Ha Dang, a self-taught accountant from Scunthorpe who trained via YouTube, won the inaugural Microsoft Excel UK Championships on September 30. The victory earned him a spot at the Microsoft Excel World Championships in Las Vegas, a three-day tournament inside a 30,000-square-foot esports arena where players compete for $5,000 and are broadcast on ESPN.
Thirty competitors sat shoulder to shoulder through three gruelling rounds of spreadsheet challenges. Each round featured a custom case with seven levels of increasing difficulty. The second round case, Right Royal Battle Part II, took 80 drafts to perfect. Players calculated troop sizes from emoji battalions and army movements across fourteenth-century France. Hadyn Wiseman, who once held the Guinness World Record for most backflips in a minute, placed fourth. Lara Holding-Jones finished thirteenth. Jaq Kennedy founded the UK chapter last year. National chapters have since formed in Germany, Brazil, and Chile.
As we careen toward a future in which Google has final say over what apps you can run, the company has sought to assuage the community’s fears with a blog post and a casual “backstage” video. Google has said again and again since announcing the change that sideloading isn’t going anywhere, but it’s definitely not going to be as easy. The new information confirms app installs will be more reliant on the cloud, and devs can expect new fees, but there will be an escape hatch for hobbyists.
Confirming app verification status will be the job of a new system component called the Android Developer Verifier, which will be rolled out to devices in the next major release of Android 16. Google explains that phones must ensure each app has a package name and signing keys that have been registered with Google at the time of installation. This process may break the popular FOSS storefront F-Droid.
It would be impossible for your phone to carry a database of all verified apps, so this process may require Internet access. Google plans to have a local cache of the most common sideloaded apps on devices, but for anything else, an Internet connection is required. Google suggests alternative app stores will be able to use a pre-auth token to bypass network calls, but it’s still deciding how that will work.
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You can get Microsoft Windows 11 Pro on sale for just $10 right now on StackSocial, which would typically cost $200 at the Microsoft Store. The sale ends October 12. Once you’ve purchased, the redemption code and setup instructions will be sent to your inbox. Just make sure your system meets the minimum requirements (like a 1GHz processor, 4GB RAM, TPM 2.0, and UEFI firmware, among others). This isn’t an upgrade path for unsupported PCs—it’s a fresh install for machines that meet the full list of Windows 11 Pro requirements.
The Windows 11 Pro layout is cleaner, Snap Layouts and virtual desktops make multitasking smoother, and redocking windows actually works like you’d expect. If you’re into voice typing or just want better search across apps and docs, it delivers. Windows 11 Pro also includes some solid professional tools, such as BitLocker for encryption, Hyper-V for virtualization, and even a sandbox mode for testing apps safely. You’re also getting DirectX 12 Ultimate, so your hardware can shine during gaming or graphics-intensive tasks, assuming your machine is sufficiently powerful.
Windows 11 Pro also doubles down with biometric login, Smart App Control, and TPM 2.0 requirements, which makes it a tougher nut to crack. It also includes the new AI-powered Copilot and baked-in Microsoft Teams support, which might appeal to remote workers. Just a heads up, you won’t get an Office upgrade bundled in with this deal—this is strictly a Windows license. It will work alongside Office if you have a separate license, though (if you’re on a Mac using Parallels Pro). Overall, this $10 deal is about as straightforward and affordable as it gets.
Along with launching a bevy of new hardware to get customers into its ecosystem, Amazon continues to work on making shopping as friction free as possible. Amazon Prime members will now be able to utilize a new feature dubbed “Add to Delivery” that will make it a breeze to add items to an order without having to go through the steps of creating
Social media usage peaked in 2022 and has been on a steady decline since. An analysis of 250,000 adults across more than 50 countries by the digital audience insights company GWI found that adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024. That figure is down almost 10% from 2022. The decline is most pronounced among teenagers and people in their twenties.
