Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Utilities, newest first.
Real estate agents working for a subsidiary of Elon Musk's xAI have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, offering to buy houses on the condition that owners give up any claims in a lawsuit over noise from the company's gas turbine power plant, The Guardian reports. A letter seen by the Mississippi Free Press spells out the release. A realtor told one resident the target is 418 homes, nearly the whole Colonial Hills neighborhood, with 18 owners already agreeing to sell. xAI denies the lawsuit's claims and did not answer questions about the numbers.
About half a dozen Connecticut towns have passed data center bans or moratoriums, and most of them have no project on the table, the Connecticut Mirror found. East Lyme's indefinite ban took effect on October 24, though nobody has proposed building there. New Haven passed a one-year pause in September, and Morris, a town of fewer than 3,000 people, has a two-year ban. Connecticut's high electricity prices have kept large data centers away, and the only project to use a 2021 state tax break is an existing Cigna facility. The pushback has still turned bipartisan. The Democratic Senate majority leader, Bob Duff, plans a bill for a statewide moratorium, and the Republican minority leader says he would support a pause and repealing the tax break.
CNBC's All-America Economic Survey of 1,000 registered voters, fielded October 14 to 18, found that 63 percent oppose an AI data center within 10 miles of their home and only 13 percent support one. The partisan split is the news: 55 percent of MAGA supporters want companies to keep developing advanced AI while Congress writes rules, yet just 29 percent would accept a data center nearby. Among Democrats, 80 percent oppose one and 4 percent support one. The proximity question went to about 500 voters, so its margin of error is roughly 4.4 points. It follows Gallup and New York Times polls this year that found similar majorities against local builds, and Republicans in close races are now stressing utility costs.
Microsoft has ended its involvement in Nscale's planned AI data center in Loughton, Essex, which was billed as the largest in Britain, the BBC reported. Microsoft had said only in September that part of its 30 billion dollar UK investment would pay for a supercomputer there. The site was due to be connected to the power grid by the end of 2026, but Nscale has been told that will not happen until the 2030s, according to the Telegraph. Nscale says it still plans to build the 2 billion pound project, is looking at other power sources, and keeps working with Microsoft in Norway, Portugal and the United States. Microsoft declined to comment. The setback comes as Nscale prepares its own stock market listing in New York.
Anthropic will lease the first phase of a data center that EverWind Fuels is building at Point Tupper on Cape Breton Island, for a term of at least 20 years, CBC News reported. It is Anthropic's first data center agreement in Canada, and the company said the site will power Claude for Canadian and global customers. The first phase comes to 95 megawatts by the end of 2027, and a second phase of 325 megawatts is planned for 2028. EverWind is raising about 10 billion Canadian dollars in all, including money for four wind farms. Until those farms are built, the existing provincial grid will supply most of the power. The two companies say they will pay for any grid upgrades.
Mistral has released Timestral, a family of four forecasting models from 5 million to 209 million parameters, built for sensor, financial and operations data. The largest ranks first on the three main public forecasting benchmarks, GIFT-Eval, TIME and fev-bench, by Mistral's count, beating larger rivals including Google's TimesFM 3. The models forecast many related series at once, give a range of likely outcomes rather than a single number, and accept known future inputs such as a production schedule. None needs a GPU: the largest forecasts a day ahead in about 140 milliseconds on an ordinary server processor. The weights are on Hugging Face under a modified MIT license that bars use by any company with more than $20 million in monthly revenue unless it buys a commercial license.
Four-hour battery storage is now cheaper than open-cycle gas turbines in all 43 markets where Wood Mackenzie modeled both, the consultancy said on October 8. It blames shortages of gas turbines and volatile fuel prices for pushing up the cost of gas peaking plants, while growing battery manufacturing keeps pushing storage costs down. TechCrunch notes that AI data center developers have been buying up any gas turbine they can find, with simpler models now taking two to four years to deliver. Solar was the cheapest new source of power in 43 of 48 markets.
Amazon Web Services chief executive Matt Garman published a long essay defending data centers and launched Built Together, a program that adds more than $1 billion over five years for neighboring communities, who will choose how it is spent across free community college, job training, energy bills and water. Amazon also put its practices in writing: it says it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with local governments, will pay enough for power that household bills do not rise, and will publish energy and water use every year. Garman said more than 100 local moratoriums are under consideration and blamed foreign misinformation for part of the opposition. The environmental group Stand.Earth called the money small next to Amazon's spending on data centers this year, and said the plan leaves out a gas power plant Amazon is backing in Pecos, Texas.
