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Tag: Data management and storage

  • Voters’ anger at high electricity bills and data centers looms over 2026 midterms

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    Voter anger over the cost of living is hurtling forward into next year’s midterm elections, when pivotal contests will be decided by communities that are home to fast-rising electric bills or fights over who’s footing the bill to power Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.

    Electricity costs were a key issue in this week’s elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, a data center hotspot, and in Georgia, where Democrats ousted two Republican incumbents for seats on the state’s utility regulatory commission.

    Voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City all cited economic concerns as the top issue, as Democrats and Republicans gird for a debate over affordability in the intensifying midterm battle to control Congress.

    Already, President Donald Trump is signaling that he’ll focus on affordability next year as he and Republicans try to maintain their slim congressional majorities, while Democrats are blaming Trump for rising household costs.

    Front and center may be electricity bills, which in many places are increasing at a rate faster than U.S. inflation on average — although not everywhere.

    “There’s a lot of pressure on politicians to talk about affordability, and electricity prices are right now the most clear example of problems of affordability,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of politics and government and pollster at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.

    Rising electric costs aren’t expected to ease and many Americans could see an increase on their monthly bills in the middle of next year’s campaigns.

    Higher electric bills on the horizon

    Gas and electric utilities are seeking or already secured rate increases of more that $34 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, consumer advocacy organization PowerLines reported. That was more than double the same period last year.

    With some 80 million Americans struggling to pay their utility bills, “it’s a life or death and ‘eat or heat’ type decision that people have to make,” said Charles Hua, PowerLines’ founder.

    In Georgia, proposals to build data centers have roiled communities, while a victorious Democrat, Peter Hubbard, accused Republicans on the commission of “rubber-stamping” rate increases by Georgia Power, a subsidiary of power giant Southern Co.

    Monthly Georgia Power bills have risen six times over the past two years, now averaging $175 a month for a typical residential customer.

    Hubbard’s message seemed to resonate with voters. Rebecca Mekonnen, who lives in the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain, said she voted for the Democratic challengers, and wants to see “more affordable pricing. That’s the main thing. It’s running my pocket right now.”

    Now, Georgia Power is proposing to spend $15 billion to expand its power generating capacity, primarily to meet demand from data centers, and Hubbard is questioning whether data centers will pay their fair share — or share it with regular ratepayers.

    Midterm battlegrounds in hotspots

    Midterm elections will see congressional battlegrounds in states where fast-rising electric bills or data center hotspots — or both — are fomenting community uprisings.

    That includes California, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

    Analysts attribute rising electric bills to a combination of forces.

    That includes expensive projects to modernize the grid and harden poles, wires and substations against extreme weather and wildfires.

    Also playing a role is explosive demand from data centers, bitcoin miners and a drive to revive domestic manufacturing, as well as rising natural gas prices, analysts say.

    “The cost of utility service is the new ‘cost of eggs’ concern for a lot of consumers,” said Jennifer Bosco of the National Consumer Law Center.

    In some places, data centers are driving a big increase in demand, since a typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 homes, according to the International Energy Agency. Some could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans.

    While many states have sought to attract data centers as an economic boon, legislatures and utility commissions were also flooded with proposals to try to protect regular ratepayers from paying to connect data centers to the grid.

    Meanwhile, communities that don’t want to live next to one are pushing back.

    It’s on voters’ minds

    An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from October found that electricity bills are a “major” source of stress for 36% of U.S. adults.

    Now, as falls turns to winter, some states are warning that funding for low-income heating aid is being delayed because of the federal government shutdown.

    Still, the impact is still more uneven than other financial stressors like grocery costs, which just over half of U.S. adults said are a “major” source of stress.

    And electric rates vary widely by state or utility.

    For instance, federal data shows that for-profit utilities have been raising rates far faster than municipally owned utilities or cooperatives.

    In the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid from Illinois to New Jersey, analysts say ratepayers are paying billions of dollars for the cost to power data centers — including data centers not even built yet.

    Next June, electric bills across that region will absorb billions more dollars in higher wholesale electricity costs designed to lure new power plants to power data centers.

    That’s spurred governors from the region — including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Illinois’ JB Pritzker and Maryland’s Wes Moore, all Democrats who are running for reelection — to pressure the grid operator PJM Interconnection to contain increases.

    High-rate states vs. lower-rate rates

    Drew Maloney, the CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association of for-profit electric utilities, suggested that only some states are the drivers of higher average electric bills.

    “If you set aside a few sates with higher rates, the rest of the country largely follows inflation on electricity rates,” Maloney said.

    Examples of states with faster-rising rates are California, where wildfires are driving grid upgrades, and those in New England, where natural gas is expensive because of strained pipeline capacity.

    Still, other states are feeling a pinch.

    In Indiana, a growing data center hotspot, the consumer advocacy group, Citizens Action Coalition, reported this year that residential customers of the state’s for-profit electric utilities were absorbing the most severe rate increases in at least two decades.

    Republican Gov. Mike Braun decried the hikes, saying “we can’t take it anymore.”

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    Associated Press reporter Jeff Amy in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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  • Energy Department offers $1.6 billion loan guarantee to upgrade transmission lines across Midwest

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    WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Energy said Thursday it has finalized a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to a subsidiary of one of the nation’s largest power companies to upgrade nearly 5,000 miles of transmission lines across five states, mostly in the Midwest, for largely fossil fuel-run energy.

    AEP Transmission will upgrade power lines in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and West Virginia, primarily to enhance enhance grid reliability and capacity, the Energy Department said. The project by AEP Transmission, a subsidiary of Ohio-based American Electric Power, is meant to help meet surging electricity demand from data centers and artificial intelligence.

    AEP primarily produces electricity from coal, natural gas and nuclear power, along with renewable resources such as wind and hydroelectric power.

    Thursday’s announcement deepens the Trump administration’s commitment to traditional, polluting energy sources even as it works to discourage the U.S. from clean energy use.

    The move comes as the Trump administration has moved to cancel $7.6 billion in grants that supported hundreds of clean energy projects in 16 states, all of which voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election. A total of 223 projects were terminated after a review determined they did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs or were not economically viable, the Energy Department said.

    The cancellations include up to $1.2 billion for California’s hydrogen hub aimed at producing clean-burning hydrogen fuels to power ships and heavy-duty trucks. A hydrogen project costing up to $1 billion in the Pacific Northwest also was cancelled.

    The loan guarantee finalized Thursday is the first offered by the Trump administration under the recently renamed Energy Dominance Financing program created by the massive tax-and-spending law approved this summer by congressional Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump. Electric utilities that receive loans through the program must provide assurances to the government that financial benefits from the financing will be passed on to customers, the Energy Department said.

    The project and others being considered will help ensure that Americans “will have access to affordable, reliable and secure energy for decades to come,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.

    “The president has been clear: America must reverse course from the energy subtraction agenda of past administrations and strengthen our electrical grid,” Wright said, adding that modernizing the grid and expanding transmission capacity “will help position the United States to win the AI race and grow our manufacturing base.”

    The upgrades supported by the federal financing will replace existing transmission lines in existing rights-of-way with new lines capable of carrying more energy, the power company said.

    More than 2,000 miles of transmission lines in Ohio serving 1.5 million people will be replaced, along with more than 1,400 miles in Indiana and Michigan serving 600,000 customers, the company said. An additional 1,400 miles in Oklahoma, serving about 1.2 million people and 26 miles in West Virginia, serving 460,000 people, will be replaced.

    The projects will create about 1,100 construction jobs, the company said.

    The loan guarantee will save customers money and improve reliability while supporting economic growth in the five states, said Bill Fehrman, AEP’s chairman, president and chief executive officer. “The funds we will save through this program enable us to make additional investments to enhance service for our customers,” he added.

    Wright, in a conference call with reporters, distinguished the AEP loan guarantee from a $4.9 billion federal loan guarantee the department cancelled in July. That money would have boosted the planned Grain Belt Express, a new high-voltage transmission line set to deliver solar and wind-generated electricity from the Midwest to eastern states.

    The Energy Department said at the time it was “not critical for the federal government to have a role” in the first phase of the $11 billion project planned by Chicago-based Invenergy. The department also questioned whether the project could meet strict financial conditions required, a claim Wright repeated Thursday.

    “Ultimately that is a commercial enterprise that needs private developers,” Wright said. The company has indicated the Grain Belt project will go forward.

    Trump and Wright have repeatedly derided wind and solar energy as unreliable and opposed efforts to combat climate change by moving away from fossil fuels. Wright said the Grain Belt Express loan was among billions of dollars worth of commitments “rushed out the doors” by former President Joe Biden’s administration after the 2024 election.

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  • Google announces $15B investment in AI hub meant to drive digital transformation

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    NEW DELHI — NEW DELHI (AP) — Google announced on Tuesday that it will invest $15 billion in India over the next five years to establish its first artificial intelligence hub in the country.

    Located in the southern city of Visakhapatnam, the hub will be one of Google’s largest globally. It will feature gigawatt-scale data center operations, extensive energy infrastructure and an expanded fiber-optic network, the company said in a statement.

    The investment underscores Google’s growing reliance on India as a key technology and talent base in the global race for AI dominance. For India, it brings in high-value infrastructure and foreign investment at a scale that can accelerate its digital transformation ambitions.

    Google said its AI hub investment will include construction of a new international subsea gateway that would connect to the company’s more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) of existing terrestrial and subsea cables.

    “The initiative creates substantial economic and societal opportunities for both India and the United States, while pioneering a generational shift in AI capability,” the company’s statement said.

    Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the company’s ambitious plans.

    “Through it (the hub), we will bring our industry-leading technology to enterprises and users in India, accelerating AI innovation and driving growth across the country,” Pichai said on the social media platform X.

    Modi said the multi-faceted investment aligns with India’s vision to build a developed country.

    “It will be a powerful force in democratizing technology. It will also ensure AI for all, delivering cutting-edge tools to our citizens, boosting our digital economy and securing India’s place as a global technology leader,” he said.

    Business conglomerate Adani Group said in a statement it had partnered with Google for developing the hub.

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  • Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ is almost here. Here’s what to know

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    NEW YORK — Lights, camera, action. Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” arrives Friday. Are you ready for it?

    Swift announced her latest era back in August, when she began teasing the release.

    Here’s everything you need to know ahead of its drop date: how to stream, which variants exist, and of course, how the album came together. Enjoy the show!

    “The Life of a Showgirl” will be available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.

    Fans can pre-save the album ahead of its release on Oct. 3. Pre-saving ensures the new music automatically appears in a fan’s library the moment it is available. It is also a way for an artist to promote streams ahead of the drop date.

    On Monday, Spotify announced that Swift’s album surpassed five million pre-saves on their platform to become the most pre-saved album in its history. The previous title holder? Her 2024 album “The Tortured Poets Department.”

    In addition to the many streaming options, there will also be a digital-download variant of “The Life of a Showgirl” available via iTunes, featuring a new cover image and a nearly three-minute “exclusive video from Taylor herself detailing inspirations behind the album” labeled “A Look Behind the Curtain.”

    Target is once again a major partner with Swift. Their stores will carry three CD variants, titled as “It’s Frightening,” “It’s Rapturous” and “It’s Beautiful” editions. There is also an exclusive vinyl release, “The Crowd Is Your King” edition in “summertime spritz pink shimmer vinyl.” Many Target locations will remain open past midnight on the day of release for superfans to pick up in real time.

    There are a number of other vinyl variants as well: “The Tiny Bubble in Champagne Collection,” which features two vinyl variants described as “under bright lights pearlescent vinyl” and “red lipstick & lace transparent vinyl.”

    There is also “The Baby That’s Show Business Collection,” in two colorways: “lovely bouquet golden vinyl” and “lakeside beach blue sparkle vinyl.”

    Then there’s “The Shiny Bug Collection” in “violet shimmer marbled vinyl” and “wintergreen and onyx marbled vinyl.”

    And of course, there is the standard LP and cassette, in “sweat and vanilla perfume Portofino orange vinyl.”

    Artwork varies throughout.

    Swift partially announced her 12-track new album “The Life of a Showgirl” on the “New Heights” podcast hosted by Travis Kelce — Swift’s fiance and Kansas City Chiefs tight end — and his brother, Jason Kelce, the former Philadelphia Eagles center.

    In the full episode, Swift revealed she worked on the album in Sweden while she was on the “Eras Tour” — flying between dates to record, truly embodying the album’s title, “The Life of a Showgirl.” The entire album was completed with producers Max Martin and Shellback, who Swift previously collaborated with on 2012’s “Red,” 2014’s “1989” and 2017’s “Reputation.” Her frequent producing partner Jack Antonoff was not mentioned.

    She described the release as full of “bangers.” “I care about this record more than I can even overstate,” she said, agreeing with Travis Kelce when he described the release as “a lot more upbeat” than 2024’s “The Tortured Poets Department.”

    Across the album, there is only one feature listed: the title track, “The Life of a Showgirl,” will include Sabrina Carpenter.

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  • OpenAI announces partnerships with South Korean chip giants over Stargate project

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    SEOUL, South Korea — OpenAI and South Korean tech conglomerates Samsung and SK on Wednesday announced partnerships to provide chips and other solutions for Stargate, a $500 billion project aimed at building infrastructure tied to artificial intelligence.

    The announcements came after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Korean corporate leaders in Seoul. Lee hailed the partnerships as a major opportunity for South Korea’s semiconductor industry to solidify its role in AI and create more jobs.

    The partnerships commit Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix — the world’s two largest makers of memory chips — to accelerate their production of advanced chips to meet OpenAI’s increasing memory demands for the Stargate initiative, according to the companies’ statements.

    The ChatGPT maker also reached separate agreements with SK Telecom, South Korea’s top wireless carrier, to explore building an AI data center in the country, dubbed “Stargate Korea,” and with other Samsung affiliates to collaborate on data center technologies and potentially expand local capacity.

    Samsung said the agreements between OpenAI, Samsung C&T, and Samsung Heavy Industries include a joint commitment to develop floating data centers, which potentially offer advantages over land-based centers by easing land scarcity, reducing cooling costs and cutting carbon emissions.

    “Korea has all the ingredients to be a global leader in AI — incredible tech talent, world-class infrastructure, strong government support, and a thriving AI ecosystem,” Altman said in a statement.

    Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong said the world is at a “pivotal moment with the advent of AI, and the industry must collaborate to effectively chart the future.”

    Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle backed by U.S. President Donald Trump, aims for a significant expansion of computing infrastructure to support the development and delivery of AI products. The companies have committed to eventually invest up to $500 billion to build large-scale data centers and secure energy generation needed to further AI development.

    OpenAI said last week that its flagship AI data center in Texas will be joined by five others around the United States, including two more data center complexes in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio and another in a Midwest location it hasn’t yet disclosed.

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  • Private equity sees profits in power utilities as electric bills rise and Big Tech seeks more energy

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    HARRISBURG, Pa. — Private investment firms that are helping finance America’s artificial intelligence race and the huge buildout of energy-hungry data centers are getting interested in the local utilities that deliver electricity to regular customers — and the servers that power AI.

    Billions of dollars from such firms are now flowing toward electric utilities in places including New Mexico, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota that deliver power to more than 150 million customers across millions of miles of power lines.

    “The reason is very simple: because there’s a lot of money to be made,” said Greg Brown, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor of finance who researches private equity and hedge funds.

    Private investment firms that have done well investing in infrastructure over the last 15 years now have strong incentives to add data centers, power plants and the services that support them at a time of rapid expansion and spiking demand ignited by the late 2022 debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Brown said.

    BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink said as much in a July interview on CNBC, saying infrastructure is “at the beginning of a golden age.”

    “We believe that there’s a need for trillions of dollars investing in infrastructure related to our power grids, AI, the whole digitization of the economy” and energy, Fink said.

    In recent weeks, private equity firm Blackstone has sought regulatory approval to buy out a pair of utilities, Albuquerque-based Public Service Company of New Mexico and Lewisville, Texas-based Texas New Mexico Power Co.

    Wisconsin earlier this year granted the buyout of the parent of Superior Water, Light and Power and the owner of Northern Indiana Public Service Co. last year sold a 19.9% stake in the utility to Blackstone.

    However, a fight has erupted in Minnesota over the buyout of the parent of Duluth-based Minnesota Power and the outcome could determine how such firms expand their holdings in an industry that’s a nexus between regular people, gargantuan data centers and the power sources they share.

    Under the proposed deal, a BlackRock subsidiary and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board would buy out the publicly traded Allete, parent of Minnesota Power, which provides power to 150,000 customers and owns a variety of power sources, including coal, gas, wind and solar.

    Both sides of the fight have attracted influential players ahead of a possible Oct. 3 vote by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. Raising the stakes is the potential that Google could build a data center there, a lucrative prospect for whoever owns Minnesota Power.

    Opponents of the acquisition suspect that BlackRock is only interested in squeezing bigger profits from regular ratepayers. Allete makes the opposite argument, that BlackRock can show more patience because it is free of the short-term burdens of publicly traded companies.

    Opponents also worry that a successful Minnesota Power buyout will launch more such deals around the U.S. and drive up electric bills for homes.

    “It’s no secret that private equity is extremely aggressive in chasing profits, and when it comes to utilities, the profit motive lands squarely on the backs of ratepayers who don’t have a choice of who they buy their electricity from,” said Karlee Weinmann of the Energy and Policy Institute, which pushes utilities to keep rates low and use renewable energy sources.

    The buyout proposals come at a time when electricity bills are rising fast across the U.S., and growing evidence suggests that the bills of some regular Americans are rising to subsidize the rapid buildout of power plants and power lines to supply the gargantuan energy needs of Big Tech’s data centers.

    Mark Ellis, a former utility executive-turned-consumer advocate who gave expert testimony against the Minnesota Power buyout, said he’s talked to private equity firms that want to get into the business of electric utilities.

    “It’s just a matter of what’s the price and will the regulator approve it,” Ellis said. “The challenge is they’re not going to come up for sale very often.”

    That’s because electric utilities are seen as valuable long-term investments that earn around 10% returns not on the electricity they deliver, but the upcharge that utility regulators allow on capital investments, like upgrading poles, wires and substations.

    That gives utility owners the incentive to spend more so they can make more money, critics say.

    The fight over Minnesota Power resembles some of the battles erupting around the U.S. where residents don’t want a data center campus plunked down next to them.

    Building trades unions and the administration of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who appointed or reappointed all five utility commissioners, are siding with Allete and BlackRock.

    On the other side are the state attorney general’s office and the industrial interests that buy two-thirds of Minnesota Power’s electricity, including U.S. Steel and other owners of iron ore mines, Enbridge-run oil pipelines and pulp and paper mills.

    In its petition, Allete told regulators that, under BlackRock’s ownership, Minnesota Power’s operations, strategy and values wouldn’t change and that it doesn’t expect the buyout price — $6.2 billion, including $67 a share for stockholders at a 19% premium — to affect electric rates.

