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In a WIRED interview, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke about his first year in office and addressed topics including artificial intelligence and data centers, framed by concerns over who bears risks and who reaps rewards. The piece also covers his use of social media and broader governance priorities.
Omen AI, a startup building real-time sensors to monitor cooling fluids in data centers, is acquiring competitor Aquatic Labs in a $16 million cash-and-stock deal. The companies plan to integrate Omen’s element-detection sensors with Aquatic’s alkalinity tests into a single sensor expected on the market by early next year; Omen says initial deployments will monitor systems powering 250–300 MW this year with a goal of 1 GW by end of 2027.
Axios reports OpenAI is preparing a post-midterms PR push and that chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane discussed several proposals, including rebranding data centers as “AI compute campuses,” advocating for U.S. involvement in global AI standards, and exploring AI “speed limits.” Lehane framed the data center debate as healthy public scrutiny; the report notes Amazon and Microsoft have faced related local-government negotiating controversies over NDAs.
Microsoft has made voluntary exit/buyout offers to roughly 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada and India as part of efforts to lower operating costs and shift investment toward AI infrastructure; eligible employees have until December to decide. The report also notes ongoing layoffs over the past year and the planned retirement of longtime Forza Motorsport lead Dan Greenawalt.
Rapid expansion of resource-intensive AI data centers has become a central issue in Maine’s closely watched Senate race, with towns adopting local moratoriums and the state legislature passing — then seeing the governor veto — a proposed statewide ban on large data centers; voters and outside tech industry money are driving the debate. Polling shows strong local opposition, and campaign spending tied to data center and AI interests is unusually high as both parties vie for control of the U.S. Senate.
Ali Jadbabaie, head of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says infrastructure is facing a defining era as climate change, resource constraints, geopolitical risks, and digital transformation — including AI — converge. He will discuss these topics at the World Infrastructure Forum in Madrid on Oct. 28, an event co-founded by MIT, UPM, the World Bank Group, and the University of Texas at Austin.
In its S-1 filing ahead of a planned IPO, Anthropic discloses that some planned data centers will use electricity generated by on‑site natural gas turbines and that competition for gas, turbines, and grid capacity could raise costs, delay or force changes to projects; the filing also notes climate change may increase power and cooling expenses. The company earlier outlined a roughly $50 billion plan to expand data centers in Texas and New York and leases capacity from hyperscalers.
In an interview tied to the release of his new book Hyperscale, Paris Marx traces historical and contemporary opposition to data centers—from US water fights and Irish moratoria to protests in other countries—and warns that surging demand from generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) is accelerating contentious buildouts, including dedicated gas power plants. He also raises uncertainty about what happens to extensive new infrastructure if an "AI bubble" reassesses demand.
In an interview on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Illinois governor JB Pritzker discussed AI, saying it has the potential to greatly extend human lifespan but also compared its risks to those of nuclear weapons; he also addressed state concerns around data centers, privacy, and the government’s role versus big business. The conversation touched on broader political realignment and local issues such as negotiations to keep the Chicago Bears in Illinois.
Ricursive Intelligence founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini told TechCrunch Disrupt that their startup is developing AI that designs chips, iterates on each design, and optimizes entire chips rather than partitioning them. They cited prior work on a system called AlphaChip that produced unconventional layouts and argued AI-driven design could speed development and yield more energy- and area-efficient chips for growing compute demand.
Amazon said it will no longer use nondisclosure agreements when negotiating data‑center deals with local governments, a move following a similar step by Microsoft aimed at reducing secrecy that has fueled community backlash. Separately, a wave of startups is developing personal AI agents that seek access to users' inboxes, files and credit cards, raising trust and privacy questions as major companies block outside agents.
Christina Delimitrou, an associate professor at MIT and member of CSAIL, leads research applying machine learning to make large-scale data centers more efficient, secure, and reliable by redesigning cloud systems, managing shared hardware resources, and developing tools (such as Seer) that anticipate and prevent application problems. Her work aims to increase utilization of existing servers so operators can deliver predictable performance while reducing the need to build new, power-hungry data centers.
On Truth Social, President Donald Trump posted a poll proposing new names for 'Artificial Intelligence' (options included 'Superior/Extreme/Supreme Intelligence') and said he is forming an 'AI Force' and will appoint an AI 'Czar', without providing details on responsibilities. He also framed AI-safety concerns as politically motivated and referenced prior comments about supporting the AI industry while considering 'guardrails.'
President Donald Trump has publicly defended AI data centers and criticized communities that oppose them, framing data center restrictions as jeopardizing U.S. competitiveness with China. That stance conflicts with growing Republican and local opposition—reflected in a New York Times poll and internal GOP memos warning candidates that unqualified support for more data centers is politically risky.
Governor Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 directing state agencies to create an AI task force to assess AI risks such as workforce displacement and data privacy, ban executive-branch NDAs for data-center projects, speed noise-rulemaking, and review backup-generation operations. The order is accompanied by a new Data Center Accountability Framework that seeks to remove some by-right approvals and state subsidies and add environmental and consumer protections.
Syensqo (represented by CTO Mike Finelli) argues that growing AI workloads are pushing semiconductors and data centers toward physical limits and that advanced materials are increasingly decisive for future performance. The company is developing high‑voltage data‑center materials, sealing compounds, and thermal‑management fluids and says it uses AI agents to screen millions of molecular candidates to accelerate and de‑risk laboratory development while aiming to improve sustainability alongside performance.
Dropbox outlined how a decade of infrastructure optimization is helping it absorb growing AI demand without treating new data-center capacity as the only solution. The company's efforts include forecasting, fleet utilization, storage density, hardware lifecycles and rack-level power delivery, many of which predate the current AI boom.
A New York Times and Siena University poll of 1,503 likely voters found 61% oppose constructing data centers to power AI, and reported that neither major party holds a clear advantage on the issue. The data confirm broad public negativity toward AI and data‑center projects that politicians are reacting to.
National opposition to rapid data center construction tied to the AI boom has reached Philadelphia, where city officials have raised the possibility of building a data center in a neighborhood already affected by a now-defunct oil refinery. The report highlights community concern over siting decisions and industrial legacies as AI infrastructure expands.
Silicon Valley is moving beyond simple chatbot queries toward agentic AI systems that are far more resource‑intensive, and that shift is a major factor behind increased data center construction and capacity expansion.
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