AI data center builder Crusoe has pulled out of a deal to buy 29 of Boom Supersonic's 42-megawatt Superpower turbines, gas-fired power plants derived from the engine Boom is developing for its supersonic jet, with deliveries due in 2027. Boom CEO Blake Scholl said turbines are no longer in Crusoe's near-term power mix at Abilene, a line he later deleted; Crusoe says it still plans to use turbines, "just not Boom's." Boom has lost its launch customer, but says it will ship about 250 megawatts to other sites next year and is targeting one gigawatt in 2028.
Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the Blue Owl Capital unit developing Project Jupiter, the Stargate campus in New Mexico, Bloomberg first reported. The notice would let Oracle delay payments if the site misses its 2028 target, though Oracle says the project "remains on our planned schedule" and Blue Owl says the commitments are unchanged. The trouble is power. The 2.45-gigawatt campus is meant to run on Bloom Energy gas fuel cells, the gas pipeline feeding it has slipped to February 2027 after repeated permit denials, and the fuel-cell air permit awaits a state decision due November 23. Residents and environmental groups oppose the project.
New Jersey has fined DataOne 1.1 million dollars for running unpermitted gas generators at its Vineland data center, which neighbors say powers Microsoft's Copilot. The Guardian and Floodlight News used thermal drone footage in August to show that 45 of the 62 generators were running. None had the permit required above 37 kilowatts, and each is rated at nearly 2,000 kilowatts. The state's environment commissioner called it the largest enforcement action ever taken against a data center in New Jersey. Residents say it falls short, because DataOne may keep the generators running during its 45-day window to apply for permits.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of seven bills on Monday that his office calls the most comprehensive data center laws in the nation. Data centers must pay for the power-grid and water-system upgrades they require, and state regulators must create a separate electricity rate class for them so the cost does not shift onto households. Proposed sites must also disclose their expected water use and drought planning to local governments, and they lose access to blanket environmental exemptions unless they meet state energy, water and fuel standards. The package lands days after Virginia ordered new data center rules, and it is the clearest sign yet that the fight over AI's physical footprint is being settled state by state. Newsom framed it directly against the White House, saying communities are left to deal with higher electricity demand, grid strain and water use "while the Trump administration moves toward deregulation."
Governor Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 on Friday in the state that hosts the world's largest concentration of data centers. It bars state officials from signing nondisclosure agreements on data-center projects, orders expedited noise regulations and a cumulative review of the backup generators these sites rely on, and directs the state's energy officer to shield households from grid costs driven by data-center load. An accompanying framework would end automatic "by-right" approval in favor of public hearings for projects above 25 megawatts, with the standards headed to the legislature in 2027. The order also creates a three-person AI task force on workforce displacement, data privacy and cybersecurity. The Piedmont Environmental Council said it does nothing about what is already built.
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed letting state and local agencies decide whether to hold public comment on air permits for large data centers, and separately would let developers start building before permits are approved. Capital B reports that the rural South, where much of this construction is concentrated, has a disproportionately Black population and residents who already learn of projects late because local governments sign nondisclosure agreements with developers. One South Carolina campus under debate spans the area of about 1,200 football fields.
Governor Maura Healey signed an executive order on September 8 barring state agencies from permitting any data center above 25 megawatts of peak demand unless the developer has already secured a community benefits agreement. Developers are expected to bring their own clean generation; those who cannot must pay into a new Ratepayer Protection Fund, with the state environmental agency directed to set that compliance payment by the end of the year. The order also blocks non-disclosure agreements between state agencies and developers, which is the provision aimed squarely at how these deals have typically been negotiated. TechCrunch counts Massachusetts the third state in three months to constrain data center build-out, after Texas ordered audits and New York halted projects above 50 megawatts.
On the same day that it shipped Astra, OpenAI committed $1 billion in subsidized access to its Daybreak cyber models, training and support, targeted to be consumed within six months. It is aimed at water and wastewater systems, electric grid operators, state and local governments, community and regional banks, nonprofits and open-source maintainers, and includes a pilot with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center plus more than 35 partner-operated products. This is subsidized demand for OpenAI's own products rather than grant funding, and it lands days after the company said Astra crossed its Critical cybersecurity threshold.
Draft offering documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal show that SB Energy, the SoftBank-controlled power developer, granted OpenAI warrants valued at $3.6 billion when they were awarded in January — a position worth $5.5 billion by the end of June. What that bought was OpenAI as anchor tenant of the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio, the site Nvidia agreed to backstop in mid-August. SB Energy is preparing an offering of $5 billion to $7 billion as soon as September, and reports a contracted backlog above $400 billion despite operating no finished data centers yet.
Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX is adding a blades-and-vanes foundry at its Bastrop, Texas site, where the company bought roughly 830 acres between March and June. Musk says casting those parts is the limiting factor in gas turbine production, and that doing it in-house could pull as much as 18 months out of the wait to bring new turbines online. SpaceX is targeting about 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by the end of 2027 — and TechCrunch notes the same turbines carry a measurable local air-quality cost, a fight xAI is already having in Memphis.
