An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes on July 17, 2024 in Stone Ridge, Virginia

An Amazon Web Services data center in Stone Ridge, Virginia (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

power hungry

AI data centers are devouring our energy and propping up fossil fuels

A new report finds the explosive growth of AI data centers is consuming a disproportionate amount of our energy generation.

Jon Keegan

1/23/25 1:12PM

The rush to build ever-larger, power-hungry data centers is a drag on America’s progress toward clean energy. And there’s no sign of things slowing down.

Earlier this month, Amazon announced it will be investing $11 billion to build out AI data centers in Georgia, and Microsoft announced it will be spending $80 billion on data centers around the world in FY 2025.

A new report from think tank Frontier Group, public research group US PIRG, and Environment America details this massive power consumption by the data centers leading the AI revolution and cryptocurrency.

The report highlights some startling data that illustrates the massive gap between power supply and demand.

Insatiable demand

In the states where tech giants have been pouring billions of dollars to rapidly build computing infrastructure for AI, the data centers are devouring huge percentages of each state’s power generation.

Virginia, which is home to a huge number of data centers, expended more than a quarter of the state’s total electricity generation to such data centers in 2023. For comparison, in 14 other states, less than 1% of the state electricity generated went to data centers, according to the report.

Another issue highlighted by the report is the huge variance in estimates for future power consumption forecasts. Analysts’ forecasts for growth of electricity demand from 2023 to 2030 varied between 29% to 166%, leaving states with no easy way to ensure enough supply.

Prolonging the use of fossil fuels

The study identified at least 17 fossil-fuel-fired power plants in five states that have moved to delay their phaseouts due to surging demand from data centers. The report identified new fossil fuel plants being planned to help meet demand with at least 10,808 MW of power, all which slow the country’s progress toward transitioning to renewable energy generation.

The report examined the impact on communities adjacent to these supersized data centers and found many significant impacts. The massive use of community water supply, noise pollution, and soaring energy price increases that get passed on to consumers were just some of the impacts.

Negligible societal benefits

The authors included several recommendations to address the concerns raised in the study. Among the recommendations is greater transparency from the tech companies that build these data centers, to better understand energy and water use by the facilities. Other suggestions include requiring new data centers to include on-site renewable energy sources, eliminating public subsidies for data centers, and a deprioritization of computing resources that produce “negligible societal benefits.”

President Trump’s executive order this week titled “Unleashing American Energy” doesn’t contain much to indicate that any of these recommendations will be implemented at a federal level, at least. The administration has made clear that it seeks to streamline the permitting and approvals to generate significantly more cheap energy to power the large AI infrastructure projects it’s supporting, such as the new $500 billion “Project Stargate” joint venture between Oracle, OpenAI, SoftBank, and its partner Nvidia.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5