Usage has traced a smooth curve upward and then downward over the past decade. This is not simply the unwinding of increased screen time during pandemic lockdowns. The data also captured a shift in how people use these platforms. The share of people who report using social media to stay in touch with friends, express themselves or meet new people has fallen by more than a quarter since 2014.
Opening the apps reflexively to fill spare time has risen. North America is an exception to the global trend. Social media consumption there continues to climb. By 2024 it reached levels 15% higher than Europe. Meta and OpenAI recently announced new social platforms that will be filled with AI-generated short-form videos.
As generative AI has taken off since ChatGPT’s debut, inspiring hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and infrastructure developments, the top question on many people’s minds has been: Is generative AI a bubble, and if so, when will it pop?
To help us potentially answer that question, I’ll be hosting a live conversation with prominent AI critic Ed Zitron on October 7 at 3:30 pm ET as part of the Ars Live series. As Ars Technica’s senior AI reporter, I’ve been tracking both the explosive growth of this industry and the mounting skepticism about its sustainability.
There’s a long list of reasons US stability is now teetering between “Fyre Festival” and “Charlie Sheen’s ‘Tiger Blood’ era.” Now you can add cybersecurity to the tally. A crucial cyber defense law, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015), has lapsed. With the government out of commission, the nation’s computer networks are more exposed for… who knows how long. Welcome to 2025, baby.
CISA 2015 promotes the sharing of cyber threat information between the private and public sectors. It includes legal protections for companies that might otherwise hesitate to share that data. The law promotes “cyber threat information sharing with industry and government partners within a secure policy and legal framework,” a coalition of industry groups wrote in a letter to Congress last week.
As Cybersecurity Diveexplains, CISA 2015 shields companies from antitrust liability, regulatory enforcement, private lawsuits and FOIA disclosures. Without it, sharing gets more complicated. “There will just be many more lawyers involved, and it will all go slower, particularly new sharing agreements,” Ari Schwartz, cybersecurity director at the law firm Venable, told the publication. That could make it easier for adversaries like Russia and China to conduct cyberattacks.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY)
Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images
Before the shutdown, there was support for renewal from the private sector, the Trump administration and bipartisan members of Congress. One of the biggest roadblocks was Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. He objected to reauthorizing the law without changes to some of his pet issues. Notably, he wanted to add language that would neuter the ability to combat misinformation and disinformation. He canceled his planned revision of the bill after a backlash from his peers. The committee then failed to approve any version before the expiration date.
Meanwhile, House Republicans included a short-term CISA 2015 renewal in its government funding bill. But Democrats, whose support the GOP needs, wouldn’t support the Continuing Resolution for other reasons. They want Affordable Care Act premium tax credits extended beyond their scheduled expiration at the end of the year. Without an extension, Americans’ already spiking health insurance premiums will continue to skyrocket.
In its letter to Congress last week, the industry coalition warned that the expiration of CISA 2015 would lead to “a more complex and dangerous” security landscape. “Sharing information about cyber threats and incidents makes it harder for attackers because defenders learn what to watch for and prioritize,” the group wrote. “As a result, attackers must invest more in new tools or target different victims.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/congress-let-a-key-cybersecurity-law-expire-this-week-leaving-us-networks-more-vulnerable-174529522.html?src=rss
A new study found that climate change has driven a surge of “societally disastrous” wildfires over the last four decades, with 43% of the most costly events occurring in the last 10 years.
Acting on a demand from the Trump administration, Apple has removed apps that let iPhone users report the locations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement to Fox News yesterday. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed.”
Apple confirmed it removed multiple apps after hearing from law enforcement. “We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” an Apple statement to news organizations said. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.”
HBO Max subscribers will no longer be able to watch CNN from the streaming platform as of November 17, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) informed customers today.
After this date, HBO Max subscribers will still be able to watch some CNN content, including shows and documentaries, on demand.
The CNN Max livestream for HBO Max launched as an open beta in September 2023. Since then, it has featured live programming from CNN’s US arm and CNN International, as well as content made specifically for HBO Max.