    In essence, Allete — which solicited bids for a buyout — argues that BlackRock’s ownership will benefit the public because, under it, the utility will have an easier time raising the money it needs to comply with Minnesota’s law requiring utilities to get 100% of their electricity from carbon-free sources by 2040.

    Allete has projected needing to spend $4.3 billion on transmission and clean energy projects over five years.

    However, opponents say Allete’s suggestion that it’ll struggle to raise money is unfounded, and undercut by its own filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in which it says it is “well positioned” to meet its financing needs.

    It hasn’t been smooth sledding for BlackRock.

    In July, an administrative law judge, Megan J. McKenzie, recommended that the commission reject the deal, saying that the evidence reveals the buyout group’s “intent to do what private equity is expected to do – pursue profit in excess of public markets through company control.”

    In recent days, a utility commission staff analysis echoed McKenzie’s concerns.

    They suggested that private investors could simply load up Minnesota Power’s parent with massive debts, borrow at a relatively low interest rate and turn a fat profit margin from the utility commission granting a generous rate of return.

    “For the big investors in private equity, this is a win-win,” the staff wrote. “For the ratepayers of the highly leveraged utility, this represents paying huge profits to the owners if the private equity ‘wins’ and dealing with a bankrupt utility provider if it loses – it is a lose-lose.”

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    Follow Marc Levy on X at: https://x.com/timelywriter

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  • Louisiana’s $3B power upgrade for Meta project raises questions about who should pay

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    HOLLY RIDGE, La. — In a rural corner of Louisiana, Meta is building one of the world’s largest data centers, a $10 billion behemoth as big as 70 football fields that will consume more power in a day than the entire city of New Orleans at the peak of summer.

    While the colossal project is impossible to miss in Richland Parish, a farming community of 20,000 residents, not everything is visible, including how much the social media giant will pay toward the more than $3 billion in new electricity infrastructure needed to power the facility.

    Watchdogs have warned that in the rush to capitalize on the AI-driven data center boom, some states are allowing massive tech companies to direct expensive infrastructure projects with limited oversight.

    Mississippi lawmakers allowed Amazon to bypass regulatory approval for energy infrastructure to serve two data centers it is spending $10 billion to build. In Indiana, a utility is proposing a data center-focused subsidiary that operates outside normal state regulations. And while Louisiana says it has added consumer safeguards, it lags behind other states in its efforts to insulate regular power consumers from data center-related costs.

    Mandy DeRoche, an attorney for the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, says there is less transparency due to confidentiality agreements and rushed approvals.

    “You can’t follow the facts, you can’t follow the benefits or the negative impacts that could come to the service area or to the community,” DeRoche said.

    Under contract with Meta, power company Entergy agreed to build three gas-powered plants that would produce 2,262 megawatts — equivalent to a fifth of Entergy’s current power supply in Louisiana. The Public Service Commission approved Meta’s infrastructure plan in August after Entergy agreed to bolster protections to prevent a spike in residential rates.

    Nonetheless, nondisclosure agreements conceal how much Meta will pay.

    Consumer advocates tried but failed to compel Meta to provide sworn testimony, submit to discovery and face cross-examination during a regulatory review. Regulators reviewed Meta’s contract with Entergy, but were barred from revealing details.

    Meta did not address AP’s questions about transparency, while Louisiana’s economic development agency and Entergy say nondisclosure agreements are standard to protect sensitive commercial data.

    Davante Lewis — the only one of five public service commissioners to vote against the plan — said he’s still unclear how much electricity the center will use, if gas-powered plants are the most economical option nor if it will create the promised 500 jobs.

    “There’s certain information we should know and need to know but don’t have,” Lewis said.

    Additionally, Meta is exempt from paying sales tax under a 2024 Louisiana law that the state acknowledges could lead to “tens of millions of dollars or more each year” in lost revenue.

    Meta has agreed to fund about half the cost of building the power plants over 15 years, including cost overruns, but not maintenance and operation, said Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, a consumer advocacy group.

    Public Service Commission Jean-Paul Coussan insists there will be “very little” impact on ratepayers.

    But watchdogs warn Meta could pull out of or not renew its contract, leaving the public to pay for the power plants over the rest of their 30-year life span, and all grid users are expected to help pay for the $550 million transmission line serving Meta’s facility.

    Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University’s Electricity Law Initiative, said tech companies should be required to pay “every penny so the public is not left holding the bag.”

    Elsewhere, tech companies are not being given such leeway. More than a dozen states have taken steps to protect households and business ratepayers from paying for rising electricity costs tied to energy-hungry data centers.

    Pennsylvania’s utilities commission is drafting a model rate structure to insulate customers from rising costs related to data centers. New Jersey’s utilities regulators are studying whether data centers cause “unreasonable” cost increases for other users. Oregon passed legislation this year ordering utilities regulators to develop new, and likely higher, power rates for data centers.

    And in June, Texas implemented what it calls a ‘kill switch’ law empowering grid operators to order data centers to reduce their electrical load during emergencies.

    Some Richland Parish residents fear a boom-and-bust cycle once construction ends. Others expect a boost in school and health care funding. Meta said it plans to invest in 1,500 megawatts of renewable energy in Louisiana and $200 million in water and road infrastructure in Richland Parish.

    “We don’t come from a wealthy parish and the money is much needed,” said Trae Banks, who runs a drywall business that has tripled in size since Meta arrived.

    In the nearby town of Delhi, Mayor Jesse Washington believes the data center will eventually have a positive impact on his community of 2,600.

    But for now, the construction traffic frustrates residents and property prices are skyrocketing as developers try to house thousands of construction workers. More than a dozen low-income families were evicted from a trailer park whose owners are building housing for incoming Meta workers, Washington says.

    “We have a lot of concerned people — they’ve put hardship on a lot of people in certain areas here,” the mayor said. “I just want to see people from Delhi benefit from this.”

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    Brook reported from New Orleans.

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    Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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  • Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers could be bumped off grids during power emergencies

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    HARRISBURG, Pa. — With the explosive growth of Big Tech’s data centers threatening to overload U.S. electricity grids, policymakers are taking a hard look at a tough-love solution: bumping the energy-hungry data centers off grids during power emergencies.

    Texas moved first, as state lawmakers try to protect residents in the data-center hotspot from another deadly blackout, like the winter storm in 2021 when dozens died.

    Now the concept is emerging in the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid and elsewhere as massive data centers are coming online faster than power plants can be built and connected to grids. That has elicited pushback from data centers and Big Tech, for whom a steady power supply is vital.

    Like many other states, Texas wants to attract data centers as an economic boon, but it faces the challenge of meeting the huge volumes of electricity the centers demand. Lawmakers there passed a bill in June that, among other things, orders up standards for power emergencies when utilities must disconnect big electric users.

    That, in theory, would save enough electricity to avoid a broad blackout on the handful of days during the year when it is hottest or coldest and power consumption pushes grids to their limits or beyond.

    Texas was first, but it won’t be the last, analysts say, now that the late 2022 debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT ignited worldwide demand for chatbots and other generative AI products that typically require large amounts of computing power to train and operate.

    “We’re going to see that kind of thing pop up everywhere,” said Michael Weber, a University of Texas engineering professor who specializes in energy. “Data center flexibility will be expected, required, encouraged, mandated, whatever it is.”

    That’s because grids can’t keep up with the fast-growing number of data center projects unfolding in Texas and perhaps 20 other states as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority.

    Grid operators in Texas, the Great Plains states and the mid-Atlantic region have produced eye-popping projections showing that electricity demand in the coming years will spike, largely due to data centers.

    A proposal similar to Texas’ has emerged from the nation’s biggest grid operator, PJM Interconnection, which runs the mid-Atlantic grid that serves 65 million people and data-center hotspots in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

    The CEO of the Southwest Power Pool, which operates the grid that serves 18 million people primarily in Kansas, Oklahoma and other Great Plains states, said it has no choice but to expand power-reduction programs — likely for the biggest power users — to meet growing demand.

    The proposals are cropping up at a time when electricity bills nationally are rising fast — twice the rate of inflation, according to federal data — and growing evidence suggests that the bills of some regular Americans are rising to subsidize the gargantuan energy needs of Big Tech.

    Analysts say power plant construction cannot keep up with the growth of data center demand, and that something must change.

    “Data center load has the potential to overwhelm the grid, and I think it is on its way to doing that,” said Joe Bowring, who heads Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid.

    Big Tech is trying to make their data centers more energy efficient. They are also installing backup generators, typically fueled by diesel, to ensure an uninterrupted power supply if there’s a power outage.

    Data center operators, however, say they hadn’t anticipated needing that backup power supply to help grid operators meet demand and are closely watching how utility regulators in Texas write the regulations.

    The Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech companies and data center developers, wants the standards to be flexible, since some data centers may not be able to switch to backup power as easily or as quickly as others.

    The grid operator also should balance that system with financial rewards for data centers that voluntarily shut down during emergencies, said Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition.

    PJM’s just-released proposal revolves around a concept in which proposed data centers may not be guaranteed to receive electricity during a power emergency.

    That’s caused a stir among power plant owners and the tech industry.

    Many questioned PJM’s legal authority to enforce it or warned of destabilizing energy markets and states scaring off investors and developers with uncertainty and risk.

    “This is particularly concerning given that states within PJM’s footprint actively compete with other U.S. regions for data center and digital infrastructure investment,” the Digital Power Network, a group of Bitcoin miners and data center developers, said in written comments to PJM.

