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The wildfires blazing across the continent aren’t isolated to the mainland. A fire raging in eastern England forced dozens of evacuations and put the Sizewell B nuclear plant, which just won approval to extend its license this month, on emergency alert.
As quickly as public opinion over data centers is plummeting, local ordinances barring or limiting construction of new facilities are proliferating. More than 530 such statutes are now in place all over the country, and the vast majority were enacted this year, according to an extensive review of public records conducted by Heatmap Pro that my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote up. These restrictions are driving a wave of project cancellations.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is in what The Wall Street Journal described as “advanced talks” with banks to borrow $15 billion to build a sweeping new data center and power-generating complex. The deal would be backed by a consortium of banks led by Morgan Stanley and would back the project in Hubbard, Texas, which would include a 1.6-gigawatt natural gas power plant. To raise the debt, Google has provided guarantees for billions of dollars of the Claude maker’s lease and obligations to pay for electricity.
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The Federal Communications Commission’s ban on imported inverters, the devices that help patch solar panels into data centers and onto the grid, will have little effect on the buildout of panels in the U.S., according to the latest assessment from the consultancy BloombergNEF. "We expect the ban to have limited impact on U.S. solar and energy storage project deployment, given that it allows current models to still be sold," the consultancy wrote in a memo. U.S. factories cannot meet demand on their own, matching only 18% of the American market in 2025.
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Workers at the Saritag antimony mine in western Tajikistan. STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. needs antimony to make ammunition, semiconductors, and batteries. But the country stopped mining the lustrous gray metalloid back in 1983. Since then, China has dominated the global market, with Russia trailing in second place and Tajikistan in a steady third, according to the latest U.S. Geological Survey data. Now America is getting back into the antimony game. On Thursday, the U.S. unveiled a new modular mineral processing plant designed to establish a new end-to-end domestic supply chain for antimony, Mining.com reported. The project is supported by the mining company Perpetua Resources, the U.S. Army, and the Idaho National Laboratory. Backed by billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson, Perpetua was designated last year by the Trump administration for a fast-track permitting program. In May, the federal Export-Import Bank gave the project a $2.9 billion loan.
It’s a good time for energy startups. Fresh off Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ $1 billion round yesterday, Antora Energy, the thermal battery startup that converts electricity into heat with large carbon blocks, just netted $550 million in a Series C. Meant to help the company ramp up production, the funding round comes after the company launched one of the largest battery storage projects in the world, a 5-gigawatt-hour system in South Dakota that was built in less than a year. “From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth,” Andrew Ponec, Antora’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Antora has shown we can help break that bottleneck — delivering energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation. With this funding round, we’re continuing to strengthen our investment in U.S. manufacturing, delivering affordable energy across the country and around the world.”
Mexico is getting ready to do something about the algae. This week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government will create a comprehensive plan to free the country from a vast bloom of sargassum. While not dangerous to humans, the seaweed can rot on shore and emit foul odors.
This story was updated with a quote directly from BloombergNEF's analyst memo.
Meanwhile, a federal Superfund site at a facility in Kentucky once used to enrich uranium for atomic bombs is being transformed into a data center. On Wednesday, the Department of Energy announced a deal between investment giant Brookfield, utility behemoth NextEra Energy, and three local power providers to redevelop portions of the Paducah site into a $100 billion data center campus. “By transforming former DOE sites into engines of innovation and economic growth, we can revitalize communities with increased tax revenue and thousands of jobs, while also strengthening America’s energy security,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release.
The Federal Reserve held the country’s benchmark interest rate steady at Wednesday’s meeting of the U.S. central bank’s top brass. But three bank presidents voted to increase rates as renewed fighting in Iran sent energy prices upward. The dissent “underscored officials’ fraying patience with looking past another price shock on the heels of tariff-related increases last year and with robust demand stemming from the artificial-intelligence buildout,” The Wall Street Journal reported. That is, of course, bad news for renewables and other clean energy developers who rely on cheap upfront money to build, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has written.