I kept repeating that to myself when I first saw the 2026 Nissan Leaf in person, like the oft-memed Tiffany Haddish clip. I quickly learned it’s hard not to love this third iteration of the Leaf. Its seats feel wonderfully comfortable, its infotainment screens are wide and immersive and its electromagnetic sunroof seemed like something meant for a far more premium car. I tested the highest-end Leaf, which retails for $38,990, but it still offers plenty of value at that price. And it makes me think the entry-level $30,000 model — which has smaller screens, cheaper seats and no sunroof — would be similarly great. Once again, the Nissan Leaf holds the crown as the ideal cheap EV.
It’s easy to forget what a revolutionary vehicle Nissan’s original Leaf was. Released in 2010 for under $33,000, it was the first truly affordable EV on the market. Sure it was small and didn’t go very far, but Nissan eventually fixed those issues with the second-gen model (which I ended up buying earlier this year). But that came at a time when the world was more hyped to see Tesla enter the fray with cheaper cars like the Model 3 and Model Y, and the Leaf was once again overshadowed when other automakers joined the EV arena.
Now the Leaf is back and better than ever. Its compact SUV styling makes it look more futuristic than the basic hatchback design of the previous model, it can get up to 300 miles of range (up from a maximum of 212 miles with the earlier Leaf SV Plus) and it offers more cargo space with the rear seats down (55.5 cubic feet compared to 30 cubic feet). And with the Leaf’s new turquoise color option, it truly stands out on the road. While it didn’t turn as many heads during my testing as the VW id.Buzz, several neighbors commented that it simply looks cool.
On a fundamental level, the 2026 Nissan Leaf shouts “hot new EV” in ways the old one simply didn’t. Its sloped roofline and unique side profile makes it simultaneously seem like a sporty coupe and a tiny SUV. Its front and rear LED lights give off sci-fi vibes. Those same neighbors who were intrigued by this Leaf didn’t even realize I had a 2018 model parked right beside it. They just thought that was a boring old hatchback. Since its inception, the Nissan Leaf’s design has gone from a quirky curiosity to a car that was desperately aiming for the mainstream. This time around, Nissan’s design choices feel supremely confident.
Stepping into the Leaf makes that all the more clear: I loved its soft synthetic leather seats, which perfectly supported my aching back once I tweaked the lumbar support settings. Its enormous dual 14.3-inch infotainment screens also make a striking impression. The first screen, situated behind the steering wheel, makes it easy to see your current speed, charge level and additional driving information. But it’s the center screen that takes the cake — it’s gloriously colorful and bright enough to be visible in harsh sunlight. It’s perfect for the Leaf’s built-in Google Maps navigation, but it’s even better when using wireless CarPlay, since every app fills the entire screen. (And thankfully, wireless CarPlay and Android Auto support are available on every Leaf trim.)
The base 2026 Leaf has cloth seats and two 12.3-inch screens, but from photos I’ve seen they still look like a step up from most infotainment setups. My review model also had a 10-speaker “Bose Personal Plus” audio system, which includes small speakers inside the headrests of the driver and passenger seats. That makes music sound a bit more immersive, but more importantly, it also serves as a covert way to deliver navigation instructions to the driver without distracting everyone else in the car. During my testing, I found that the Bose system felt rich and detailed for most music (it has a small subwoofer, so anything bass-heavy sounded muddled), and I genuinely appreciated having directions whispered into my ears.
Here the sunroof is partially shaded.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
The Leaf’s panoramic sunroof, which is only available on the high-end Platinum+ FWD trim, also makes a striking impression. It lets in tons of light while blocking the heat of the sun, and it can also become opaque at the touch of a button with so-called Polymer Dispersed Crystal Display technology. You can also have it shade only part of the car, which is helpful when I’d like some light, but my kids in the back seat don’t. The shaded mode still lets in diffuse light, but it’s not powerful enough to cast shadows (it acts almost like a total solar filter, allowing you to see the sun safely). It doesn’t darken the Leaf much, though, so you might need an additional shade for napping babies.