    The governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland said they worried that it’s too unpredictable to provide a permanent solution and that it should at least be accompanied by incentives for data centers to build new power sources and voluntarily reduce electricity use.

    Others, including consumer advocates, warned that it won’t lower electric bills and that PJM should instead pursue a “bring your own generation” requirement for data centers to, in essence, build their own power source.

    In Indiana, Google took a voluntary route.

    Last month, the electric utility, Indiana & Michigan Power, and the tech giant filed a power-supply contract with Indiana regulators for a proposed $2 billion data center planned in Fort Wayne in which Google agreed to reduce electricity use there when the grid is stressed. The data center would, it said, reduce electricity use by delaying non-urgent tasks to when the electric grid is under less stress.

    However, important details are being kept from the public and Ben Inskeep of the Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer advocacy group, said that leaves it unclear how valuable the arrangement really is, if at all.

    To an extent, bumping big users off the grid during high-demand periods presents a new approach to electricity.

    It could save money for regular ratepayers, since power is most expensive during peak usage periods.

    Abe Silverman, an energy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said that data centers can and do use all the electricity they want on most days.

    But taking data centers off the grid for those handful of hours during the most extreme heat or cold would mean not having to spend billions of dollars to build a bunch of power plants, he said.

    “And the question is, is that worth it? Is it worth it for society to build those 10 new power plants just to serve the data centers for five hours a year?” Silverman said. “Or is there a better way to do it?”

    ___

    Follow Marc Levy on X at: https://x.com/timelywriter

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  • Nvidia’s earnings report will help to show whether the AI boom is overhyped or gaining steam

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    SAN FRANCISCO — Chipmaker Nvidia will release a quarterly report Wednesday that could provide a better sense of whether the stock market has been riding an overhyped artificial intelligence bubble or is being propelled by a technological boom that’s still gathering momentum.

    Nvidia become the first publicly traded company to surpass a market value of $4 trillion last month, and its stock price has gained another 13% since then to create an additional $500 billion in shareholder wealth.

    The latest financial results are due out Wednesday afternoon. They have become a key AI barometer during the past two years because Nvidia makes most of the chips that power the technology in vast data centers at the center of the boom.

    This summer’s run-up has continued Nvidia’s jaw-dropping rise from early 2023, when the company’s market value was hovering around $400 billion. That was shortly after OpenAI’s late 2022 release of its ChatGPT chatbot triggered the biggest craze in technology since Apple released the first iPhone in 2007.

    While the technology industry has been the biggest beneficiary of the AI frenzy, it’s also been a boon for the overall stock market. The benchmark S&P 500 has gained 68% since the end of 2022, with AI fervor fueling much of the investor optimism.

    But even amid the general euphoria, there recently have been murmurs about whether AI mania will prove to be an echo of the late 1990s dot-com boom that culminated in an excruciating stock market meltdown in 2000 that eventually drove the U.S. economy and plunged Silicon Valley into a funk that lasted several years before the tech industry began to thrive again.

    Investors were recently spooked by a combination of an MIT report that said 95% of AI pilots fail and comments from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman floating the idea that the artificial intelligence market is in a bubble.

    And by some metrics, the stock prices of tech companies at the AI are looking frothy. For instance, Nvidia is trading at about 40 times its future earnings, roughly double the rate that investors traditionally believe is a reasonable level. Meanwhile, the market value of Microsoft, another AI leader, is hovering just below $4 trillion, while the values of other fellow pacesetters Amazon, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Google parent Alphabet currently range from $1.9 trillion to $2.5 trillion.

    Nvidia is expected to post another quarter of robust growth for the May-July period of its fiscal year. Analysts surveyed by FactSet research predict Nvidia will earn $1.01 per share, excluding certain items unrelated to its ongoing business, which would be a 49% increase from the same time last year. The analysts anticipated Nvidia’s revenue would rise 53% from a year ago to about $46 billion.

    Those gains reflect the financial tsunami flooding the AI market as the biggest players spend heavily to build and expand data centers needed to power the technology. Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta are collectively budgeting more than $325 billion for investments in AI this year. With its dominant position in the AI chip market, Nvidia is reaping the benefits of that intense demand.

    Even so, the trajectory of Nvidia’s growth has been tapering off. If analyst projections pan out, Nvidia’s revenue growth for its latest quarter will be significantly lower than the 122% increase it posted during the same period last year.

    And Nvidia has also been losing business because of President Donald Trump’s trade war with China. Following a ban on its AI chip sales in China, which resulted in a $4.5 billion blow to its finances during its fiscal first quarter, Nvidia estimated that the restrictions would cost it about approximately $8 billion in sales in this during the past quarter.

    Trump took the China handcuffs off of Nvidia earlier this month in return for a 15% cut of the company’s sales in that country — a compromise CEO Jensen Huang is expected to discuss with analysts while he shares his perspective on the state of the AI market on a call with investors.

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  • As AI becomes part of everyday life, it brings a hidden climate cost

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    Marissa Loewen first started using artificial intelligence in 2014 as a project management tool. She has autism and ADHD and said it helped immensely with organizing her thoughts.

    “We try to use it conscientiously though because we do realize that there is an impact on the environment,” she said.

    Her personal AI use isn’t unique anymore. Now it’s a feature in smartphones, search engines, word processors and email services. Every time someone uses AI, it uses energy that is often generated by fossil fuels. That releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change.

    And it’s getting harder to live without it.

    The climate cost

    AI is largely powered by data centers that field queries, store data and deploy information. As AI becomes ubiquitous, the power demand for data centers increases, leading to grid reliability problems for people living nearby.

    “Since we are trying to build data centers at a pace where we cannot integrate more renewable energy resources into the grid, most of the new data centers are being powered by fossil fuels,” said Noman Bashir, computing and climate impact fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium.

    The data centers also generate heat, so they rely on fresh water to stay cool. Larger centers can consume up to 5 million gallons (18.9 million liters) a day, according to an article from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. That’s roughly the same as the daily water demand for a town of up to 50,000 people.

    It’s difficult to imagine, because for most users the impact isn’t visible, said AI and Climate Lead Sasha Luccioni with the AI company, Hugging Face.

    “In one of my studies, we found that generating a high-definition image uses as much energy as charging half of your phone. And people were like, ‘That can’t be right, because when I use Midjourney (a generative AI program), my phone battery doesn’t go down,’” she said.

    Jon Ippolito, professor of new media at the University of Maine, said tech companies are constantly working to make chips and data centers more efficient, but that does not mean AI’s environmental impact will shrink. That’s because of a problem called the Jevons Paradox.

    “The cheaper resources get, the more we tend to use them anyway,” he said. When cars replaced horses, he said, commute times didn’t shrink. We just traveled farther.

    Quantifying AI’s footprint

    How much those programs contribute to global warming depends on a lot of factors, including how warm it is outside the data center that’s processing the query, how clean the grid is and how complex the AI task is.

    Information sources on AI’s contributions to climate change are incomplete and contradictory, so getting exact numbers is difficult.

    But Ippolito tried anyway.

    He built an app that compares the environmental footprint of different digital tasks based on the limited data he could find. It estimates that a simple AI prompt, such as, “Tell me the capital of France,” uses 23 times more energy than the same question typed into Google without its AI Overview feature.

    “Instead of working with existing materials, it’s writing them from scratch. And that takes a lot more compute,” Luccioni said.

    And that’s just for a simple prompt. A complex prompt, such as, “Tell me the number of gummy bears that could fit in the Pacific Ocean,” uses 210 times more energy than the AI-free Google search. A 3-second video, according to Ippolito’s app, uses 15,000 times as much energy. It’s equivalent to turning on an incandescent lightbulb and leaving it on for more than a year.

    It’s got a big impact, but it doesn’t mean our tech footprints were carbon-free before AI entered the scene.

    Watching an hour of Netflix, for example, uses more energy than a complex AI text prompt. An hour on Zoom with 10 people uses 10 times that much.

    “It’s not just about making people conscious of AI’s impact, but also all of these digital activities we take for granted,” he said.

    Limit tech, limit tech’s climate impact

    Ippolito said he limits his use of AI when he can. He suggests using human-captured images instead of AI-generated ones. He tells the AI to stop generating as soon as he has the answer to avoid wasting extra energy. He requests concise answers and he begins Google searches by typing “-ai” so it doesn’t provide an AI overview for queries where he doesn’t need it.

    Loewen has adopted the same approach. She said she tries to organize her thoughts into one AI query instead of asking it a series of iterative questions. She also built her own AI that doesn’t rely on large data centers, which saves energy in the same way watching a movie you own on a DVD is far less taxing than streaming one.

    “Having something local on your computer in your home allows you to also control your use of the electricity and consumption. It allows you to control your data a little bit more,” she said.

    Luccioni uses Ecosia, which is a search engine that uses efficient algorithms and uses profits to plant trees to minimize the impact of each search. Its AI function can also be turned off.

    ChatGPT also has a temporary chat function so the queries you send to the data center get deleted after a few weeks instead of taking up data center storage space.

    But AI is only taking up a fraction of the data center’s energy use. Ippolito estimates roughly 85% is data collection from sites like TikTok and Instagram, and cryptocurrency.

    His answer there: make use of screen time restrictions on your phone to limit time scrolling on social media. Less time means less personal data collected, less energy and water used, and fewer carbon emissions entering the atmosphere.

    “If you can do anything that cuts a data center out of the equation, I think that’s a win,” Ippolito said.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • Nvidia’s CEO says it’s in talks with Trump administration on a new chip for China

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    BANGKOK (AP) — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Friday that the company is discussing a potential new computer chip designed for China with the Trump administration.

