Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Electric Power, newest first.
Ars Technica traced who is answerable at Lake Mariner in Somerset, New York, a campus valued at $3.2 billion, after a June fire that firefighters entered with no working alarm, no suppression system and three dead hydrants. Four parties share the site: TeraWulf owns and operates it on land leased from its own chief executive, Fluidstack will run it, Google holds warrants for a future 14 percent stake and backstops the lease, and Anthropic is among the tenants. Anthropic's ratepayer covenant covers electricity costs here but not noise or clean-power claims, and no party appears able to verify them. A 2019 pledge of 165 jobs became 35 to 40.
Sunrun, Tesla, and Renew Home are pooling hundreds of thousands of home batteries and more than 8 million smart thermostats into a 16-gigawatt virtual power plant aimed at AI data centers — capacity that needs no new land, water, or hardware and can come online in months rather than years. With US data-center demand projected to climb from 41 gigawatts this year to 66 gigawatts in 2027, the Brattle Group estimates better use of the existing grid could cut US power bills by $110 billion to $170 billion over the next decade. About 300 megawatts is already available in Virginia's Data Center Alley, though the headline figure is theoretical rated capacity, not firm supply.
TechCrunch reports xAI is now buying $2.8 billion more unregulated natural-gas turbines to power its Memphis-area data centers, abandoning the *"solar-electric economy"* commitment Elon Musk wrote into Tesla's 2023 Master Plan 3. The pitch for the eventual fix: SpaceX-launched orbital solar arrays that the company claims can deliver more than five-times the energy of terrestrial panels with constant illumination. A SpaceX filing argues *"terawatt-scale annual AI compute growth"* will eventually force data centers off-planet — a long-horizon framing that does not yet address the methane the Memphis turbines burn today.
A May 13 virtual town hall organized by the Better Path Coalition and No False Climate Solutions PA pulled in roughly 225 viewers and over 20 speakers from multiple counties, all describing the same set of grievances: surging electricity bills, heavy water draws, noise, industrial-scale builds next to homes and schools, and what one speaker called being "bulldozed over" by projects whose permitting moves faster than community input. State Senator Katie Muth is pushing a three-year moratorium on hyperscale development, and Chester County's North Coventry Township is now drafting a local data-center ordinance. The Pennsylvania backlash echoes the NAACP's suit against xAI's Mississippi turbines from this week — community pushback against AI compute siting is becoming a named political issue, not just a permitting headache.
Oregon-based Panthalassa raised $140 million led by Peter Thiel's personal fund — with Founders Fund a returning backer from 2018 — pushing the company's valuation to roughly $1 billion. The pitch is unsubtle: pair massive floating orbs that harvest wave energy with on-board AI compute, use cold ocean water for cooling, and uplink results to land via low-Earth-orbit satellites. CEO Garth Sheldon-Coulson is targeting a northern Pacific Ocean-3 pilot deployment later this year and commercial nodes in 2027. The bet — placed the same week Pennsylvanians filled a town hall demanding onshore data centers slow down — is that ocean siting bypasses transmission costs, water-rights fights, and the community veto that keeps blocking gigawatt-scale builds on land.
The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of the NAACP, filed suit alleging xAI is operating 46 natural gas turbines at its Mississippi data center after state regulators permitted only 15 of them. Mississippi treats the trailer-mounted turbines as "mobile" equipment, which it argues exempts them from federal air-pollution standards for a year — but the complaint contends federal law allows states to regulate trailer-mounted power plants as stationary sources, and that Mississippi is simply declining to enforce. The NAACP frames the unchecked emissions as worsening air quality in an already polluted region. xAI has not responded publicly. The case is the first major regulatory test of the "neocloud" pattern of standing up frontier-scale data centers on temporary fossil-fuel power.