The California Energy Commission is putting $8.5 million behind a San Diego Supercomputer Center demonstration of a solid-state transformer that converts medium-voltage alternating current straight to 800-volt direct current in one device, removing the conversion stages that waste power on the way to a rack. Alderbuck Energy supplies the hardware, Emerald AI the orchestration software and San Diego Gas and Electric the grid connection; the two-megawatt build targets roughly 25 percent energy savings. The argument is that a data center can be something the grid leans on rather than a load it absorbs.
Reuters reported that Nvidia has bought a minority position in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a company founded in 2024 that sits between utilities and developers to secure grid power, cooling and sites. Terms were not disclosed, though the Wall Street Journal put the figure at several hundred million dollars. Cloverleaf will run Nvidia's DSX platform to choose sites and size power. It lands days after Nvidia committed $1.5 billion to SoftBank's SB Energy, and it marks where the chip company now believes the real constraint sits.
TerraPower's Natrium design pairs a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with gigawatt-scale molten salt storage, so the reactor never throttles down: surplus heat goes into the salt and comes back as extra steam when a data center's load spikes. The first plant is under construction in Wyoming under a Department of Energy cost-share worth up to $2 billion, and a second breaks ground in 2027 for an unnamed data center customer. Meta agreed in January to buy eight Natrium plants. The storage was designed for intermittent renewables rather than for AI; the fit with data center load was a happy accident.
Nvidia is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer of the PORTS-Pike campus in Pike County, Ohio, and is providing credit support covering the land, power and buildings so the site can open at just over four gigawatts and scale to eight. SB Energy will own and operate the data center under a 20-year lease to OpenAI, with Nvidia named the exclusive compute supplier. SB Energy and SoftBank say they will build at least 10 gigawatts of new generation and put at least $4.2 billion into regional grid infrastructure through a partnership with the utility AEP Ohio that is designed to protect ratepayers.
The energy research firm Noreva expects natural gas to pass $10 per million British thermal units at some delivery hubs in the coming years, against a Henry Hub price now just under three dollars. Meta has committed to a 7.5-gigawatt plant in Louisiana and Amazon to a 7.6-gigawatt plant in Texas, with Microsoft and Google building gigawatt-scale plants of their own. Chief executive Peter Gardett argues those buyers are carrying unusual price risk, which would surface either in token prices or on the wider grid.
HD Hyundai Heavy Industries signed a 956 billion won order, worth about $675 million, with the US infrastructure firm Coban Energy Group to supply one gigawatt of on-site generating capacity for American data centers, built around its 9.6-megawatt HiMSEN engines. It is the company's largest power-engine order to date, surpassing a 627 billion won contract it signed in April. The deal is another sign that AI operators are buying their own generation rather than waiting years for a grid connection.
Michael Thomas of the Distilled newsletter identified Amazon as the customer behind GW Ranch, a 35-turbine, 7.65-gigawatt gas plant in Pecos County, West Texas, developed by Pacifico Energy to power a new data center campus. Texas granted the air permit in January, allowing 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — more than any existing US power plant, though operators rarely emit their full allowance. Amazon says generating its own power means the site "won't raise electricity costs for Texas families." Land clearing began in late July.
Governor Greg Abbott directed the state's utility commission and its grid operator to verify and audit each data center moving through the interconnection queue, and any project that fails the requirements will be denied a connection. That queue now holds roughly 474 gigawatts of requests, more than five times the state's record peak demand, and about ninety percent of it is data centers. Applicants must disclose projected power draw, on-site generation, water sourcing and cooling method, noise and lighting mitigation, tax incentives received, and who actually owns the project. An earlier voluntary survey went mostly unanswered.
The 69 unpermitted gas turbines powering xAI's Colossus data centers, sited in Mississippi just south of Memphis, will not be fully removed until July 2027 while SpaceX builds a permanent 1.2 gigawatt plant with 41 turbines nearby. Federal rules require permits for turbines that size; SpaceX argues these are exempt because they sit on shipping trailers. The N-A-A-C-P and the Southern Environmental Law Center have sued, pointing to the potential for more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides a year in one of the country's more polluted regions.
PJM Interconnection, which serves 67 million customers from Virginia to Illinois, directed staff to build a registry of every site drawing at least 50 megawatts and to curtail those loads first when capacity runs short. New large loads that have not brought their own generation or otherwise secured supply by June 1, 2027, get cut before emergency measures reach ordinary customers, with advance notice ranging from 30 minutes to several days and compensation for participating. Wholesale power prices across the territory have nearly doubled in a year, and PJM now forecasts 70 gigawatts of new large load by 2038.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Nvidia is in talks to guarantee $250 billion in financing so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt campus that SoftBank's energy arm is developing in Piketon, Ohio, on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. The full project could cost more than $500 billion, and Nvidia is separately discussing another $350 billion tied to chip purchases. Investor Michael Burry, who is short Nvidia, called the structure circular — a chip vendor guaranteeing its own customer's spending on its own chips.