    Huang was asked about a possible “B30A” semiconductor for artificial intelligence data centers for China while on a visit to Taiwan, where he was meeting Nvidia’s key manufacturing partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., the world’s largest chip maker.

    “I’m offering a new product to China for … AI data centers, the follow-on to H20,” Huang said. But he added that “That’s not our decision to make. It’s up to, of course, the United States government. And we’re in dialogue with them, but it’s too soon to know.”

    Such chips are graphics processing units, or GPUs, a type of device used to build and update a range of AI systems. But they are less powerful than Nvidia’s top semiconductors today, which cannot be sold to China due to U.S. national security restrictions.

    The B30A, based on California-based Nvidia’s specialized Blackwell technology, is reported to operate at about half the speed of Nvidia’s main B300 chips.

    Huang praised the the Trump administration for recently approving sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China after such business was suspended in April, with the proviso that the company must pay a 15% tax to the U.S. government on those sales. Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, was told to pay the same tax on its sales of its MI380 chips to China.

    As part of broader trade talks, Beijing and Washington recently agreed to pull back some non-tariff restrictions. China approved more permits for rare earth magnets to be exported to the U.S., while Washington lifted curbs on chip design software and jet engines. After lobbying by Huang, it also allowed sales of the H20 chips to go through.

    Huang did not comment directly on the tax when asked but said Nvidia appreciated being able to sell H20s to China.

    He said such sales pose no security risk for the United States. Nvidia is also speaking with Beijing to reassure Chinese authorities that those chips do not pose a “backdoor” security risk, Huang said.

    “We have made very clear and put to rest that H20 has no security backdoors. There are no such things. There never has. And so hopefully the response that we’ve given to the Chinese government will be sufficient,” he said.

    The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet watchdog, recently posted a notice on its website referring to alleged “serious security issues” with Nvidia’s computer chips.

    It said U.S. experts on AI had said such chips have “mature tracking and location and remote shutdown technologies” and Nvidia had been asked to explain any such risks and provide documentation about the issue.

    Huang said Nvidia was surprised by the accusation and was discussing the issue with Beijing.

    “As you know, they requested and urged us to secure licenses for the H20s for some time. And I’ve worked quite hard to help them secure the licenses. And so hopefully this will be resolved,” Huang said.

    Unconfirmed reports said Chinese authorities were also unhappy over comments by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggesting the U.S. was only selling outdated chips to China.

    Speaking on CNBC, Lutnick said the U.S. strategy was to keep China reliant on American chip technology.

    “We don’t sell them our best stuff,” he said. “Not our second best stuff. Not even our third best, but I think fourth best is where we’ve come out that we’re cool,” he said.

    China’s ruling Communist Party has made self-reliance in advanced technology a strategic priority, though it still relies on foreign semiconductor knowhow for much of what it produces.

    ___

    AP Videojournalist Taijing Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.

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  • As AI becomes part of everyday life, it brings a hidden climate cost

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    Marissa Loewen first started using artificial intelligence in 2014 as a project management tool. She has autism and ADHD and said it helped immensely with organizing her thoughts.

    “We try to use it conscientiously though because we do realize that there is an impact on the environment,” she said.

    Her personal AI use isn’t unique anymore. Now it’s a feature in smartphones, search engines, word processors and email services. Every time someone uses AI, it uses energy that is often generated by fossil fuels. That releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change.

    And it’s getting harder to live without it.

    AI is largely powered by data centers that field queries, store data and deploy information. As AI becomes ubiquitous, the power demand for data centers increases, leading to grid reliability problems for people living nearby.

    “Since we are trying to build data centers at a pace where we cannot integrate more renewable energy resources into the grid, most of the new data centers are being powered by fossil fuels,” said Noman Bashir, computing and climate impact fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium.

    The data centers also generate heat, so they rely on fresh water to stay cool. Larger centers can consume up to 5 million gallons (18.9 million liters) a day, according to an article from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. That’s roughly the same as the daily water demand for a town of up to 50,000 people.

    It’s difficult to imagine, because for most users the impact isn’t visible, said AI and Climate Lead Sasha Luccioni with the AI company, Hugging Face.

    “In one of my studies, we found that generating a high-definition image uses as much energy as charging half of your phone. And people were like, ‘That can’t be right, because when I use Midjourney (a generative AI program), my phone battery doesn’t go down,’” she said.

    Jon Ippolito, professor of new media at the University of Maine, said tech companies are constantly working to make chips and data centers more efficient, but that does not mean AI’s environmental impact will shrink. That’s because of a problem called the Jevons Paradox.

    “The cheaper resources get, the more we tend to use them anyway,” he said. When cars replaced horses, he said, commute times didn’t shrink. We just traveled farther.

    How much those programs contribute to global warming depends on a lot of factors, including how warm it is outside the data center that’s processing the query, how clean the grid is and how complex the AI task is.

    Information sources on AI’s contributions to climate change are incomplete and contradictory, so getting exact numbers is difficult.

    But Ippolito tried anyway.

    He built an app that compares the environmental footprint of different digital tasks based on the limited data he could find. It estimates that a simple AI prompt, such as, “Tell me the capital of France,” uses 23 times more energy than the same question typed into Google without its AI Overview feature.

    “Instead of working with existing materials, it’s writing them from scratch. And that takes a lot more compute,” Luccioni said.

    And that’s just for a simple prompt. A complex prompt, such as, “Tell me the number of gummy bears that could fit in the Pacific Ocean,” uses 210 times more energy than the AI-free Google search. A 3-second video, according to Ippolito’s app, uses 15,000 times as much energy. It’s equivalent to turning on an incandescent lightbulb and leaving it on for more than a year.

    It’s got a big impact, but it doesn’t mean our tech footprints were carbon-free before AI entered the scene.

    Watching an hour of Netflix, for example, uses more energy than a complex AI text prompt. An hour on Zoom with 10 people uses 10 times that much.

    “It’s not just about making people conscious of AI’s impact, but also all of these digital activities we take for granted,” he said.

    Ippolito said he limits his use of AI when he can. He suggests using human-captured images instead of AI-generated ones. He tells the AI to stop generating as soon as he has the answer to avoid wasting extra energy. He requests concise answers and he begins Google searches by typing “-ai” so it doesn’t provide an AI overview for queries where he doesn’t need it.

    Loewen has adopted the same approach. She said she tries to organize her thoughts into one AI query instead of asking it a series of iterative questions. She also built her own AI that doesn’t rely on large data centers, which saves energy in the same way watching a movie you own on a DVD is far less taxing than streaming one.

    “Having something local on your computer in your home allows you to also control your use of the electricity and consumption. It allows you to control your data a little bit more,” she said.

    Luccioni uses Ecosia, which is a search engine that uses efficient algorithms and uses profits to plant trees to minimize the impact of each search. Its AI function can also be turned off.

    ChatGPT also has a temporary chat function so the queries you send to the data center get deleted after a few weeks instead of taking up data center storage space.

    But AI is only taking up a fraction of the data center’s energy use. Ippolito estimates roughly 85% is data collection from sites like TikTok and Instagram, and cryptocurrency.

    His answer there: make use of screen time restrictions on your phone to limit time scrolling on social media. Less time means less personal data collected, less energy and water used, and fewer carbon emissions entering the atmosphere.

    “If you can do anything that cuts a data center out of the equation, I think that’s a win,” Ippolito said.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • As data center industry booms, an English village becomes a battleground

    As data center industry booms, an English village becomes a battleground

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    ABBOTS LANGLEY, England — Originally built to store crops from peasant farmers, the Tithe Barn on the edge of the English village of Abbots Langley was converted into homes that preserve its centuries of history. Now, its residents are fighting to stop a development next door that represents the future.

    A proposal to build a data center on a field across the road was rejected by local authorities amid fierce opposition from villagers. But it’s getting a second chance from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government, which is pursuing reforms to boost economic growth following his Labour party’s election victory in July.

    Residents of Abbots Langley, 18 miles (30 kilometers) northwest of London, worry the facility will strain local resources and create noise and traffic that damages the character of the quiet village, which is home to just over 20,000 people. Off the main street there’s a church with a stone tower built in the 12th century and, further down the road, a picturesque circular courtyard of rustic thatched-roof cottages that used to be a farm modeled on one built for French Queen Marie Antoinette.

    “It’s just hideously inappropriate,” said Stewart Lewis, 70, who lives in one of the converted houses in the 600-year-old Tithe Barn. “I think any reasonable person anywhere would say, ‘Hang on, they want a data center? This isn’t the place for it.’”

    As the artificial intelligence boom fuels demand for cloud-based computing from server farms around the world, such projects are pitting business considerations, national priorities and local interests against each other.

    Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has stepped in to review the appeals filed by developers of three data center projects after they were rejected by local authorities, taking the decision out of the hands of town planners. Those proposals include Abbots Langley and two projects in Buckinghamshire, which sits west of London. The first decision is expected by January.

    The projects are controversial because the data centers would be built on “greenbelt” land, which has been set aside to prevent urbanization. Rayner wants to tap the greenbelt for development, saying much of it is low quality. One proposed Buckinghamshire project, for example, involves redeveloping an industrial park next to a busy highway.

    “Whilst it’s officially greenbelt designated land, there isn’t anything ‘green’ about the site today,” said Stephen Beard, global head of data centers at Knight Frank, a property consultancy that’s working on the project.

    “It’s actually an eyesore which is very prominent from the M25″ highway, he said.