According to Christian Spencer, a Nissan senior manager and engineer, the company found that the sunroof’s shading technology also allowed for more headroom. Adding a traditional retracting shade would have shaved off a few much-needed inches. As it stands, the Leaf’s wide and round roof should easily fit very tall drivers and passengers. In a conversation with Engadget, Spencer noted that Nissan also brought over some design elements from existing vehicles, like the Z sports car, Rogue SUV and Ariya EV. In particular, the new Leaf’s sturdy 4-link suspension comes directly from the Ariya, and it helps to make the car feel much more stable over bumps and at high speeds.
This is one of two charging ports on the 2026 Leaf.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
That’s something I definitely noticed during a recent 100-mile round trip. The Leaf is zippy to get to highway speed thanks to its 214-horsepower electric motor (up from 147hp on the previous gen, but matching the same performance of the previous higher-end SV Plus models). The revamped Leaf also feels very solid while cruising alongside much larger cars and in chaotic winds, whereas the previous model always felt a bit unstable at high speeds. The overall rigidity leads to slightly mushy steering on the 2026 Leaf, but I still found it more comfortable to drive than Kia’s similarly-sized EV6. My wife and kids, who care less about driving dynamics, noted that it just felt very smooth to ride in.
My 100-mile trip brought the leaf down to 60 percent from a full charge, which is in line with the 259 miles of range available on my Platinum+ review model. (Curiously, you lose range as you step up the Leaf’s specs. I’m sure the large 19-inch tires didn’t help with efficiency — the cheaper models have 18-inch tires.) I was able to charge the Leaf from 65 percent to 100 percent overnight with a standard Level 1 charger. In addition to the standard J1772 port for Level 1 and 2 charging at home, the Leaf also includes a Tesla-style (NACS, above) port for high-speed refills at Tesla Superchargers. That makes the 2026 Leaf far more suitable for road trips than the older model, which was stuck with an archaic CHAdeMO port for fast charging.
The nissan Leaf 2018 (left) next to the 2026 model (right).
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
A major difference I noticed from my 2018 Leaf is that the new model actually feels like a true electric car internally, rather than being built out of a frame that was originally designed for a gas-powered vehicle. The annoying center console from the second-gen Leaf — which was made out of cheap plastic, and led to so much knee banging I had to install a cushion — is completely gone, replaced with room for a small backpack or purse by your right foot. The new Leaf’s floor also sits very low, which gives second-row passengers a ton of leg room.
Not every change is a true step forward, though. While the 2026 Leaf offers more overall cargo space than the previous version, it loses 3.6 cubic feet of storage when the rear seats are up. And if you’ve got kids in car seats, those rear chairs will always be up. I was able to fit in a small tricycle, two scooters, protective gear and a small cooler during a recent trip, but it was definitely a tight squeeze. On a brighter note, I was at least able to fit in a large combination car seat and smaller booster chair without issue. I also really appreciated Nissan’s easily accessible LATCH connections, which are brightly colored and easily visible. You don’t have to go fishing around for them under cushions like on other cars.
Here you can see a Doona tricycle, two scooters and a cooler.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
There’s also bad news for fans of one pedal driving: Nissan has dumped its original “E-pedal” feature for “E-step,” which can dramatically slow the Leaf with regenerative braking, but won’t fully stop the car. According to Spencer, that’s partially due to Japanese regulators, who prefer having the brake be the only way to fully stop a car. But it’s a bummer if you’ve gotten used to the convenience of one-pedal driving and never touching the brakes, a feature that Nissan helped to pioneer with the second-gen Leaf. Spencer says the company has heard plenty of feedback about the loss of true one pedal driving though, so it could be a feature Nissan implements again down the line.
