As Jensen Huang puts it, AI can help fight climate change – but only if it inflicts “an enormous amount of pain and suffering” first. The Nvidia CEO discussed the future of energy and AI’s impact on our planet in the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show. But his comments boil down to the […]
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a slate of bills on Monday that could finally give communities better data – and more say – on how data centers impact their electricity bills and water supply. As data centers invade a growing number of communities across the US, they’ve triggered protests over how the infrastructure underpinning AI […]
Amazon plans to spend $20 million on water conservation projects along the Colorado River, a crucial but dwindling water supply for 40 million people in the Western US. The initiative comes as Amazon and other tech companies face mounting scrutiny over how much water their data centers use. Amazon has a goal of becoming water […]
E-waste from the AI boom has been vastly underestimated, a new report warns. By 2050, it could become enough trash to fill 23 million shipping containers – roughly enough 40-foot containers to circle the world six times if lined up in a row. It’s a significantly higher estimate of AI’s e-waste than previous studies have […]
The Environmental Protection Agency announced its plans today to kill any remaining standards on how much greenhouse gas pollution power plants are allowed to emit in the US. The move will only make electricity dirtier as AI, electric vehicles, and a revival of domestic manufacturing drive up power demand. The EPA’s proposal today is a […]
President Donald Trump is weakening environmental regulations in the name of speeding up the construction of AI data centers, raising health risks for Americans, a cadre of former EPA officials said this week in a briefing and new report. They are urging – perhaps futilely – the president to adopt a “Data Center Health Protection […]
Arizona, an epicenter for the bipartisan push to revive American chip manufacturing, is about to lose more than a quarter of the water it typically pulls each year from the Colorado River. The 1,400-mile waterway is a crucial lifeline for the region and other western states. A recent federal decision on how to manage its […]
As he steps down from his post as Apple CEO today, Tim Cook leaves behind a mostly positive environmental record. As far as billionaire tech moguls and the environment go, Cook will likely be remembered as one of the better ones – certainly far from the worst. But it will become harder for the company […]
Just as new data centers face growing backlash from neighboring communities, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to make it harder for people to weigh in on any pollution those centers create. The EPA plans to toss out a federal rule requiring public notice and an opportunity to comment when certain industrial sites […]
It’s 8:52 AM and 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) where I live in Southern California. My husband just came back from a morning outing with our four-month-old. “How was the botanic garden?” I ask him. “It was okay. It was just too hot,” he tells me. I didn’t expect us to spend so much of […]