    Greystoke, the company behind the Abbots Langley center and a second Buckinghamshire project to be built on a former landfill, didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an online video for Abbots Langley, a company representative says, “We have carried out a comprehensive search for sites, and this one is the very best.” It doesn’t specify which companies would possibly use the center.

    The British government is making data centers a core element of its economic growth plans, deeming them “critical national infrastructure” to give businesses confidence to invest in them. Starmer has announced deals for new centers, including a 10 billion pound ($13 billion) investment from private equity firm Blackstone to build what will be Europe’s biggest AI data center in northeast England.

    The land for the Abbots Langley data center is currently used to graze horses. It’s bordered on two other sides by a cluster of affordable housing and a highway.

    Greystoke’s plans to construct two large buildings totaling 84,000 square meters (904,00 square feet) and standing up to 20 meters (66 feet) tall have alarmed Lewis and other villagers, who worry that it will dwarf everything else nearby.

    They also doubt Greystoke’s promise that it will create up to 260 jobs.

    “Everything will be automated, so they wouldn’t need people,” said tech consultant Jennifer Stirrup, 51, who lives in the area.

    Not everyone in the village is opposed.

    Retiree Bryan Power says he would welcome the data center, believing it would benefit the area in a similar way as another big project on the other side of the village, the Warner Bros.’ Studio Tour featuring a Harry Potter exhibition.

    “It’ll bring some jobs, whatever. It’ll be good. Yeah. No problem. Because if it doesn’t come, it’ll go somewhere else,” said Power, 56.

    One of the biggest concerns about data centers is their environmental impact, especially the huge amounts of electricity they need. Greystoke says the facility will draw 96 megawatts of “IT load.” But James Felstead, director of a renewable energy company and Lewis’ neighbor, said the area’s power grid wouldn’t be able to handle so much extra demand.

    It’s a problem reflected across Europe, where data center power demand is expected to triple by the end of the decade, according to consulting firm McKinsey. While the AI-fueled data boom has prompted Google, Amazon and Microsoft to look to nuclear power as a source of clean energy, worries about their ecological footprint have already sparked tensions over data centers elsewhere.

    Google was forced to halt plans in September for a $200 million data center in Chile’s capital, Santiago, after community complaints about its potential water and energy usage.

    In Ireland, where many Silicon Valley companies have European headquarters, the grid operator has temporarily halted new data centers around Dublin until 2028 over worries they’re guzzling too much electricity.

    A massive data center project in northern Virginia narrowly won county approval last year, amid heavy opposition from residents concerned about its environmental impact. Other places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Singapore have imposed various restrictions on data centers.

    Public knowledge about the industry is still low but “people are realizing more that these data centers are quite problematic,” said Sebastian Lehuede, a lecturer in ethics, AI and society at King’s College London who studied the Google case in Chile.

    As awareness grows about their environmental impact, Lehuede said, “I’m sure we will have more opposition from different communities.”

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  • AP sources: White House altered record of Biden’s ‘garbage’ remarks despite stenographer concerns

    AP sources: White House altered record of Biden’s ‘garbage’ remarks despite stenographer concerns

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    WASHINGTON — White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two U.S. government officials and an internal email obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

    Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks to Latino activists responding to racist comments at a Trump rally made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

    Biden, according to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, told the Latino group on a Tuesday evening video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

    The transcript released by the White House press office, however, rendered the quote with an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” which aides said pointed to Biden criticizing Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.

    The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

    The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”

    “If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the supervisor wrote, adding, “Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.”

    The edit of the transcript came as the White House scrambled to respond to a wave of queries from reporters about Biden’s comments. The president’s remarks clashed with Vice President Kamala Harris’ near-simultaneous speech outside the White House in which she called for treating Americans of differing ideologies with respect.

    The Trump campaign quickly moved to fundraise off the quote, and the next day, Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck to try to capitalize on Biden’s criticism.

    Harris on Wednesday distanced herself from Biden’s comments — making the clearest break from the president since she took over for him at the top of the Democratic ticket just over three months ago. “Let me be clear,” she told reporters, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”

    According to the email, the press office had asked the stenographers to quickly produce a transcript of the call amid the firestorm. Biden himself took to social media to say that he he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage and that he was referring specifically to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.”

    The stenographers office is charged with preparing accurate transcripts of public and private remarks of the president for preservation by the National Archives and distribution to the public.

    The two-person stenography team on duty that evening — a “typer” and “proofer” — said any edit to the transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of stenographers’ office.

    The supervisor was not immediately available to review the audio, but the press office went ahead and published the altered transcript on the White House website and distributed it to press and on social media in an effort to tamp down the story.

    White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates that evening also posted on X the edited version of the quote and wrote that Biden was referring ”to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage.’”

    The supervisor, a career employee of the White House, raised the concerns about the press office action — but did not weigh in on the accuracy of the edit — in an email to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other press and communications officials.

    “Regardless of urgency, it is essential to our transcripts’ authenticity and legitimacy that we adhere to consistent protocol for requesting edits, approval, and release,” the supervisor wrote.

    The supervisor declined to comment to The AP and referred questions about the matter to the White House press office.

    Asked to comment, Bates did not address the alteration of the transcript and said: “The President confirmed in his tweet on Tuesday evening that he was addressing the hateful rhetoric from the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. That was reflected in the transcript.”

    House Republicans, meanwhile, were debating launching an investigation into the matter. House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., on Wednesday accused White House staff of “releasing a false transcript” of Biden’s remarks.

    In a letter to White House counsel Ed Siskel on Wednesday, they called on the administration to retain documents and internal communications related to Biden’s remarks and the release of the transcript.

    “White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,” the lawmakers wrote to Siskel.

    Stefanik and Comer said the action could be in violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

    —

    Madhani reported from Las Vegas.

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  • Vinyl thrives at United Record Pressing as the nation’s oldest record maker plays a familiar tune

    Vinyl thrives at United Record Pressing as the nation’s oldest record maker plays a familiar tune

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    NASHVILLE, Tenn. — During the six decades since United Record Pressing stamped out the Beatles’ first U.S. single, the country’s oldest vinyl record maker has survived 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, Napster, iPods and streaming services. Now, the Nashville-based company has rebounded so dramatically that some of its equipment and technology has been retrofitted to keep pace with an ever-growing demand for old-school vinyl.

    The 75-year-old company has adjusted its business from filling jukeboxes to helping DJs spin and stocking shelves despite a pandemic. On shelves in its warehouse are master versions by Johnny Cash, Kanye West and The Black Crowes.

    When Mark Michaels bought the company in 2007, vinyl was fading — its 38 employees mostly made singles for rap artists, often promos for clubs. Michaels wanted a hands-on chance to build a business and thought he could keep this one steady, but not grow it substantially. It also came with a rich history as the first record pressing plant in the South, including an apartment atop the factory that housed Black artists and music executives during segregation.

    “You walked into this building and you just felt 50, 60 years of history and just the importance of what it stood for,” said Michaels, the company’s CEO and chair. “And yeah, you you get choked up, you get gooseflesh just experiencing that.”

    Today, United Record Pressing runs a newer factory six times bigger than what Michaels bought, with about 125 employees who make up to 80,000 records a day.

    A variety of factors have boosted vinyl in recent years, from independent artists insisting on vinyl albums to big box retailers getting on board again.

    In 2023, U.S. revenues from vinyl records grew 10% to $1.4 billion, the 17th-straight year of growth, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Records accounted for 71% of revenues from non-digital music formats, and for the second time since 1987, vinyl outpaced CDs in total sold.

    United Record Pressing underwent its own evolution. The initial pressing plant was formed in 1949 by Nashville label Bullet Records. In the 1950s, it changed to Southern Plastics Inc. and focused on 7-inch singles preferred by jukebox makers.

    In the early 1960s, the company was pressing more than 1 million records per month. It signed a deal to produce singles for Motown Records and moved to a bigger facility that included the apartment that hosted The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and others — and which became known as the “Motown Suite.” In 1963, it pressed the Beatles’ first U.S. single, “Please Please Me.” Then in the 1970s, a restructuring turned the company into United Record Pressing.

    During the 1980s, records dwindled to a niche market. DJs still needed records for their turntables. Rap and hip-hop artists used them for “scratching.” But CDs had overtaken them.

    By the late 2000s, indie artists were insisting on releasing vinyl records. By 2015, records were broadly embraced again, but there were few manufacturers, and they were relying on presses from the 1960s and 1970s and a limited number of specialists who could operate them, Michaels said. Demand increased again during the coronavirus pandemic.

    “It’s art,” Michaels said of vinyl records. “Artists and fans, they want something tactile to hold on to and engage with. It’s easy to stream music, and streaming music is a wonderful way to discover new music. But you know, at the end of the day, it’s kind of sonic wallpaper.”

    Today, the factory mixes old and new.

    There’s plenty of wood paneling on the throwback audio equipment used to test master versions of records before they are used to press copies. And the factory floor has its share of retrofitted pressing equipment that looks and sounds like it’s been around since the last time vinyl ruled the market.

    Technology is improving the process, too. Beyond the older presses are sleek, newly made machines that plop out records more quietly and efficiently. And there are huge sacks of colorful pebbles from discarded material that can be pressed again into new records.

    The machines that stamp master copies use technology that had been in place to produce CDs and DVDs, now retooled for vinyl.

    In a room farther back in the factory, the whizzing of machinery gives way to music.

    That’s where Tyler Bryant might listen to 10 records in a shift as the company’s quality control lead. Talking over the rhythms of harmonica from a Cash album, Bryant said he discovers many artists and records that wouldn’t be on his list, ranging from Harry Styles to Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” to indie artists.

