AI Power News

05/26/2026

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and NRC Chairman Ho K. Nieh all flew to Park City, Utah last week for a summit called Operation Gigawatt. The explicit message from the room: China is already ahead in the AI energy race, and US permitting timelines are the reason.

Utah and the White House Permitting Council signed an MOU to coordinate state and federal energy project approvals.

xAI is buying $2.8 billion in gas turbines and building its own power plant next to its Memphis data center.

The NRC accepted NANO Nuclear's construction permit for a microreactor at U of Illinois targeting commercial operation by 2027.

Ontario's 250 MW battery project went live five weeks ahead of schedule. DOE awarded $94 million to eight companies to advance SMR site permits and supply chain.

Trump Cabinet Joins Utah Governor at Operation Gigawatt Energy Summit

05/18/2026

Data centers in Northern Virginia produce 11% of the region's nitrogen oxide emissions. Not from servers running hot. From gas turbines providing round-the-clock power because the grid interconnection queue runs seven years.

Residents near these facilities report vertigo, nausea, and sleep disruption from a low-frequency hum that doesn't register on standard noise meters. A study found one facility causes an estimated $53 to $99 million in annual health damage to surrounding communities.

New piece today on what's actually causing the harm, whether liquid cooling is helping, and what the fix realistically looks like. Link in first comment.

Should data center operators running 24/7 gas turbines be required to get full power plant permits?

05/13/2026

NVIDIA is mounting AI data centers on the sides of homes. Startup SPAN and homebuilder PulteGroup are in early testing. Each unit holds an Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, mounts on an exterior wall, draws from the home's electrical panel, and sells compute to AI cloud providers. Span claims 8,000 homes can match the capacity of a 100 MW data center at $3M per megawatt. Homeowners pay $150/month for electricity and internet. Installation is free.

California's grid-scale batteries discharged a record 12,000 MW during peak evening hours, covering 40%+ of statewide demand. Battery storage in the state is up 2,000% since 2019.

Meta reserved 1 GW of space-based solar from Overview Energy - satellites beaming near-infrared light from geosynchronous orbit - and 1 GW of 100-hour energy storage from Noon Energy. Meta now has staked positions in space solar, long-duration storage, nuclear, and geothermal simultaneously.

NextEra Energy, Inc. got federal approval to build 10 GW of new natural gas in Texas and Pennsylvania for AI data center hubs. Its Florida pipeline alone: 21 GW of data center load requests.

Fermi America - the Trump-branded AI campus startup backed by Rick Perry - imploded. CEO and CFO out within two days of each other. Stock down 81% from IPO. No confirmed hyperscaler tenant. First major public failure of a company built entirely on the AI power buildout story.

MARA Holdings is acquiring a 505 MW Ohio gas plant plus 1,600 acres for $1.5B. Bitcoin miners and AI data centers are now competing directly for the same power assets.

Massachusetts signed 2,400 MW of offshore wind contracts, saving an estimated $1.4B vs. prior procurement costs.

What does the Nvidia home data center model change about how you think about distributed AI infrastructure?

Link in first comment.