I’d consider those complaints minor quibbles, though. The 2026 Leaf is more attractive and feature-rich than the $34,000 Hyundai Kona EV or Chevy Equinox, and it also has the backing of a company with far more experience in the EV arena. While I’d still recommend looking at used EV options — I’ve seen great cars like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 dip to $25,000 or less — the 2026 Leaf is simply hard to beat.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/nissan-leaf-2026-review-still-the-budget-ev-to-beat-173000858.html?src=rss
ASUS just announced the ExpertCenter PN54-S1 Mini PC, a follow-up to its existing line of PN54 Mini PCs aimed at enterprise customers. The ASUS ExpertCenter PN-54-S1 Mini PC is a lower-end version of the PN54, now touting Ryzen 200 Series processors instead of the Ryzen 300 Series. In turn, these PCs should be lower priced than their Ryzen
Jeff Bezos told an audience on Friday that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next ten to twenty years. The Amazon founder said these orbital facilities would eventually outperform their terrestrial counterparts because space offers uninterrupted solar power around the clock.
Bezos was speaking in a fireside chat with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann. He said the giant training clusters needed for AI would be better built in space because there are no clouds, rain or weather to interrupt power generation. Bezos predicted that space-based data centers would beat the cost of Earth-based ones within a couple of decades. He described the shift as part of a broader pattern that has already occurred with weather satellites and communication satellites. The next steps would be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing.
ICEBlock, an app designed to inform users of reported sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents within a 5-mile radius, has been removed from the Apple App Store. The app rose to prominence during the immigration raids that took place in several cities earlier this year. Apple made the move to ban the app after being pressured
With the AI boom, construction of new data centers has skyrocketed, and not without consequence — some communities that count these facilities as neighbors are now facing water shortages and strained power supplies. While tech’s data center footprint has been growing for decades, generative AI has seemingly shifted the impacts of these operations toward the catastrophic. What exactly makes these new data centers such a burden on the environment and existing infrastructure, and is there anything we can do to fix it?
Chips
The industry believes AI will work its way into every corner of our lives, and so needs to build sufficient capacity to address that anticipated demand. But the hardware used to make AI work is so much more resource-intensive than standard cloud computing facilities that it requires a dramatic shift in how data centers are engineered.
Typically the most important part of a computer is its “brain,” the Central Processing Unit (CPU). It’s designed to compute a wide variety of tasks, tackling them one at a time. Imagine a CPU as a one-lane motorway in which every vehicle, no matter the size, can get from A to B at extraordinary speed. What AI relies on instead are Graphics Processing Units (GPU), which are clusters of smaller, more specialized processors all running in parallel. In the example, a GPU is a thousand-lane motorway with a speed limit of just 30 mph. Both try to get a huge number of figurative vehicles to their destination in a short amount of time, but they take diametrically opposite approaches to solving that problem.
Phil Burr is Head of Product at Lumai, a British company looking to replace traditional GPUs with optical processors. “In AI, you repeatedly perform similar operations,” he explained, “and you can do that in parallel across the data set.” This gives GPUs an advantage over CPUs in large but fundamentally repetitive tasks, like graphics, executing AI models and crypto mining. “You can process a large amount of data very quickly, but it’s doing the same amount of processing each time,” he said.
In the same way that thousand-lane highway would be pretty wasteful, the more powerful GPUs get, the more energy hungry they become. “In the past, as [CPUs evolved] you could get a lot more transistors on a device, but the overall power [consumption] remained about the same,” Burr said. They’re also equipped with “specialized units that do [specific] work faster so the chip can return to idle sooner.” By comparison, “every iteration of a GPU has more and more transistors, but the power jumps up every time because getting gains from those processes is hard.” Not only are they physically larger — which results in higher power demands — but they “generally activate all of the processing units at once,” Burr said.
In 2024, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published a congressionally mandated report into the energy consumption of data centers. The report identified a sharp increase in the amount of electricity data centers consumed as GPUs became more prevalent. Power use from 2014 to 2016 was stable at around 60 TWh, but started climbing in 2018, to 76 TWh, and leaping to 176 TWh by 2023. In just five years, data center energy use more than doubled from 1.9 percent of the US’ total, to nearly 4.4 percent — with that figure projected to reach up to 12 percent by the start of the 2030s.
