ai data centers

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images As some of us continue to calcify our brains asking ChatGPT to answer an email or blow up our lives for an AI side chick, others are paying hand over fist for it via power bills. Wholesale electricity costs have increased as much as 267 percent since 2020 in areas near data centers, and consumers are emptying their pockets for the power companies. A very granular Bloomberg analysis of who

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Budget-wise, there have certainly been better times to be a PC gamer in search of higher framerates. For the past few months, RAM prices have been shooting through the roof, as the rapid buildout of AI datacenters causes an ever tightening shortage of memory chips. What was once considered to be one of the most affordable components of building a gaming rig has now doubled or even tripled

Getty / Futurism The Grinch comes in many forms: greedy businessman, bosses that won’t give you the holidays off, and even Fox News hosts. Dagen McDowell, a co-host of the “The Big Money Show” on Fox Business, recently flaunted her zeal for AI — and her distaste for holiday cheer — by declaring that a beloved local Christmas tree farm should be sacrificed to make way for data center infrastructure. McDowell was defending a proposed plan for a 67-mile long

Getty / Futurism Over the last couple of months, the AI industry’s obsession with building out costly data centers has sent the price of RAM skyrocketing, turning a simple computer upgrade into a costly investment. And while there are some early glimmers of hope, with RAM prices now falling across the pond, the next AI price hike could affect a different component instead: hard drives. During a recent company earnings call, Irving Tan, the CEO of hard driv

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Andres Kudacki / Getty Images America really hates data centers. While the rise of grassroots data center opposition makes compelling evidence on its own, a new survey by the Pew Research Center shows just how bad the tech industry’s PR problem really is. As flagged by 404 Media, the majority of people surveyed said they think data centers are bad for the environment, home energy costs, and quality of

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Trade unions have a centuries-long history of squaring up against the might of industrial capitalists to fight for rights that workers now often take for granted, from the eight-hour work day to the federal minimum wage to workplace safety laws. If you were to imagine how unions are responding to the tech industry’s massive push to build AI data centers across the country — an issue that’

A color-treated photo of a group of angry protestors yelling. The shockingly unpopular drive to pepper the United States with massive AI data centers isn’t just driving up electricity prices, wasting huge amounts of water, and reviving heavy-polluter power stations — it’s also making life more expensive for the average American. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the data center boom is driving a “third wave of inflation” which — following president Donal

Shutterstock / Futurism The massive surge of fossil fuel-powered data centers cropping up across the country are emitting an enormous amount of pollution, a pulsing indication that we’re headed in the wrong direction in the midst of a climate crisis. The extent of the this polluting activity is confounding. As climate action group Floodlight found in a recent investigation spotted by Wired, Texas has become the epicenter of the United States’ current obses

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Can companies seize your private property to build data center infrastructure? According to legal scholar Aaron Walayat at the University of Dayton, it’s certainly a possibility. In a new piece for The Conversation, Walayat warns that power companies in states like George and Pennsylvania have been considering the use of eminent domain — the government’s prerogative to seize land without

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock As dozens of cities across the US are forced to scrap their plans to build power-hungry data centers, some civic leaders are no longer asking. According to new reporting by Fortune, the state of Georgia’s for-profit utility company, Georgia Power, is looking to demolish and pave over some 30 homes — and 330 parcels of land — that currently block the route of a 1,000 mile transmission line

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images As the backlash against data centers mounts, American political strategists are scrambling to balance immense public sentiment against the facilities with their obligation to big business. In the Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm, a recently leaked memo exposes just how deep the anxieties go. First reported by Axios, the private document was addressed to major AI companies, warning that the public’s disgus

Stefano Guidi/Getty Images/Futurism Data centers are wildly unpopular amongst the US population — so much so that grassroots opposition threatened some $130 billion in developments over the first three months of 2026 alone. Tech executives, as a result, are having to make a calculated decision to change their tune, from AI doomsaying to something more palatable to the everyman. But just like their proselytizing over the coming AI apocalypse — messaging mea

The space around Earth has changed a lot in the last few years. A new generation of satellite constellations like Starlink has shown it’s feasible to relay Internet communication via orbital systems. Deploying high-performance AI accelerators in space along similar lines would be a boon to the industry’s never-ending build-out. Google notes that space may be “the best place to scale AI compute.” Google’s vision for scalable orbiting data centers relies on

Following President Trump’s lead, the Republican Party has been developing close ties with Silicon Valley, insisting the United States must remain the global leader in artificial intelligence—no matter the cost. Tuesday’s midterms were a thunderous affirmation of what numerous polls leading up to election season had already begun to suggest: Americans just aren’t all that thrilled about AI. Not enough to justify the construction of new data centers in thei

The idea isn’t entirely new. Companies like Crusoe and Schneider Electric also sell prefabricated pods, but Runware says it can ship its pods faster. Flaviu Radulescu, co-founder and CEO of Runware, told TechCrunch that the company plans to scale production at its Romania-based factory to 30 megawatts of data center capacity per day by 2028, or nearly 1 gigawatt per month. That’s a whole lot of capacity: At that pace, Runware would produce roughly as much