A hot potato: GitHub has announced that starting April 24, the company will begin using interaction data from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users to train and improve its AI models unless they opt out.

John Steinbach was shocked to receive a $281 electricity bill in January 2026—a huge spike from the roughly $100 he’d paid the previous month. “It’s just so far beyond any bill that I’ve ever had,” he ...

Google has signed agreements with five U.S. electric utilities in states from Arkansas to Minnesota to curtail its electricity use during periods of peak demand, the company said on March 19, in its ...

Roughly one in five student interactions with generative artificial intelligence on school technology involved cheating, self-harm, bullying, and other problematic behaviors, according to data ...

OpenAI's Sam Altman says AI's water concerns are "totally fake." The truth about AI's impact on natural resources is more complicated. Macy is a writer on the AI Team. She covers how AI is changing ...

Meta struck a massive chip deal with Nvidia that includes new standalone CPUs and next-generation GPUs and Vera Rubin rack-scale systems. The social media giant will also use Nvidia for networking ...

Water consumption by data centers and cryptomining facilities will be the focus of a new data-collection effort launched Friday by the Texas Public Utility Commission. Demand to build new data centers ...

Data center operators and utilities often do not disclose facility-specific energy and water usage data. The Republic built a database to estimate data centers' energy capacity by analyzing air ...

The proliferation of data centers in Arizona raises concerns about the strain on the state's water and power resources. Existing and planned data centers in Maricopa County could nearly double the ...

Water powers our lives. It feeds our crops, keeps factories running, generates electricity, and fills our taps. But until now, no one had a clear, national picture of how much water we're using—and ...