#ai-data-centers

#ai-data-centers

Higher oil prices fueled by the Iran war are the main driver behind inflation, with the Consumer Price Index rising 3.8% in April, new data out this week shows. Higher energy prices accounted for the bulk of the increase between March and April, Axios' Courtenay Brown reported. Compared with the same period a year ago, energy costs are up 18%.

xAI has added a further 19 natural gas turbines to its Southhaven, Mississippi-based AI data center site. This is despite an ongoing lawsuit alleging the company was already operating 27 unpermitted methane gas generators to power the nearby Colossus 2 campus in South Memphis, which it uses to train its Grok AI assistant.

Seven years is a strange unit of time. Long enough to finish a PhD, short enough to remember an event vividly, and apparently, exactly long enough for Sony to build, test, manufacture, and ship a new generation of PlayStation hardware. PS3 to PS4, PS4 to PS5: seven years, twice, with the precision of a Swiss movement. The console industry built its entire release calendar ecosystem around that cadence. Publishers scheduled their biggest titles around it. Retailers planned inventory cycles for it. Analysts forecast revenue curves based on it.

“When a group comes to me and says, 'Look, I have concerns about water, I have concerns about air, I have concerns about wildlife,' I totally get it,” O'Leary said. O'Leary said he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in environmental studies. “It's understanding the concerns of people, but at the same time, think about the number of jobs,” O'Leary said in a post on X on Friday.

Canaccord asserted that Hut 8's strategic progress continues to accelerate. In just a couple of quarters, the company has signed two marquee AI co-location deals with "some of the best terms we have seen across the sector." That language matters because it signals Hut 8 is winning enterprise-grade AI tenants rather than speculative compute customers.

I believe 2026 may mark the beginning of a new phase: the large-scale development of off-grid data centers built closer to the point of energy generation, where, under certain conditions, it may be possible to generate and utilize power at costs approaching $0.02 per kWh.

"We were considering multiple forms of capital when we started. It just felt like the opportunity is so large that venture capital gives us the opportunity to take those risks upfront and have the possibility to generate an outsized return."

A severe shortage of NAND flash, driven by the enormous demand for it to expand AI data centers, makes procurement impossible. Sony is currently unable to fulfill orders for CFexpress Type A, CFexpress Type B, and SDXC/SDHC memory cards.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projected in March 2026 that American power demand will climb to a new record in 2026 and keep rising through 2027, driven largely by AI data centers. Nuclear is one of the few energy sources positioned to absorb that load reliably, and its share of the generation mix is forecast to tick up.

Developers promise "community investments," downtown revitalization, and a new "AI Center." What they don't say is that this development comes tethered to a massive resource-intensive data center that will cost billions, create pollution, and concentrate profits for the corporations and CEOs at the top-not the surrounding communities. This is not innovation, it's exploitation.

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.

A year ago, Redwood Materials didn't have an energy storage business. Now, it is the fastest-growing unit within the battery recycling and materials startup - a reflection of an AI data center building boom. The evidence of that growth, the company says, can be found at its R&D lab in San Francisco, which has expanded four-fold into a 55,000-square-foot facility and now employs nearly 100 people.

and some companies will even die if they can't get the components they need, he agreed, in a televised interview with Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV. While the interview's entirely in Chinese, friends of The Verge stepped forward to confirm parts of a machine-translated summary that's been making headlines. They also note, importantly, that it's the interviewer asking whether companies might shut down or product lines might discontinue. Khein-Seng largely just agreed and clarified that it'll happen if these companies cannot secure enough RAM.

Sony and Nintendo are reportedly feeling squeezed by RAM shortages as demand from AI data centers takes up an increasing share of memory chip production. In response to rising costs and dwindling chip supplies, Sony is considering pushing back the release of its next PlayStation console "to 2028 or even 2029," according to industry sources cited by Bloomberg, while Nintendo may increase the $450 price of its Switch 2 console this year.

Corning Incorporated ( NYSE:GLW) has delivered one of 2026's most impressive rallies, climbing 50.2% year-to-date and 46% over the past month. Corning's 2026 is so good, it's now the 6th top performing stock in the entire S&P 500. The 175-year-old materials science company is riding three converging waves: stellar earnings execution, a massive partnership with Meta, and surging demand for AI data center infrastructure.

The Associated Builders and Contractors trade group estimated in a report last month the industry will need to bring in 456,000 new workers in 2027, up 30.7% from the 349,000 needed this year. "Failing to do so will worsen labor shortages, especially in certain occupations and regions, placing further upward pressure on labor costs," ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu warned in a statement.