#data-centers

#data-centers

Undoubtedly, there's still a lot of nerves out there over the latest wave of volatility, which may very well be the start of a painful, drawn-out move lower. As to whether we're in an AI bubble, though, remains a mystery. It'll probably be the big question going into the new year. With a recent wave of relief powering hard-hit AI stocks higher in the last few sessions, it seems like AI fears might be in an even bigger bubble than the AI stocks themselves.

On the outskirts of Dallas/Fort Worth, where pastureland once stretched uninterrupted to the horizon, thousands of new structures are rising. Windowless. Warehouse-sized. Fenced in and humming with electricity. These are not fulfillment centers or factories. They are data centers, the physical backbone of artificial intelligence. Texas, long known for oil rigs and subdivisions, is now ground zero for the AI economy.

The S&P 500 utilities sector had gained well over 15% in 2025, before rolling over in mid-October. After hitting a high of 471, the sector has traded back to the 434 level, offering investors a new chance to own the top stocks in the industry. It is important to remember that as the S&P 500 approaches its third consecutive year of double-digit gains, a correction could be on the way in 2026.

"The lead negotiator for Amazon called me on Thursday," Neugebauer said.

"For the first half a decade that I was telling people I was doing nuclear, I had to convince them, 'Hey, here's why nuclear is important,'" Bret Kugelmass, founder and CEO of Last Energy, told TechCrunch. "Now everyone just comes to us saying, 'Oh yeah, of course nuclear is a key part of the solution.' I'm like, okay, great, I'm glad everyone's caught up now."

The bank's analysts are forecasting that AI's share of the overall data center market will double to 30% over the next two years, eating into the share from conventional cloud workloads. By 2030, the firm said in a new , overall power consumption from data centers looks set to jump 175% from 2023 levels - more than the 165% that the firm previously forecast.

"If you subscribe to our worldview that bringing superintelligence at scale at very low cost is going to be transformative, you try to figure out - how can I invest in that and take the least amount of risk?"

Antin is a European infrastructure investor with offices in Paris, London, and New York. The company focuses on investments in sectors such as digital infrastructure, energy, transportation, and social services. In the digital domain, Antin has previously invested in data center and connectivity companies in various European countries, including a regional data center platform in the United Kingdom. This has given the company experience in scaling up colocation and network services within regulated and competitive markets.

As data center power density and uptime expectations rise, it's predicted that we'll see a rapid growth in the use of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in the next three to five years. While there are utilities working on flexible load tariffs for which data center operators could use storage when called upon instead of curtailing, many are turning to off-grid solutions because interconnection for new loads is taking too long, says Allison Weis, Global Head of Energy Storage, Power, and Renewables at Wood Mackenzie.

Enhanced geothermal startup Fervo Energy has raised $462 million to complete its first large-scale power plant and begin development on several others as it races to provide electricity to a power-hungry grid. The new funds will help the company continue work on its 500-megawatt Cape Station power plant in Utah while starting development on several others, Sara Jewett, senior vice president of strategy at Fervo, told TechCrunch.

San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, is now ground zero in California's battle over how to govern the rise of data centers used to power artificial intelligence. The county seat of Santa Clara is touting its partnership with Pacific Gas & Electric, claiming the city is "the West Coast's premier destination for data center development." The investor-owned utility now estimates it has enough capacity in its planning pipeline to push the city's electricity use to almost three times its current peak.

More than 230 groups including Food & Water Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Greenpeace are demanding a pause on the construction of any new data centers in the US until stronger regulations are in place to prevent soaring electricity rates, water use, and pollution.

AI preemption would not apply to local infrastructure. That's a separate issue," Sacks wrote. "In short, preemption would not force communities to host data centers they don't want.

Civil rights groups say these impacts resemble earlier patterns seen with highways, refineries and manufacturing: pollution concentrated where political resistance is weakest and property values are lowest. Data centers can also consume millions of gallons of water per day and use as much electricity as a small city, driving up energy and water use costs for poor residents. Zoom in: A supercomputer data center built by Elon Musk's xAI in Southwest Memphis, a historically Black neighborhood, faces a legal challenge from the NAACP.

Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI's strain on power grids. AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday.

In a complaint filed on November 25 with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Monitoring Analytics, LLC, an independent market monitor for PJM, requested that the regulator mandate that the energy wholesaler only add large data centers to its system if all customers can be reliably served. "PJM is currently proposing to allow the interconnection of large new data center loads that it cannot serve reliably and that will require load curtailments (black outs) of the data centers or of other customers at times," the complaint read.

Before getting into the details, Roberto Ytaysaba, who is from Brazil, wants to make one thing perfectly clear: neither he nor the Anace Indigenous people, whom he leads, are against progress. We're not against progress if it respects the communities, nature, spirituality, the autonomy of [native] peoples and Convention 169, he clarifies, one recent morning in his village. They've had electricity here since the 1980s. The school teaches ethnomathematics to the children.

During the months following OpenAI's announcement of its blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT just over three years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai pulled the fire alarm. The search giant's management issued a "code red " over what Pichai saw as an imminent disruption to its core business - a warranted level of caution, in retrospect, considering ChatGPT's meteoric rise in popularity and influence.

For two decades, the playbook for Big Tech was fairly simple and extremely successful: Create disruptive innovations, deliver blinding growth rates and keep a lid on spending. A handful of behemoths like Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. used this formula to seize market share from legacy businesses and power the US stock market to record after record.