants to rewire data centers to save space A Microsoft data center in Aldie, Virginia, on Tuesday, October 28th, 2025.
Photo: Getty Images Microsoft wants to design more efficient data centers using materials that allow electricity to flow with zero resistance. If these new materials, called high-temperature superconductors, can make it to market, Microsoft thinks it could be a game changer for how data centers and the energy infrastructure they connect to are built.
Tech companies are facing backlash over how much power generative AI demands, delays connecting to power grids that lack the infrastructure to meet those demands, and the impact construction of new data centers has on local residents. High-temperature superconductors (HTS) could potentially shrink the amount of space needed for a data center and the transmission lines feeding it power.
Read Article > Feb 8 Terrence O'Brien New York is considering two bills to rein in the AI industry AI data centers are becoming a bipartisan concern.
The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act ( NY FAIR News Act , for short) would require that any news “substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence” carry a disclaimer. It would also require that any content created using AI be reviewed and approved by a human with “editorial control” before being published.
Read Article > Feb 3 Andrew J. Hawkins Elon Musk is merging SpaceX and xAI to build data centers in space — or so he says Photo by Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images On Monday, Elon Musk announced that he was merging two of his companies , SpaceX and xAI, in a deal said to be worth $1.25 trillion. The reason, Musk said in an announcement , was that in order for AI to grow, it needed to go to space.
AI relies on “large terrestrial data centers” that run on “immense amounts of power and cooling,” he said, which comes at great expense to the environment and community opposition. The solution: data centers in space. “In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk said.
Read Article > Jan 29 Justine Calma It’s a new heyday for gas thanks to data centers Gas turbines at the on-site natural gas plant under construction during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Sept. 24, 2025.
Photo: Getty Images The US is now leading a global surge in new gas power plants being built in large part to satisfy growing energy demand for data centers. And more gas means more planet-heating pollution.
Gas-fired power generation in development globally rose by 31 percent in 2025. Almost a quarter of that added capacity is slated for the US, which has surpassed China with the biggest increase of any country. More than a third of that growth in the US is expected to directly power data centers, according to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
Read Article > Jan 28 Jay Peters Microsoft gets approval to build 15 data centers in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.
The data centers will be built on land that used to be owned by Foxconn .
Microsoft's plans for 15 more data centers win approval at former Wisconsin Foxconn site [ CNBC ] Jan 27 Stevie Bonifield Meta is spending millions to convince people that data centers are cool and you like them Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Over the last few months of 2025, Meta spent $6.4 million on an ad campaign running in cities across the country, from Sacramento to Washington, with a clear mission: win over viewers on the construction of new data centers. As the New York Times reports, the ad campaign is anchored by short, folksy video spotlights on Meta’s data centers in Altoona, Iowa, and Los Lunas, New Mexico .
The ads make the case that Meta’s data centers create jobs, revitalizing rural communities.
Read Article > Jan 27 Justine Calma The winter storm tested power grids straining to accommodate AI data centers Power lines during a winter storm in Irving, Texas, on Sunday, January 25th.
Photo: Getty Images The colossal winter storm that swept across 34 states left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity. Bitterly cold temperatures lingering after Winter Storm Fern are still testing power grids , already under stress from a rush of new AI data centers.
Over the weekend, wholesale electricity prices soared in Virginia, the state with the most data centers . And while that’s not surprising during a spike in energy demand for heating, it could add to the growing discontent over rising utility bills that has fueled opposition to data centers across the US . Utilities and grid operators were already hard-pressed to meet the increasing power needs of AI , which can make it even harder to prepare ahead of a weather disaster.
Read Article > Jan 22 Jay Peters Microsoft wants to build 15 data centers in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.
Leaders of the village approved plans for the data centers on Wednesday, FOX6 News Milwaukee reports , and the Mount Pleasant Village Board could give final approval “as soon as Monday night.” The data centers would go on land formerly owned by Foxconn .
“We commit to paying our own way on energy, so that our operations don’t increase your electricity prices,” OpenAI said. The company promised to work with local communities to minimize the impact of its Stargate data centers . OpenAI was not specific but said plans could involve securing its own energy supplies or paying for local grid upgrades.
Read Article > Jan 16 Jess Weatherbed ICE hits Meta data center project.
Two individuals who were driving dump trucks to the construction site in Richland Parish, Louisiana, were arrested on Wednesday.
Local law enforcement says ICE “did not enter the Meta site at any time,” but told Bloomberg that agents were sweeping for identification of workers en route to the site.
Immigration Officers Descend on Meta Data Center, Arrest Drivers [ Bloomberg.com ] More Stories Most Popular Most Popular Nintendo is raising Switch 2 prices Canvas is online again after ShinyHunters threaten to leak schools’ data Tesla is recalling its cheaper Cybertruck because the wheels might fall off Google Fitbit Air preorders come with a second band for free A hacker ran me over with a robot lawn mower The Verge Daily A free daily digest of the news that matters most.
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