AI data centers dominated PowerGen, revealing how inference-driven demand, grid limits, and self-built power are reshaping the energy industry.
The post PowerGen’s Shock Pivot: How AI Data Centers Hijacked an Energy Conference appeared first on TechRepublic.
AI data centers dominated PowerGen, revealing how inference-driven demand, grid limits, and self-built power are reshaping the energy industry.
The post PowerGen’s Shock Pivot: How AI Data Centers Hijacked an Energy Conference appeared first on TechRepublic.
Someone listening to last week’s GeekWire Podcast caught something we missed: a misleading comment by Alexa during our voice ordering demo — illustrating the challenges of ordering by voice vs. screen. We followed up with Amazon, which says it has fixed the underlying bug.
On this week’s show, we play the audio of the order again. Can you catch it?
Plus, Microsoft announces a “community first” approach to AI data centers after backlash over power and water usage — and President Trump scooped us on the story. We discuss the larger issues and play a highlight from our interview with Microsoft President Brad Smith.
Also: the technology capturing images of every fan at Lumen Field, UK police blame Copilot for a hallucinated soccer match, and Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman departs six months after the company’s acquisition by Rocket.
Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Audio editing by Curt Milton.
On Thursday, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) reported record fourth-quarter earnings and said it expects AI chip demand to continue for years. During an earnings call, CEO C.C. Wei told investors that while he cannot predict the semiconductor industry's long-term trajectory, he remains bullish on AI.
TSMC manufactures chips for companies including Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm, making it a linchpin of the global electronics supply chain. The company produces the vast majority of the world's most advanced semiconductors, and its factories in Taiwan have become a focal point of US-China tensions over technology and trade. When TSMC reports strong demand and ramps up spending, it signals that the companies designing AI chips expect years of continued growth.
"All in all, I believe in my point of view, the AI is real—not only real, it's starting to grow into our daily life. And we believe that is kind of—we call it AI megatrend, we certainly would believe that," Wei said during the call. "So another question is 'can the semiconductor industry be good for three, four, five years in a row?' I'll tell you the truth, I don't know. But I look at the AI, it looks like it's going to be like an endless—I mean, that for many years to come."
© BING-JHEN HONG via Getty Images
On Thursday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced API access deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, expanding its effort to get major tech companies to pay for high-volume API access to Wikipedia content, which these companies use to train AI models like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.
The deals mean that most major AI developers have now signed on to the foundation's Wikimedia Enterprise program, a commercial subsidiary that sells high-speed API access to Wikipedia's 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes than the free public APIs provide. Wikipedia's content remains freely available under a Creative Commons license, but the Enterprise program charges for faster, higher-volume access to the data. The foundation did not disclose the financial terms of the deals.
The new partners join Google, which signed a deal with Wikimedia Enterprise in 2022, as well as smaller companies like Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media. The revenue helps offset infrastructure costs for the nonprofit, which otherwise relies on small public donations while watching its content become a staple of training data for AI models.
© Wikipedia
President Donald Trump pressures Microsoft and Big Tech to cover the costs of powering AI data centers as rising electricity bills spark consumer concerns.
The post Trump Warns Microsoft: Don’t Make Americans Pay for AI Electricity appeared first on TechRepublic.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a new initiative called "Community-First AI Infrastructure" that commits the company to paying full electricity costs for its data centers and refusing to seek local property tax reductions.
As demand for generative AI services has increased over the past year, Big Tech companies have been racing to spin up massive new data centers for serving chatbots and image generators that can have profound economic effects on the surrounding areas where they are located. Among other concerns, communities across the country have grown concerned that data centers are driving up residential electricity rates through heavy power consumption and by straining water supplies due to server cooling needs.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that global data center electricity demand will more than double by 2030, reaching around 945 TWh, with the United States responsible for nearly half of total electricity demand growth over that period. This growth is happening while much of the country's electricity transmission infrastructure is more than 40 years old and under strain.
© Bloomberg via Getty Images
President Donald Trump pressures Microsoft and Big Tech to cover the costs of powering AI data centers as rising electricity bills spark consumer concerns.
The post Trump Warns Microsoft: Don’t Make Americans Pay for AI Electricity appeared first on TechRepublic.
President Trump was right about Microsoft — but he only leaked part of the story.
Microsoft is changing its approach to building massive data centers for artificial intelligence, unveiling what it calls a “community first” initiative in response to growing opposition from people across the country facing higher electricity bills and dwindling water supplies.
The new plan, announced Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C, includes pledges to pay the company’s full power costs, reject local property tax breaks, replenish more water than it uses, train local workers, and invest in AI education and community programs.
“This sector worked one way in the past, and needs to work in some different ways going forward,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft president and vice chair, in an interview with GeekWire. He later described the shift as “both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do.”
Trump made headlines Monday night with a Truth Social post in advance of the news, saying his administration has been working with tech companies “to secure their commitment to the American People.” He called Microsoft “first up” and said it would “make major changes … to ensure that Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption.”
Microsoft’s rollout comes at a critical juncture for tech.
Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and others are betting hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, but those ambitions hinge on their ability to build out the infrastructure to support them — a prospect that depends increasingly on the cooperation of local communities that have grown skeptical of the costs and tradeoffs.
