#pollution machine

On Sunday night, House Republicans added language to the Budget Reconciliation bill that would block all state and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years, 404 Media reports. The provision, introduced by Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, states that "no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act."

“Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content,” CEO Matthew Prince announced in a blog post. “That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it’s only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.”

As conversations with experts and AI companies made clear, inference, not training, represents an increasing majority of AI’s energy demands and will continue to do so in the near future. It’s now estimated that 80–90% of computing power for AI is used for inference.

OpenAI’s biggest backer has voided leases totaling “a couple of hundred megawatts” of capacity, the US brokerage wrote Friday, citing channel checks or inquiries with supply chain providers. Microsoft has also stopped converting so-called statement of qualifications, which are agreements that usually lead to formal leases, TD Cowen said. That was a tactic rivals such as Meta Platforms Inc. employed previously, when it decided to cut back on capital spending, the brokerage wrote.

OpenAI’s biggest backer has voided leases totaling “a couple of hundred megawatts” of capacity, the US brokerage wrote Friday, citing channel checks or inquiries with supply chain providers. Microsoft has also stopped converting so-called statement of qualifications, which are agreements that usually lead to formal leases, TD Cowen said. That was a tactic rivals such as Meta Platforms Inc. employed previously, when it decided to cut back on capital spending, the brokerage wrote.

When there’s an innovative technology that’s useful to the general population and it’s affordable, people will use it, said Vic Shao, founder of DC Grid, which delivers off-grid, direct current power to data centers and electric vehicle charging stations. That means data centers will still be built, though they may be able to operate more efficiently, said Travis Miller, an energy and utilities strategist at Morningstar Securities Research.

Electricity demand for data centers alone will increase 10-20% per year through 2030, while manufacturing of batteries, solar cells and semiconductors will require additional gigawatts of new power over the next four years, predicted Chris Seiple with analyst firm Wood Mackenzie.

Notably, the sources for all this power are particularly “dirty.” Since so many data centers are located in coal-producing regions, like Virginia, the “carbon intensity” of the energy they use is 48% higher than the national average. The paper, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that 95% of data centers in the US are built in places with sources of electricity that are dirtier than the national average.