    “A lot of variety, that’s what I appreciate,” Bryant said. “I don’t like being stuck to just one genre, you know?”

    A few miles away, architects and a construction crew are at work to preserve the old 1962 plant and pave the way for its future. As for what that will look like, Michaels says stay tuned.

    “My vision is not completely crystallized yet, but the mandate is, it’s some of the most important space in all of music,” Michaels said. “It needs to be celebrated. It needs to be something that people can engage with.”

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  • One of the largest solar projects in the US opens in Texas, backed by Google

    One of the largest solar projects in the US opens in Texas, backed by Google

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    One of the largest solar projects in the U.S. opened in Texas on Friday, backed by what Google said is the largest solar electricity purchase it has ever made.

    Google executive Ben Sloss said at the ribbon cutting, about two hours south of Dallas, that the corporation has a responsibility to bring renewable, carbon-free electricity online at the same time it opens operations that will use that power. Google expects to spend $16 billion through 2040 globally to purchase clean energy, he said.

    U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who attended, said the solar project is a posterchild for the administration’s efforts to incentivize manufacturers and developers to locate energy projects in the U.S.

    “Sometimes when you are in the middle of history, it’s hard to tell, because you are in the middle of it,” she said. “But I’m telling you right now that we are in the middle of history being made.”

    SB Energy built three solar farms side by side, the “Orion Solar Belt,” in Buckholts, Texas. Combined, they will be able to provide 875 megawatts of clean energy. That is nearly the size of a typical nuclear facility. In total, Google has contracted with clean energy developers to bring more than 2,800 megawatts of new wind and solar projects to the state, which it says exceeds the amount of power required for its operations there.

    Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all recently announced investments in nuclear energy to power data centers, too, as the tech giants seek new sources of carbon-free electricity to meet surging demand from data centers and artificial intelligence. Google has a commitment to get all of its electricity without contributing to climate change, regardless of time of day or whether the sun is up, but neither it nor other large companies are meeting those commitments with the rise of artificial intelligence.

    The International Energy Agency forecasts that data centers’ total electricity consumption could reach more than 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026, more than doubling from 2022. Estimates suggest one terawatt-hour can power 70,000 homes for a year.

    The demand for power is also growing globally as buildings and vehicles electrify. People used more electricity than ever last year, placing strain on electric grids around the world.

    In August, Google said it planned to invest more than $1 billion in Texas this year to support its cloud and data center infrastructure.

    Google will use about 85% of the project’s solar power for data centers in Ellis County and for cloud computing in the Dallas region. In Ellis County, Google operates a data center campus in Midlothian and is building out a new campus in Red Oak. The rest of the solar power will go to the state’s electrical grid. Thousands of sheep graze in the area, maintaining the vegetation around the solar arrays.

    “This project was a spreadsheet and a set of emails that I had been exchanging and a bunch of approvals and so on. And then you come over the rise over there and you see it laid out in front of you and it kind of takes your breath away, right? Because there’s this enormous field of solar arrays,” Sloss said during the ceremony. “And we actually collectively have done this. That is amazing.”

    SB Energy said most of the solar farm components are made in the United States, and that’s only possible because the climate law formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act spurred clean energy manufacturing. The company expects the projects to be the first to qualify for an extra tax credit the law affords for using domestic content.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • Amazon, Google make dueling nuclear investments to power data centers with clean energy

    Amazon, Google make dueling nuclear investments to power data centers with clean energy

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    Amazon on Wednesday said that it was investing in small nuclear reactors, coming just two days after a similar announcement by Google, as both tech giants seek new sources of carbon-free electricity to meet surging demand from data centers and artificial intelligence.

    The plans come as the owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant said last month it plans to restart the reactor so tech giant Microsoft can buy the power to supply its data centers. All three companies have been investing in solar and wind technologies, which make electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions. Now they say they need to go further in the search for clean electricity to meet both demand and their own commitments to cut emissions.

    Nuclear energy is a climate solution in that its reactors don’t emit the planet-warming greenhouse gases that come from power plants that burn fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. The demand for power is surging globally as buildings and vehicles electrify. People used more electricity than ever last year, placing strain on electric grids around the world. Much of the demand also comes from data centers and artificial intelligence.

    The International Energy Agency forecasts that data centers’ total electricity consumption could reach more than 1,000 terawatt hours in 2026, more than doubling from 2022. Estimates suggest one terawatt hour can power 70,000 homes for a year.

    “AI is driving a significant increase in the amount of data centers and power that are required on the grid,” Kevin Miller, Amazon Web Services’ vice president of global data centers, told The Associated Press, adding: “We view advanced new nuclear capacity as really key and essential.”

    Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said she’s thrilled Amazon is the latest to “BYOP” or “bring your own power” to the buildout of data centers. Granholm spoke at an event for Wednesday’s announcement at Amazon’s second headquarters in Virginia. Virginia’s governor and two U.S. senators also attended.

    The United States aims to reach 100% clean electricity by 2035. Granholm said small modular reactors are a “huge piece of how we’re going to solve this puzzle,” a way to phase out fossil fuel power while responding to the increasing electricity demand from data centers and new factories. She said her department will provide $900 million to deploy more of these reactors.

    Small modular reactors are a type of nuclear reactor that can generate up to roughly one-third the amount of power of a traditional reactor. Developers say small reactors will be built faster and at a lower cost than large power reactors, scaling to fit needs of a particular location. They aim to start spinning up electricity in the early 2030s, if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives permission to build and operate their designs and the technology succeeds.

    If new, clean power isn’t added as data centers are developed, the U.S. runs the risk of “browning the grid,” or including more power that isn’t made from clean sources, said Kathryn Huff, a former U.S. assistant secretary for nuclear energy who is now an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

    The reactors are currently under development, with none currently providing power to the electric grid in the U.S. Big investors can help change that, and these announcements could be the “inflection point” that makes scaling up this technology truly possible, Huff said.

    Jacopo Buongiorno, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, echoed that, saying the industry needs customers who value the reliability and carbon-free attributes of nuclear and are willing to pay a premium for it at first, until a number of the next-generation reactors are deployed and the cost comes down.

    On Monday, Google said it was signing a contract to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors that Kairos Power, a nuclear technology company, plans to develop.

    The news highlights “the technologies that we’re going to need to achieve round the clock clean energy, not only for Google but for the world,” Michael Terrell, Google’s senior director of energy and climate, told the AP.

    With Kairos, Google said it expects to bring the first small modular reactor online by 2030, with more to come through 2035. The deal is projected to bring 500 megawatts of power to the grid. For context, Google consumed more than 24 terawatt hours of electricity last year, according to the company’s annual environmental report. One terawatt is equal to 1,000,000 megawatts.

    Meanwhile, Amazon’s announcements Wednesday included working with utility Dominion Energy to explore putting a small modular reactor near its existing North Anna nuclear power station in Virginia. It’s investing in reactor developer X-energy for its early development work, and collaborating with regional utility Energy Northwest in central Washington to put four of the X-energy reactors there.

    Combined, the three announcements could account for more than 5,000 megawatts of power by the late 2030s with the possibility of more. All of that is still likely only a small fraction of the company’s total energy consumption, a figure that Amazon does not report publicly.

    New reactor designs pair well with industrial applications because they can be built on a small footprint and generate reliable power, with some able to provide high-temperature heat too, at the site, said Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the industry trade association, Nuclear Energy Institute.

    “It seems like a really good fit to support those facilities, and for a lot of different applications depending upon the amount of power that’s needed by the customer,” he said.

    Both Amazon and Google have committed to using renewable energy to address climate change. By 2030, Google has pledged to meet net-zero emissions, and run carbon-free energy every hour of every day on every grid where it operates. It says it has already matched 100% of its global electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases on an annual basis. However, the company has fallen short on decreasing its emissions.

    Amazon has said it would match all of its global electricity consumption with 100% renewable energy by 2030, and recently announced it met that goal early in 2023. Though the company has matched its consumption as far as purchases of an equivalent amount of renewable energy, that does not necessarily mean it is using that to power its operations.

    Amazon saw its electricity emissions drop 11%, but direct emissions — known as Scope 1 — increased 7%, according to its 2023 sustainability report. The company is also targeting net zero-carbon by 2040.

    ___

    Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • One Tech Tip: Here’s what you need to do before and after your phone is stolen or lost

    One Tech Tip: Here’s what you need to do before and after your phone is stolen or lost

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    LONDON (AP) — Phones hold so much of our digital lives — emails, social media and bank accounts, photos, chat messages and more — that if they ever get stolen or go missing, it can cause major disruption beyond just the loss of a device.

    In some places, phone thefts have surged so much it’s now an everyday problem, with thieves on electric bikes snatching them out of pedestrians’ hands, swiping them off restaurant tables or pickpocketing them on the subway.

    In Britain, where 200 phones are stolen every day in “snatch thefts,” the government has pledged to crack down on the crime and is meeting with tech companies and device makers to come up with solutions.

    Here are steps you can take before and after your phone goes missing:

    Basic protections

    There are things you can do to make it less painful if your phone is stolen. Because some of these features are more technical in nature, people often overlook them.

    Lock down as much as you can. At a minimum, require a password or biometric scan to unlock the device. You can also add similar requirements to important individual apps — like your banking account, WhatsApp or Signal — to protect your finance or chats from thieves.

    Also, activate the find my device feature, which is available for both iOS and Android. Samsung also offers its own service called SmartThings Find.