Smith said Microsoft has been developing its initiative since September. He described it as a response to shifting public sentiment — which he witnessed firsthand during visits to his home state of Wisconsin for Microsoft’s data center expansion. Back in 2024, local residents wanted to talk about jobs. By last October, the big topics were electricity prices and water use.
“We saw this catch fire, to a degree, for many other companies in many other places around the country as each month unfolded,” he said.
In data‑center hubs such as Virginia, Illinois and Ohio, residential power prices jumped 12–16% over the past year — noticeably faster than the U.S. average, according to U.S. government data — as grid operators scrambled to add capacity for large new facilities.
The issue has drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Last month, three Democratic senators launched an investigation into whether tech giants are raising residential power bills, sending letters to Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta. An Amazon-funded study found that the company more than covers the utility costs associated with its electricity use in some regions.
Microsoft’s new approach, as outlined in a post by Smith, is a clear departure from its own past practices. The company has accepted tax abatements for data centers in states including Ohio and Iowa, and its identity was kept under wraps in a Michigan township until recently.
In the interview, Smith promised new levels of transparency.
He acknowledged that the traditional approach in the industry was for companies to buy land under nondisclosure agreements to avoid driving up prices — giving them a competitive edge but leaving communities in the dark about who was moving in and how they would operate.
“That is clearly not the path that’s going to take us forward,” he said. The companies that succeed with data centers in the long run, he added, “will be the companies that have a strong and healthy relationship with local communities.”
Asked if Microsoft hopes to inspire or compel others to follow suit, Smith stopped short of positioning Microsoft as the sole leader, crediting Amazon for “really good and well-executed work in this space” while adding that “the industry is going to need to set a higher bar for itself.”
Microsoft’s plan starts by addressing the electricity issue, pledging to work with utilities and regulators to ensure its electricity costs aren’t passed on to residential customers. Smith cited a new “Very Large Customers” rate structure in Wisconsin as a model, where data centers pay the full cost of the power they use, including grid upgrades required to support them.
The company’s other commitments include:
Microsoft did not say how much it plans to spend on these new initiatives, separate from its broader capital expenditures, which approached $35 billion in its first fiscal quarter.
Asked if the company would truly be able to follow through on all of these commitments, Smith said, “we have to follow through.” Internally, he said, Microsoft is “bringing some groups together” and “adding resources” to execute the plan, describing it as essential to the company’s long-term business strategy.
As for how Microsoft’s position squares with OpenAI’s push for federal incentives to support large-scale AI infrastructure projects, Smith drew a distinction. He said he supports federal help with permitting and land access, but not electricity subsidies.
“When it comes to things like electricity prices, when it comes to the water system, when it comes to training for local jobs, these are local issues,” he said.
Smith’s post references the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan and pledges to work with the Department of Labor on workforce programs. Microsoft says it will announce specific community partnerships during the first week of July, timed to America’s 250th anniversary.
Nvidia unveiled the Vera Rubin AI computing platform at CES 2026, claiming up to 10x lower inference token costs and faster training for MoE models.
The post Nvidia Introduces Vera Rubin, a New AI Supercomputing Platform Built to Slash Costs appeared first on TechRepublic.
Nvidia unveiled the Vera Rubin AI computing platform at CES 2026, claiming up to 10x lower inference token costs and faster training for MoE models.
The post Nvidia Introduces Vera Rubin, a New AI Supercomputing Platform Built to Slash Costs appeared first on TechRepublic.
Elon Musk is rapidly scaling xAI’s Colossus data center into a hyperscale AI powerhouse, raising stakes around power, cost, and the AI arms race.
The post Elon Musk Is Turning ‘Colossus’ Data Center Into a 2-Gigawatt AI Behemoth appeared first on TechRepublic.
Elon Musk is rapidly scaling xAI’s Colossus data center into a hyperscale AI powerhouse, raising stakes around power, cost, and the AI arms race.
The post Elon Musk Is Turning ‘Colossus’ Data Center Into a 2-Gigawatt AI Behemoth appeared first on TechRepublic.
The past year may go down as one of the most consequential in technology history, in both the Seattle tech community and the world. But in some ways, it’s not without precedent.
As we sat down to reflect on the past year, we rewound all the way back to January — when, as part of a larger discussion with Bill Gates, we asked the Microsoft co-founder to compare the early days of the PC with these early years of AI.
Gates reflected on the PC era as a moment of computing becoming free, effectively.
“Now what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free,” he said, “and that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.”
As we looked through GeekWire’s top stories of the year, almost every one felt like a subplot to that larger narrative. On this special year-end episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we reviewed the articles that resonated most with readers, and compared notes to make sense of it all.
Listen below, and continue reading for episode notes and links.
“We look forward to joining Matt on his private island next year.” — Kiana Ehsani, CEO of Vercept, after her co-founder Matt Deitke left to join Meta for a reported hundreds of millions of dollars.
Proud Seattleite and grammarian Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!, correcting a contestant: “Sorry, Dan, we are sticklers in Seattle. It’s Pike Place — no s.”
Ambika Singh, CEO and founder of Armoire, accepting the Workplace of the Year award at the GeekWire Awards: “It is not a surprise to any of you that we are losing community outside of these walls in this country. But here, it feels alive and well.”
Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Audio editing by Curt Milton
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