All the latest updates on AI data centers

When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings about data centers, they started their testimony by citing a city law barring employment discrimination over political speech. Now, they’re accusing their employer of breaking that law by retaliating against them.

On June 10th — one week after the hearing, and one day after the City Council passed a milestone moratorium on data centers — Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand were each called into an impromptu meeting with Amazon’s “Employee Relations.” HR representatives told the employees that the company was investigating them and said there could be disciplinary action, up to and including termination. On Thursday, the three filed a legal complaint requesting that the Seattle Office for Civil Rights investigate the matter, alleging that Amazon engaged in prohibited employment discrimination.

Just after Seattle enacted a one-year data center moratorium that some of Amazon’s own employees pushed for, Amazon shared how much water its data centers use, reportedly for the first time. With concerns about water consumption and energy use a focus of new AI data center construction debates, Amazon says its global data center operations consumed 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025 at a rate of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour of electricity, dropping by 2 percent from its 2024 total even as it expanded operations.

Amazon also claims it’s using water more efficiently than some Big Tech rivals — this graphic in Amazon’s report points to Microsoft, Google, and Meta data showing each using more water per kilowatt-hour than Amazon did over the past few years.

At an event in San Francisco today, General Motors made a series of announcements around EV batteries, energy storage, and grid resiliency in the face of growing electricity demand from AI data centers. The automaker announced that it would be activating new vehicle-to-grid capabilities for its current EV and home energy customers. It’s releasing a new commercial energy storage system strategy, anchored by newly developed sodium-ion batteries for industrial-scale grid applications. And it’s launching a new feature for EV owners that it says will help simplify public charging.

Right now, millions of EVs are sitting idly in driveways across the country with a wealth of electrons stored in their batteries. GM is betting that even as EV sales cool down, public utilities will want to work with automakers to utilize those EV batteries as a potential solution to the energy demand crisis they face. It was also the latest effort by the largest automaker in North America to grab a piece of the multibillion-dollar energy generation and storage market, which it has been trying to do for nearly four years now.

A proposed $2 billion data center has become a political flashpoint in the small city of Shelbyville, Indiana. And the controversy has only grown more intense after the mayor, Scott Furgeson, was caught on camera saying of the “No Data Center” signs going up that, “I’ve seen a lot of these all over town, but I only see them in shitty houses,” before adding, “most of them are rentals.”

The woman speaking to him in the clip quickly pushes back, saying that they’re “working class,” and someone chimes in to add something that a mayor shouldn’t have to be told about their constituents: “it doesn’t matter whether they’re rentals, they’re still human beings.”

The New York State legislature passed a one-year moratorium on new large data centers, the first statewide ban of its kind if Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul signs it into law.

Lawmakers behind the bill say it’s meant to give policymakers time to understand the impact of large data centers on the environment and energy prices. It directs the state’s environmental agency to create an impact report assessing the amount of electricity, water, and land that data centers use, and the pollution they create. It also requires companies planning to build large data centers — defined as having a peak demand of at least 20 megawatts — to hold and fund a public hearing at least three months before it’s able to gain approval for the project. Hochul has not said whether she will sign the bill, and has until December to decide whether to sign or veto it, according to Bloomberg Government.

Kevin O’Leary agreed to halve the size of his planned 40,000-acre data center in Utah amid mounting pressure from residents and activists, as reported earlier by local affiliate ABC4. The Shark Tank star sent a letter to Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams on Thursday, saying that he will remove 19,430 acres from the project, located in and around the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area.

The change comes just days after Adams called on O’Leary to slash the size of his Stratos Project data center by 75 percent, which would reduce it to about 10,000 acres. Adams also asked O’Leary to implement technology that minimizes water consumption, as well as to divert excess water to the Great Salt Lake, which continues to shrink.

In the face of widespread backlash to the AI data center buildout throughout the US, Google is touting its efforts to minimize the environmental impact by actually increasing water for local communities.

The company laid out five commitments around water use in a new blog post published Wednesday, including a goal to replenish more water than it uses at its data centers by 2030. Google also said it will invest in local water infrastructure, identify alternative water sources to power its facilities, and be transparent about its water use overall.

Earlier this month, SpaceX and Anthropic announced a new compute partnership that provides access to the rocket company’s Colossus data centers in Memphis, TN. Now, with the release of SpaceX’s IPO filing, we have more details about that deal, including how much Anthropic is paying to Elon Musk’s company.

In its S-1 filing, SpaceX said that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to SpaceX’s AI training centers at Colossus I and Colossus II. That’s $15 billion annually, which could nearly double the $18.7 billion in revenue that SpaceX reported in all of 2025.

Utah may host one of the world’s most colossal data centers, despite stark warnings from experts and fierce public backlash. Earlier this month, commissioners in Box Elder County signed off on the Stratos Project: a 40,000-acre data center stretching across the county’s Hansel Valley. It’s supposed to establish American AI dominance, but potentially at the expense of environmental damage and a strain on already overtaxed water supplies.

The Stratos Project, backed by Shark Tank investor and venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, is projected to be more than twice the size of Manhattan and consume 9GW of power — almost double the state’s peak electricity demand in 2025. Its first phase is projected to cost more than $4 billion, according to Utah Money Watch. O’Leary positions it as a way for the US to become an AI superpower and bolster national defense by serving the government and “tech firm contractors.” “It shows the Chinese and the rest of the world we are not messing around,” he said during a Fox News interview last month.

When Oregon resident Isabelle Reksopuro heard Google was gobbling up public land to fuel its data centers in her home state, she didn’t initially know what to believe. “There’s a lot of misinformation about data centers,” she said. “Google has denied taking that land.”

Technically, she explains, The Dalles, a city near the Washington state border, sought to reclaim that land, “and Google is just a big, unnamed power user.” The city had in fact asked for ownership of a 150-acre portion of Mount Hood National Forest, claiming it needs access to Mount Hood’s watershed to meet municipal needs as its population — 16,010 as of the 2020 census — grows. But critics, including environmentalists, say the city is trying to secure more water for Google, which has a sprawling data center campus in The Dalles that already consumes about one-third of the city’s water supply.

Over 70 percent of Americans oppose AI data center construction in their area, according to a new Gallup survey. Just 7 percent said they were “strongly” in favor of new data centers. According to Gallup, data centers are so strongly disliked that Americans would prefer to live near a nuclear power plant than a data center — even at its peak, opposition to nuclear power plant construction topped out at 63 percent.

Gallup’s data is based on a March 2026 survey of 1,000 randomly selected American adults in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, along with an April 2026 survey of 2,054 adults “who are members of the Gallup Panel.” Among those in opposition, 50 percent said data centers’ impact on resources like water and electricity was their top concern. A Pew Research survey published earlier this month similarly reported that 43 percent of Americans view data centers as a “major reason” for skyrocketing power bills.

At its peak, the Androscoggin paper mill in Jay, Maine, a rural town about 67 miles northwest of Portland, employed about 1,500 people — until a pulp digester exploded in 2020, forcing the mill to close permanently.

In 2023, the 1.4 million-square-foot facility was purchased through a joint venture by JGT2 Redevelopment and a number of other holding and capital companies. The project is led by developer Tony McDonald. Over the next three years, McDonald and his team broke down the mill’s machinery and shipped it to Pakistan, and worked to clean up the industrial site for resale. That resale agreement was finalized earlier this year, according to McDonald — turning Jay into the latest flashpoint over giant data centers in America.