Heat
Like a lightbulb filament, as electricity moves through the silicon of computer chips, it encounters resistance, generating heat. Extending that power efficiency metaphor from earlier, CPUs are closer to modern LEDs here, while GPUs, like old incandescent bulbs, lose a huge amount of their power to resistance. The newest generation of AI data centers are filled with rack after rack of them, depending on the owner’s needs and budget, each one kicking out what Burr described as “a massive amount of heat.”
Heat isn’t just an unwelcome byproduct: if chips aren’t kept cool, they’ll experience performance and longevity issues. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) publishes guidelines for data center operators. It advocates server rooms should be kept between 18 to 27 degrees celsius (64.4 to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Given the sheer volume of heat GPUs kick out, maintaining that temperature requires some intensive engineering, and a lot of energy.
The majority of data centers use a handful of methods to keep their hardware within the optimal temperature. One of the oldest ways to maximize the efficiency of air conditioning is a technique of hot and cold aisle containment. Essentially, cold air is pushed through the server racks to keep them cool, while the hot air those servers expel is drawn out to be cooled and recirculated.
Many data centers, especially in the US, rely on the cooling effect that occurs as water changes from a liquid to a gas. This is done by drawing hot air through a wet medium to facilitate evaporation and blowing the resulting cooled air into the server room, in a method known as direct evaporative cooling. There’s also indirect evaporative cooling, which works similarly but adds a heat exchanger — a device that’s used to transfer heat between different mediums. In this type of setup, the heat from the warm air is transferred and cooled separately from the server room to avoid raising the humidity levels indoors.
Due in part to their cooling needs, data centers have a tremendous water footprint. The Lawrence Berkeley report found that, in 2014, US-based data centers consumed 21.2 billion liters of water. By 2018, however, that figure had leapt to 66 billion liters, much of which was attributed to what it collectively terms “hyperscale” facilities, which include AI-focused operations. In 2023, traditional US data centers reportedly consumed 10.56 billion liters of water while AI facilities used around 55.4 billion liters. The report’s projections believe that by 2028, AI data centers will likely consume as much as 124 billion liters of water.
“Collectively, data centers are among the top-ten water consuming industrial or commercial industries in the US,” according to a 2021 study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. About one-fifth of these data centers use water from stressed watersheds, i.e. areas where the demand for water may be greater than the natural supply.
Most of the water consumed by data centers evaporates and won’t be immediately replenished, while the rest goes to wastewater treatment plants. As a trio of academics explained in an op-ed for The Dallas Morning News, data centers are “effectively removing [drinking water] from the local water cycle.” Water used in the cooling process is typically treated with chemicals such as corrosion inhibitors and biocides, which prevent bacterial growth. The resulting wastewater often contains pollutants, so it can’t be recycled for human consumption or agriculture.
And data centers’ water use goes well beyond cooling. A much bigger portion of their water footprint can be attributed to indirect uses, mainly through electricity generated by power plants but also through wastewater utilities. These account for about three-fourths of a data center’s water footprint, the study notes. Power plants use water in a number of ways, primarily for cooling and to produce the steam needed to spin their electricity-generating turbines. According to the authors, 1 megawatt-hour of energy consumed by data centers in the US on average requires 7.1 cubic meters of water.
“Data centers are indirectly dependent on water from every state in the contiguous US, much of which is sourced from power plants drawing water from subbasins in the eastern and western coastal states,” the authors explain. To adequately address the water issue, energy consumption must be reigned in too.
Exploring the alternatives
One major approach to reduce the massive water footprint of these systems is to use closed-loop liquid cooling. This is already ubiquitous on a smaller scale in high-end PCs, where heat-generating components, such as the CPU and GPU, have large heat exchangers that a liquid is pumped through. The liquid draws away the heat, and then has to be cooled down via another heat exchanger, or a refrigeration unit, before being recirculated.
