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Jensen Huang talks about AI and climate change like a supervillain

2026-09-24T14:04:44-04:00

As Jensen Huang puts it, AI can help fight climate change - but only if it inflicts "an enormous amount of pain and suffering" first.

The Nvidia CEO discussed the future of energy and AI's impact on our planet in the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show. But his comments boil down to the same accelerationist spin we've seen from a variety of tech leaders as well as President Donald Trump. They promise that AI will be such a gift to humanity that it's worth the damage caused by data centers currently running on dirty energy.

Huang's extreme level of privilege is glaring

Huang's extreme level of privilege is glaring in the interview. He …

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Google is sending an AI satellite into space next week

2026-09-24T10:54:18-04:00

Google is getting ready to launch a satellite with its AI processors to test how well they perform in space, as reported earlier by The New York Times. The move is part of Google's Project Suncatcher, the company's experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers into orbit.

The satellite, equipped with Google's Tensor Processing Units, will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on October 1st, allowing it to harness the power of the sun in low Earth orbit. As noted by Google, the goal of the mission is to measure how well its TPUs "handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." …

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Data centers are black boxes, but California wants to change that

2026-09-23T14:22:57-04:00

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a slate of bills on Monday that could finally give communities better data - and more say - on how data centers impact their electricity bills and water supply.

As data centers invade a growing number of communities across the US, they've triggered protests over how the infrastructure underpinning AI might stress power grids and local water systems. That's fueled partly by concerns about how difficult it is to see just how much electricity or water they're actually gobbling up. California's new disclosure rules won't offer a full picture, but starting next year, data center operators will have to start s …

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Anthropic’s biolab made a discovery it’s comparing to Crispr

2026-09-23T13:10:35-04:00

Anthropic says its AI Claude has "autonomously discovered" a new enzyme system similar to machinery behind the powerful gene-editing tool Crispr. It's the first result from Anthropic's newly-launched wet lab and an early test of Claude's usefulness for science as the company prepares to go public.

The company says Claude found the enzyme system after searching through a massive database of DNA sequences, adding that its scientists' involvement was limited to the initial prompt and lab work.

Over 21 hours, Anthropic said nearly 950 Claude agents worked through 210 million tokens before one spotted an unusual repeating pattern in the datas …

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McDonald’s is testing ads on its drive-thru menus

2026-09-23T10:38:28-04:00

McDonald's is putting ads on its drive-thru menu as part of a "limited" pilot at company-owned restaurants, according to a report from Bloomberg. Drive-thru locations included in the test will show ads from other brands on digital menu boards after a customer places their order, which they'll see while they wait for their meal.

In a statement to Bloomberg, a McDonald's spokesperson says the test allows the company to explore "ways to share post-purchase content that customers may find helpful, relevant, or interesting."

As noted by Bloomberg, selling ads on McDonald's menu boards could open up another stream of revenue for the company, whi …

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Eight Sleep’s new cooling hub is small enough to hide under your bed

2026-09-22T16:59:56-04:00

Eight Sleep announced the next version of its "intelligent sleep system" designed to regulate the temperature of your bed in response to tracked health and sleep metrics like breathing and heart rate. The company calls its new Pod 6 system its "most significant hardware launch to date," and it's centered around a redesigned cooling hub that's now small enough to hide beneath most beds. The new system is cheaper than Eight Sleep's Pod 5 that launched in 2025, but is still by no means cheap.

The Pod 6 is now available through Eight Sleep's online store. The Standard version ranges in price from $2,699 for a full-size mattress to $2,999 for ki …

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Rivian’s R2 beat its own climate goals four years early

2026-09-22T12:03:45-04:00

Rivian always planned for its all-important R2 vehicle to be less expensive than its pricey R1 predecessors, but also less polluting. The production process for the R2 would rely on more renewable energy, and the vehicle itself would feature more recycled and biodegradable materials than the models that came before it. With this and a few other tricks, Rivian set the target to achieve a 50 percent lifetime carbon reduction for the R2 by 2030.

Today, the company released its 2025 impact report outlining its sustainability progress for the year. The main takeaway is that over the entire lifespan - everything from production, driving, and eve …

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Amazon wants to help the Colorado River, but we still don’t know how much water the company uses

2026-09-22T10:27:44-04:00

Amazon plans to spend $20 million on water conservation projects along the Colorado River, a crucial but dwindling water supply for 40 million people in the Western US.

The initiative comes as Amazon and other tech companies face mounting scrutiny over how much water their data centers use. Amazon has a goal of becoming water positive - replenishing more water than it uses - by the end of the decade. It recently disclosed some information about its water use, but we still have an incomplete picture of the company's impact as a whole.

Amazon announced the launch of a Colorado River Basin Collaborative today, with a mission to "create one o …

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Humans, not rogue AI, are still the biggest cybersecurity risk to energy systems

2026-09-19T16:28:15-04:00

Before recent high-profile hacks raised the specter of AI possibly "killing all humans," our energy systems were already disturbingly vulnerable to cyberattack - and the risk is growing.

"We were always prey. We were just kind of surviving at the appetite of our predators," Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety and resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), told me last year. At the time, I was preoccupied with a Department of Homeland Security warning that Iranian actors and sympathizers could target the US with cyberattacks.

Last week, I called Corman up to chat about recent incidents of rogue AI a …

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Virginia governor creates an AI task force and moves to restrain data centers

2026-09-18T15:09:19-04:00

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger ordered the state government to take steps that could empower local communities to have a larger say in data center development and slow down approvals in a state that is already home to the data center capital of the world.

Executive Order 22 bans executive branch officials from signing nondisclosure agreements for data center projects, requires expedited noise regulations, and requires a review of backup-generation operations used by data centers, among other requirements. The order also establishes an AI task force responsible for evaluating how the state government can address risks to Virginians like wo …

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