    You’ll probably have lots of precious photos saved on your camera roll. It’s a good idea to back them up, along with contacts, calendar items and other files. Google and Apple offer cloud-based backup services, although the free versions have limited storage space. You can also back up your files to an external hard drive, memory card or a laptop.

    Some police forces and phone companies advise turning off message previews, which prevents thieves trying to break into your accounts from seeing reset or login codes when the phone is locked. To do this on an iPhone, for example, go to the Notifications section of your settings menu and tap Show Previews. You can also scroll down the app list to turn previews off for individual apps but leave them on for less risky ones like news or weather.

    Turn on newer features

    Recent iOS and Android updates include a number of new functions designed to make thefts less attractive.

    IPhone users can turn on Stolen Device Protection, which makes it a lot harder for phone thieves to access key functions and settings. Many thieves will want to wipe the data off and reset so they can resell it, but with this feature on, they’ll need a face or fingerprint scan to do so. Apple also recently updated its “ activation lock ” feature to make it harder for thieves to sell parts from stolen phones.

    Android phones, meanwhile, can now use use artificial intelligence to detect motion indicating someone snatched it out of your hand and is racing away on foot or a bike, and then lock the screen immediately. And there’s a feature called Private Spaces that lets you hide sensitive files on your phone.

    Jot down your device number

    Take note of your phone’s serial number, also known as an IMEI number. It can link you to the phone if it does eventually get recovered. Call it up by typing (asterisk)#06# on your phone’s keypad. If you’ve already lost your phone you can also find it in other places like the box it came in.

    If it’s stolen

    If you’re unlucky enough to have your phone stolen, notify police. Call your insurance company if you have a policy that covers the device. Inform your phone company so they can freeze your number and issue a replacement SIM card or eSIM. Notify your bank so they can watch out for suspicious transactions.

    Tracking your device

    Try to locate your phone with the find my device feature. For iPhones, go to iCloud.com/find from a web browser while Android users should head to www.google.com/android/find. Samsung also has its own service for Galaxy phones.

    These services will show your phone’s current or last known location on a map, which is also handy if you’ve just lost track of it somewhere in the house. Apple says even if a phone can’t connect to the internet or has been turned off, it can use Bluetooth to ping any nearby Apple devices using the same network behind its AirTags tracking devices. Google says newer Pixel phones can be located “for several hours” after they’ve been turned off using similar technology.

    You can get the phone to play a sound, even if it’s on silent. You can also put the phone in lost mode, which locks it and displays a message and contact details on the screen for anyone who finds it. Lost mode on iOS also suspends any Apple Pay cards and passes.

    If the device shows up in an unfamiliar location on the map, and you suspect it has been stolen, experts say it’s better to notify police rather than trying to get it back yourself.

    Cybersecurity company Norton says, “Confronting a thief yourself is not recommended.”

    Final steps

    If you can’t find your phone, there are some final steps to take.

    Log yourself out of all your accounts that might be accessible on the phone, and then remove it from your list of trusted devices that you use to get multifactor authentication codes — but make sure you can get those codes somewhere else, such as email.

    Then, as a last resort, you can erase the phone remotely so that there’s no chance of any data falling into the wrong hands. However, take note: Apple says that if the iPhone is offline, the remote erase will only happen the next time it come back online. But if you find the phone before it gets erased, you can cancel the request.

    Google warns that SD memory cards plugged into Android phones might not be remotely erased. And after the phone has been wiped, it won’t show up with find my device.

    ___

    Is there a tech challenge you need help figuring out? Write to us at [email protected] with your questions.

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  • One Tech Tip: Here’s what you need to do before and after your phone is stolen or lost

    One Tech Tip: Here’s what you need to do before and after your phone is stolen or lost

    [ad_1]

    LONDON — Phones hold so much of our digital lives — emails, social media and bank accounts, photos, chat messages and more — that if they ever get stolen or go missing, it can cause major disruption beyond just the loss of a device.

    In some places, phone thefts have surged so much it’s now an everyday problem, with thieves on electric bikes snatching them out of pedestrians’ hands, swiping them off restaurant tables or pickpocketing them on the subway.

    In Britain, where 200 phones are stolen every day in “snatch thefts,” the government has pledged to crack down on the crime and is meeting with tech companies and device makers to come up with solutions.

    Here are steps you can take before and after your phone goes missing:

    There are things you can do to make it less painful if your phone is stolen. Because some of these features are more technical in nature, people often overlook them.

    Lock down as much as you can. At a minimum, require a password or biometric scan to unlock the device. You can also add similar requirements to important individual apps — like your banking account, WhatsApp or Signal — to protect your finance or chats from thieves.

    Also, activate the find my device feature, which is available for both iOS and Android. Samsung also offers its own service called SmartThings Find.

    You’ll probably have lots of precious photos saved on your camera roll. It’s a good idea to back them up, along with contacts, calendar items and other files. Google and Apple offer cloud-based backup services, although the free versions have limited storage space. You can also back up your files to an external hard drive, memory card or a laptop.

    Some police forces and phone companies advise turning off message previews, which prevents thieves trying to break into your accounts from seeing reset or login codes when the phone is locked. To do this on an iPhone, for example, go to the Notifications section of your settings menu and tap Show Previews. You can also scroll down the app list to turn previews off for individual apps but leave them on for less risky ones like news or weather.

    Recent iOS and Android updates include a number of new functions designed to make thefts less attractive.

    IPhone users can turn on Stolen Device Protection, which makes it a lot harder for phone thieves to access key functions and settings. Many thieves will want to wipe the data off and reset so they can resell it, but with this feature on, they’ll need a face or fingerprint scan to do so. Apple also recently updated its “ activation lock ” feature to make it harder for thieves to sell parts from stolen phones.

    Android phones, meanwhile, can now use use artificial intelligence to detect motion indicating someone snatched it out of your hand and is racing away on foot or a bike, and then lock the screen immediately. And there’s a feature called Private Spaces that lets you hide sensitive files on your phone.

    Take note of your phone’s serial number, also known as an IMEI number. It can link you to the phone if it does eventually get recovered. Call it up by typing (asterisk)#06# on your phone’s keypad. If you’ve already lost your phone you can also find it in other places like the box it came in.

    If you’re unlucky enough to have your phone stolen, notify police. Call your insurance company if you have a policy that covers the device. Inform your phone company so they can freeze your number and issue a replacement SIM card or eSIM. Notify your bank so they can watch out for suspicious transactions.

    Try to locate your phone with the find my device feature. For iPhones, go to iCloud.com/find from a web browser while Android users should head to www.google.com/android/find. Samsung also has its own service for Galaxy phones.

    These services will show your phone’s current or last known location on a map, which is also handy if you’ve just lost track of it somewhere in the house. Apple says even if a phone can’t connect to the internet or has been turned off, it can use Bluetooth to ping any nearby Apple devices using the same network behind its AirTags tracking devices. Google says newer Pixel phones can be located “for several hours” after they’ve been turned off using similar technology.

    You can get the phone to play a sound, even if it’s on silent. You can also put the phone in lost mode, which locks it and displays a message and contact details on the screen for anyone who finds it. Lost mode on iOS also suspends any Apple Pay cards and passes.

    If the device shows up in an unfamiliar location on the map, and you suspect it has been stolen, experts say it’s better to notify police rather than trying to get it back yourself.

    Cybersecurity company Norton says, “Confronting a thief yourself is not recommended.”

    If you can’t find your phone, there are some final steps to take.

    Log yourself out of all your accounts that might be accessible on the phone, and then remove it from your list of trusted devices that you use to get multifactor authentication codes — but make sure you can get those codes somewhere else, such as email.

    Then, as a last resort, you can erase the phone remotely so that there’s no chance of any data falling into the wrong hands. However, take note: Apple says that if the iPhone is offline, the remote erase will only happen the next time it come back online. But if you find the phone before it gets erased, you can cancel the request.

    Google warns that SD memory cards plugged into Android phones might not be remotely erased. And after the phone has been wiped, it won’t show up with find my device.

    ___

    Is there a tech challenge you need help figuring out? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your questions.

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  • AMD buying server maker ZT Systems for $4.9 billion as chipmakers strengthen AI capabilities

    AMD buying server maker ZT Systems for $4.9 billion as chipmakers strengthen AI capabilities

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    AMD is buying server maker ZT Systems in a cash-and-stock deal worth $4.9 billion as the chipmaker strengthens its artificial intelligence capacity in its efforts to compete with Nvidia.

    AMD plans to sell ZT Systems’ server manufacturing business after the deal closes, with mergers and acquisitions in tech and elsewhere getting a closer look by the Biden Administration.

    ZT Systems, based in Secaucus, New Jersey, is a privately held company that has designed and rolled out data center and storage infrastructure systems to cloud companies for more than a decade.

    The transaction includes a contingent payment of up to $400 million based on post-closing milestones.

    AMD is looking to bulk up its AI capabilities. Over the past year, the company has invested more than $1 billion to expand its AI ecosystem and strengthen its AI software capabilities.

    The moves are part of an effort to better compete with tech giant Nvidia, which has experienced nearly insatiable demand for its chips to power artificial intelligence applications.

    Once AMD’s deal with ZT Systems closes, it will join the AMD Data Center Solutions Business Group. AMD said Monday that it will look for a buyer for its U.S.-based data center infrastructure manufacturing business.

    The transaction, which was approved by AMD’s board, is expected to close in the first half of next year.

    Shares of AMD, based in Santa Clara, Calif., rose more than 3% before the market opened.

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