Liquid cooling is becoming more and more common, especially in AI data centers, given the heat that GPUs generate. With the exception of mechanical issues, like leaking, and the water needed to operate the facility more generally, closed-loop systems do not experience water loss and so make more reasonable demands on local water resources. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling drastically cuts a data center’s potential water use, and more efficiently removes heat than traditional air-cooling systems. In recent years, companies including Google, NVIDIA and Microsoft have been championing liquid cooling systems as a more sustainable way forward. And researchers are looking into ways to employ this approach on an even more granular level to tackle the heat right at the source.
Whereas cold plates (metal slabs with tubing or internal channels for coolant to flow through) are commonly used in liquid cooling systems to transfer heat away from the electronics, Microsoft has been testing a microfluidics-based cooling system in which liquid coolant travels through tiny channels on the back of the chip itself. In the lab, this system performed “up to three times better than cold plates at removing heat,” and the company said it “can effectively cool a server running core services for a simulated Teams meeting.” A blog post about the findings noted, “microfluidics also reduced the maximum temperature rise of the silicon inside a GPU by 65 percent, though this will vary by the type of chip.”
Another option is “free” cooling, or making use of the natural environmental conditions at the data center site to cool the operation. Air-based free cooling utilizes the outdoor air in cold locales, while water-based free cooling relies on cold water sources such as seawater. Some facilities couple this with rainwater harvesting for their other water needs, like humidification.
A map of Start Campus
Start Campus
Start Campus, a data center project in Portugal, is located on the site of an old coal-fired power station and will use much of its old infrastructure. Rather than simply employ a closed-loop, the high temperatures will require the closed-loop system to interact with an open loop. When the campus is fully operational, its heat will be passed onto around 1.4 million cubic tons of seawater per day. Omer Wilson, CMO at Start Campus, said that by the time the water has returned to its source, its temperature will be the same as the surrounding sea. Start Campus has also pledged that there will be no meaningful water loss from this process.
There is another novel cooling method, immersion, in which computing equipment is — you guessed it — immersed in a non-conductive liquid suitable to draw heat. Wilson described it as a relatively niche approach, used in some crypto mining applications, but not used by industrial-scale facilities.
To keep with both energy and cooling needs, some researchers say the industry must look to renewable resources. “Directly connecting data center facilities to wind and solar energy sources ensures that water and carbon footprints are minimized,” wrote the authors of the aforementioned Environmental Research study. Even purchasing renewable energy certificates — which each represent one megawatt-hour of electricity generated from a renewable source and delivered to the grid — could help shift the grid toward these sources over time, they added. “Data center workloads can be migrated between data centers to align with the portion of the grid where renewable electricity supplies exceed instantaneous demand.”
Geothermal resources have begun to look especially promising. According to a recent report by the Rhodium Group, geothermal energy could meet up to 64 percent of data center’s projected power demand growth in the US “by the early 2030s.” In the Western US, geothermal could meet 100 percent of demand growth in areas such as Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth and Las Vegas.
For cooling, geothermal heat pumps can be used to “leverage the consistently cool temperatures” found hundreds of feet beneath the surface. Or, in locations where there are shallow aquifers present, data centers can make use of geothermal absorption chillers. These rely on the low-grade heat at shallower depths “to drive a chemical reaction that produces water vapor,” the report explains. “This water vapor cools as it is run through a condenser and cools the IT components of a data center using evaporation.”
Iron Mountain Data Centers operates a geothermally cooled data center in Boyers, Pennsylvania at the site of an old limestone mine. A 35-acre underground reservoir provides a year-round supply of cool water. Geothermal may not be a widespread solution just yet, but it’s catching on. In 2024, Meta announced a partnership with Sage Geosystems to supply its data centers with up to 150 megawatts (MW) of geothermal power starting in 2027.
Beyond the hardware
While novel cooling methods will undoubtedly help curb some of the AI data centers’ excessive resource demands, the first step to meaningful change is transparency, according to Vijay Gadepally, a senior scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center. AI companies need to be upfront about the emissions and resource use associated with their operations to give people a clear view of their footprints.