President Trump announced a major expansion of the federal Ratepayer Protection Pledge, adding more than 200 utilities, data-center developers, cooperatives, and states to a commitment the White House says now covers about 80 percent of the power delivered to US homes and businesses. The core promise is that data-center operators — not ordinary customers — pay for the new generation and grid infrastructure their AI campuses require, whether they use that power or not. Duke Energy, among the participating utilities, launched a "Customer Protection Plus" framework; chief executive Harry Sideris told CNBC that a 15-year deal with a single one-gigawatt data center could save its other customers roughly $1 billion — though the utility cautioned that means bills rise less than they otherwise would, not that they fall.
When a power line failed near Washington on July 22, the grid should have recovered in seconds; instead it took more than ten minutes, because roughly 3.1 gigawatts of data-center load — about three percent of the regional grid's demand — disconnected almost at once and swung voltage from Northern Virginia to Chicago. Twice the size of a similar 2024 event, the incident exposed a reliability risk that is the flip side of the affordability fears behind this week's federal ratepayer pledge — two faces of the same data-center power crunch. Proposed fixes include staggered disconnection rules, campus-scale batteries that ride through disturbances, and ride-through mandates already appearing in Texas.
A new BloombergNEF forecast projects US data centers will draw nearly 200 gigawatts of power by 2035 — about 20 percent of the nation's electricity, up from under 6 percent today and roughly four times current demand. The estimate is 83 percent higher than the firm's December projection, driven by a wave of giant AI campuses, more than a quarter of them larger than 500 megawatts. "Every coal plant, every gas plant, every solar farm in the US — one unit of energy out of five generated by them is going to data centers," one BloombergNEF analyst said.
Construction-robotics startup Gritt left stealth with $34 million in total funding, including a $26 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures. Its AI controls off-the-shelf robotic arms and skidders to unload, carry, and place solar panels with sub-millimeter precision. An eight-person crew using the systems installs 3,000 to 4,000 panels a day versus about 800 by hand, and Gritt has contracts to help deploy 2.8 gigawatts of solar over eighteen months. The founders say the robots also cut worker injuries on hazardous outdoor sites.
Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order barring new permits for data centers that draw 50 megawatts or more, making New York the first state to pause the AI build-out. The freeze holds until the state finishes an environmental review of energy demand, water use, and noise — a process expected to take about a year. Projects that already hold permits are exempt, and a proposed Grid Acceleration Fund would make operators help pay to upgrade the aging power grid.
A new SemiAnalysis analysis argues the US grid simply cannot add capacity fast enough for AI. Data-center demand is set to climb from 21 gigawatts in 2026 to 84 gigawatts by 2030, while net-new firm capacity is barely 15 gigawatts a year — turning available headroom negative across several regions by 2027. The firm projects that behind-the-meter generation — power plants built on-site, bypassing the grid — will supply well over half of new US data centers from 2028 on, because gas-turbine and interconnection lead times now stretch four to six years and on-site power is both faster and more certain.
Chevron signed a 20-year agreement to supply natural-gas-fired electricity to a massive Microsoft AI data center planned near Pecos in West Texas. The project, called Kilby, would start generating power by 2028 and scale to 2.67 gigawatts — enough for more than 530,000 homes — with a first phase estimated at about $7 billion. Chevron is building the plant with Joulent, an energy firm backed by Engine No. 1, and will make a final investment decision later this year. It is the latest sign that AI's power appetite is reshaping where and how electricity gets built.
In a unanimous vote, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered the six largest US grid operators to justify or rewrite the rules that govern how AI data centers and other big power users connect to the transmission system. Operators have 30 days to report available capacity and 60 days to defend their regional rates, with data centers footing their own interconnection costs. The orders speed up connections but leave the deeper problem untouched — there still is not enough generating capacity, and data-center demand is on track to nearly triple by 2035.
A Gallup poll released this month found that 70 percent of Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their local community, including 48 percent who say they are *"strongly opposed."* Half of opponents cite excessive use of resources — 18 percent each name water and energy use specifically — while another 16 percent cite pollution and noise. Two-thirds of supporters cite economic benefits, mostly local job creation. The first national survey of public sentiment on the issue lands as Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced moratorium legislation, Maine's legislature has passed and then watched a governor's veto kill a construction ban, and protests have escalated from Tremonton, Utah, to Monterey Park, California — a sign that the *"AI is good for jobs"* pitch is not yet outweighing local concern about water, grid, and noise.