data center

Google's experimental orbital data center will have four TPUs and only run for 15 minutes at a time.

Million-dollar fines won’t end billionaires’ data center pollution, neighbors fear.

You know it's cold when you have to heat the air used to cool your data center.

Europe's AI data center buildout is creating a power problem that cannot be solved by adding more...

Oracle is reportedly looking to delay payment on Project Jupiter if it the data center fails to come online in 2028

Critics of the data center in St. Louis, Missouri, worry about its water usage, the impact on the city’s air quality and utility costs

And Other Tales of Billionaire Lying from the Data Center Wars

When it comes to infrastructure engineering, building a data center is probably closer to building a house than to deploying a Terraform stack.

What is linear pluggable optics (LPO)? Learn how LPO vs DSP optics differ, and why LPO is cutting data center power consumption in AI interconnect deployments.

Microsoft has spent all year telling communities that when it brings a new data center into their area, it is committed to being a “good neighbor." It will pay local property taxes that support local hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries, and it will invest in “vital services the community cares about,” the company promised. And it has sent liaisons into those communities to learn what those needs are. But ask those liaisons how much the company is willing to invest, and the answers can be hard to come by. At community meetings, Microsoft representatives have seemed unprepared to answer questions that go beyond the company's “good neighbor” campaign materials, Ars has learned. The company has acknowledged in public-facing documents that simply matching its employees’ charitable donations—which totaled $229 million across 29,000 nonprofits in 2024—isn't enough. But it has been vague about what more substantial local investments might look like. And to critics, Microsoft’s local investments seem especially small compared with the estimated hundreds of millions in state-level tax breaks that data center developers get in 38 states—exemptions that often last more than a decade. Read full article Comments

This week, New Jersey ordered the operator of one of the East Coast’s largest planned data centers to pay a $1.1 million fine for secretly installing and operating gas generators in violation of the state’s Air Pollution Control Act. DataOne got hit with the fine after an investigation by The Guardian and Floodlight News in August shared thermal drone footage showing that 45 of the 62 gas generators were operating. None of the generators had permits required for generators with 37-kilowatt capacity or higher, despite running at 1,982-kw capacities more than 50 times higher than the state limit. States track gas generators like DataOne uses because they emit “carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and other combustion-related pollutants,” officials from New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) noted. Those pollutants can worsen asthma, trigger heart attacks, and cause early deaths. Read full article Comments