Then there is the hardware to consider. Incorporating more intelligent chip design — i.e. processors with better performance characteristics — could go a long way toward making data centers more sustainable. “That’s a huge area of innovation right now,” Gadepally said. And large data centers are often “running underutilized,” with a lot of power that isn’t being allocated efficiently. Rather than leaning into the push to build more such facilities, the industry should first make better use of existing data centers’ capacities.
Similarly, many of today’s AI models are vastly overpowered for the tasks they’re being given. The current approach is “like cutting a hamburger with a chainsaw,” Gadepally said. “Does it work? Sure… but it definitely is overkill.” This doesn’t need to be the case. “We have found in many instances that you can use a smaller but tuned model, to achieve similar performance to a much larger model,” Gadepally said, noting that this is especially true for new “agentic” systems. “You’re often trying thousands of different parameters, or different combinations of things to discover which is the best one, and by being a little bit more intelligent, we could dismiss or essentially terminate a lot of the workloads or a lot of those combinations that weren’t getting you towards the right answer.”
Each of those unnecessary parameters isn’t just a computational dead end, it’s another nudge towards rolling blackouts, less potable water and rising utility costs to surrounding communities. As Gadepally said, “We’re just building bigger and bigger without thinking about, ‘Do we actually need it?'”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/why-do-ai-data-centers-use-so-many-resources-171500010.html?src=rss
GL.iNet has introduced the Comet PoE (GL-RM1PE), a compact remote KVM device for server management, industrial systems, NVR setups, and HomeLab use. It supports 4K@30 FPS remote display, two-way audio, PoE for simplified deployment, and includes onboard storage with self-hosted cloud support. The Comet PoE is equipped with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor, paired with […]
When you’re looking to top off your iPhone’s battery, you might not think much about the actual plug you’re using. The thing is, it actually matters quite a bit, especially if you care about charging speeds. But even knowing that, you might take a look at Apple’s newest power adapter and think “$40? Without a cable? No way.”
It’s certainly a steep price for a power adapter, especially as you can find other options for literally half the price. But there’s something interesting about this particular charger. It might not necessarily be worth $40, but there’s a reason it’s not cheap: This thing might be the only power adapter you need in your tech tool box.
Dynamic power output
As you can see from the product listing, Apple’s power adapter is advertised as a 40W charger. However, it is also advertised as being able to deliver up to 60W. You don’t typically see that from a power adapter, as the wattage you see is the wattage you usually get.
As CNET’s Bridget Carey explains, this is made possible through some clever engineering. The power adapter will start by offering the maximum charging output your device in question can take in, up to 60W. iPhones can’t accept 60W of charging, for example, but MacBooks can: So this 40W power adapter can actually deliver 60W of power when connected to something like your MacBook—at first. Since the power adapter isn’t actually a true 60W charger, it can’t sustain that power output for long periods of time. As such, it pulls back the power draw over time.
In practical terms, it means you can get an initial 60W charge on a device that can accept it, which can help charge your larger devices faster at the start. Rather than bring a power adapter for your iPhone, and a larger one for your MacBook, or tote a huge power adapter for both, you get a compact power adapter that can offer the best of both worlds.
There’s also a reason Apple chose 40W for this power adapter’s “standard” output. The new iPhone 17 series has the quickest charging speeds of any iPhone device so far, charging up to 50% in just 20 minutes. (The exception is the iPhone 17 Air, which can charge to 50% in 30 minutes.) However, you need the right power adapter to take advantage of these charging speeds—at least 40W. (Again, the iPhone 17 Air is the exception, as it can charge to 50% in 30 minutes with 20W or higher.)
That’s really the perk of this dynamic power adapter. It’s powerful enough to offer the fastest charging speeds for your iPhone 17, while also offering a power boost to give something like a MacBook a faster charge, at least for a little while. That being said, there are plenty of power adapter options out there, including ones that offer outputs in the 60W range. No matter what power adapter you end up going with, just keep two things in mind: the maximum power output of the adapter itself, but also your charging cable. If your cable can’t support the wattage, it doesn’t matter how large the adapter is.