But there are potentially bigger problems afoot for American energy consumers. U.S. crude stockpiles fell sharply last week as American refineries ramped up production to seize on surging fuel prices as fighting erupted in Iran. The stocks have now reached “precariously low” levels, analysts told the Financial Times, meaning there’s far less cushion if the war worsens the supply shock.
Last month, the energy team at the liberal policy shop Third Way assembled 100 swing voters from across the country to talk about the data centers that poll after poll shows are becoming less and less popular, to put it mildly. The conclusion of the discussions was this: “America’s opposition to data centers has less to do with their feelings about artificial intelligence and more to do with their anger and distrust of large corporations and government.” The findings, shared with me exclusively in advance, showed that most participants were open to a new data center if they believed it would come with tangible benefits for their communities. While some investors, such as “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary, have tried to present those offerings, “the trust isn’t there.” While Emily Becker, the director of Communications for Third Way’s Climate and Energy Program, told me she was “not surprised by how much opposition there was, what was heartening is people understood that benefits were possible. They just didn’t think they would receive them.”
Speaking of data centers and the public trust: NV Energy has accused one of the biggest developers of data centers in Nevada of attempting to illegally bypass state regulators to determine through private arbitration how and when the Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility should provide power to its operations. The lawsuit, filed Friday in Washoe County’s Second Judicial District Court, alleges that the developer, Tract, is trying to skirt the usual process by which the state Public Utilities Commission determines what share of the utility’s electricity should go to the large power user. Tract, according to the complaint, “wants NV Energy to reserve and provide enormous amounts of power for Tract's private development while shifting the infrastructure and energy costs to Nevada families, small businesses, and existing customers who did not cause them.” Sorting out those questions through arbitration would help to “keep these issues hidden” from state regulators and the public, NV Energy said, according to The Nevada Independent.
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A transformer factory in Jiangsu Province, China. Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
When the Biden administration attempted to overhaul regulations on electrical transformers to make the key grid components more efficient, the proposal drew fierce bipartisan pushback amid a years-long nationwide shortage of the equipment. Ultimately, the Biden administration backed down and changed the proposal after receiving public comments. That would have seemed to provide some certainty for factories. But just two years after the final rule won acclaim from across the industry, the Trump administration is now considering revising the requirements for rules set to take effect in 2029. “We’re not aware of anyone asking for this,” Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told Utility Dive. The group supported the 2024 transformer rule and other stricter efficiency requirements DOE finalized during the Biden administration.
China has signaled it’s planning to take on what Bloomberg described as a bigger role in steering global negotiations over climate change. The 15th five-year plan published Monday by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and other key agencies outlines how Beijing “will constructively lead the multilateral governance process to address climate change” and states that “China’s influence, guiding capacity, shaping power, and moral appeal in global climate governance will be significantly enhanced” through the end of the decade. Beijing is already looking to increase how much renewable energy it consumes, as I told you last week.
As you may recall, China is going all in on figuring out how to make green hydrogen work, especially now that the People’s Republic is throwing everything at the wall to diversify its domestic supply of fuels as the Iran War chokes off its regular supply of hydrocarbons. One of the trickier questions with green hydrogen is how to ship the world’s small molecules without leaks. A popular solution is to convert the hydrogen into green ammonia. On Tuesday, SPIC Green Energy announced the successful loading of 3,750 metric tons of green ammonia produced in Jilin Province onto a vessel at the Lianyungang Port in Jiangsu Province and shipped to South Korea. “The shipment represents the world’s largest single-batch delivery of green ammonia,” analyst Jian Wu wrote in his China Hydrogen Bulletin newsletter. “It marks China’s transition from technical demonstration to large-scale international commercial delivery.”
A company promising to put an expiration date on so-called forever chemicals just raised a bunch of money to bring its technology to market. Claros Technologies is developing a proprietary system that can break down the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, contaminating millions of Americans’ drinking water systems. This week, the startup closed a $55 million Series B financing round. “Over the past year, Claros has crossed the threshold from breakthrough technology to successful commercial reality,” CEO Michelle Bellanca said in a statement.
