President Biden signed an executive order Tuesday designed to ensure that the AI industry will have plenty of compute and electrical power in the coming years by making federal lands available to expansive data centers and clean energy production facilities.
Specifically, the order directs federal agencies to fast-track large-scale AI infrastructure projects on federal land, make more federal sites available for data center and energy production projects, as well as integrate the new infrastructure into the local power grid. Both the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense are to each find three sites within their holdings where private companies might be able to build AI data centers before running “competitive solicitations” from prospective builders on those sites.
The order isn’t just a blank check for new AI projects; it imposes numerous safeguards and criteria on developers for how these projects can be built. These include requiring firms to pay for their facilities’ construction, as well as provide sufficient “clean energy” capabilities to fully power the data centers once they come online.
The race to achieve artificial general intelligence, the relentless drive to train ever larger language models in hopes the U.S. can beat out China for global leadership of the technology’s development has caused the electrical and cooling requirements for AI data centers to skyrocket in recent years. A Department of Energy report from December estimated that data center electricity draws have tripled in the last 10 years and are on pace to as much as triple again by 2028.
A new report from JLL doesn’t paint a much rosier picture, the real estate management firm figures data center power demands will only double by 2029. What’s more, current data center infrastructure tends to be geographically clustered, which strains local power grids, “distorting” how that power is delivered to customers and increasing the likelihood of brownouts.
AI will have a “profound implications for national security and enormous potential to improve Americans’ lives if harnessed responsibly, from helping cure disease to keeping communities safe by mitigating the effects of climate change,” President Biden said in a prepared statement. “However, we cannot take our lead for granted. We will not let America be out-built when it comes to the technology that will define the future, nor should we sacrifice critical environmental standards and our shared efforts to protect clean air and clean water.”
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.