Theme: Data centers

Tuesday’s vote turned AI data centers into a local-ballot issue: 44 communities voted to restrict data centers and just one voted to allow construction, across 45 decided measures. Twenty-one of the measures were in towns and cities in Ohio alone; the next state with the most measures was Maine, with eight. The measures included outright prohibitions, temporary moratoriums, limitations on energy use, mandating voter approval before construction and advisory measures — by late Tuesday evening, 33 restriction measures had passed or were leading in ongoing counts, according to the Data Centers on the Ballot tracking site.

Data center opponents were among the biggest winners of the Democratic wave in the US midterm elections, according to a Reuters analysis, in a text republished by the Lufkin Daily News, pointing to a shifting public mood on artificial intelligence and a possible slowdown of the boom that has sustained US economic growth and stock markets. In Texas and Georgia, Democrats who campaigned in part on a moratorium on data center development won offices the party had not held for decades. Data center stocks fell as the Democratic sweep became apparent: Core Scientific dropped 11.6% and Iren 12.5%, with declines also at Applied Digital, Hut 8, Cipher Digital, GE Vernova, Constellation Energy and Vistra. For Aidan Yao, a senior investment strategist at the Amundi Investment Institute, the election worked more as a referendum on artificial intelligence than on Trump. Even Republicans turned against data centers, which opponents say drive up utility bills, pollute the night sky with lights and do not create enough jobs or taxes to justify state incentives.

Rystad Energy cut Brazil’s announced data center pipeline by roughly two-thirds, from 21 GW to about 7 GW, citing regulatory uncertainty, severe grid congestion and limited access to reliable power. Under the Redata tax regime (Law No. 15,504/2026), enacted in September, the tax exemptions are neither automatic nor permanent: they are time-bound and contingent on meeting strict operational criteria. Still pending is the decision on whether natural gas generation qualifies as low-emission power. Bill 3716/2026, which reallocates battery storage integration costs from generators to all system users, is being fast-tracked in Congress and must be approved before the Brazilian electricity regulator ANEEL holds its inaugural capacity auction in December.

Drax unveiled plans to build an artificial intelligence data center at the site of its biomass power plant in North Yorkshire, using the plant’s surplus energy capacity, in a partnership with Radiant, according to City AM, in a text republished by OilPrice. The first phase is to deliver up to 100 megawatts by 2028 and the second an extra 500 megawatts by 2031, with total capacity above one gigawatt and potential investment exceeding £20 billion, of which £2.5 billion in the first stage. Drax shares rose 8.5% to 877 pence on Tuesday morning, making the stock the biggest riser on the FTSE 250.

More than 3,000 data centers already operate in the United States, with more than 1,500 others in development, according to the Pew Research Center, and at least seven Bay Area cities, including San Francisco and Richmond, have passed temporary moratoriums on data center construction in the final two months before the vote; in the race for Nancy Pelosi’s House seat, Scott Wiener opposes any ban while Connie Chan promises to seek a national moratorium pending artificial intelligence (AI) regulation.

A US export licence allows Firebird to ship 45,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) to Kazakhstan, according to Nvidia. OilPrice reports that the chips are bound for Ekibastuz.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that supply chains for many of the technologies shaping the emerging Age of Electricity remain highly concentrated in a small number of countries. Electricity demand in ASEAN countries is rising at twice the pace of overall energy consumption, driven by industrial electrification, air-conditioning needs, electric vehicles and data centres, according to ET EnergyWorld.

The United States announced a partnership between an American company and a Paraguayan developer to build a high-performance computing facility powered by the Itaipu hydroelectric plant, on the border between Brazil and Paraguay, according to G1. According to the US State Department, the project should serve cloud computing customers in the United States and Latin America.

Multiple Google Cloud services were experiencing serious network disruptions at its European data centre in London on Tuesday, according to the US technology giant's service health website. British digital bank Revolut said it was facing disruption to multiple services, which a source close to the matter attributed to the Google Cloud outage. Google said the incident began at 06:08 GMT on Tuesday.

Russia's Ministry of Defense said it struck data centers, Ukrainian port infrastructure and vessels serving the Ukrainian military overnight, including the TeNet data center in Odessa, used to process, transmit and store information, according to the ministry, cited by Sputnik.

Power supply in Vladimir, locally disrupted by a drone attack, was restored to 80%, with heat and water fully restored, according to regional governor Alexander Avdeyev. Yandex said the attack damaged its facilities and caused the complete shutdown of its data center in the Vladimir region — the third major company data center to go offline in recent days.

The infrastructure of Yandex's data center in Vladimir was damaged in a drone attack, and the center's operation was completely suspended, according to TASS. There were no casualties, the agency said.

Yandex suspended operations at one of its key data centers on Thursday after a drone strike, as Ukraine continues to target the country’s infrastructure, according to CNBC. The attack caused a fire at the company’s data center in Sasovo, in western Russia’s Ryazan region, and affected part of its infrastructure, Yandex told CNBC. Open-source intelligence (OSINT) groups Exilenova+ and ASTRA identified the site as Yandex DC Sasovo, which the company describes as its largest data center, according to the Kyiv Independent.

Russia’s uninterrupted bombardment killed at least seven people and wounded more than 80 in Ukraine on Monday, according to The Associated Press. On Sunday, September 27, Russia hit the headquarters of Kyivstar, the country’s largest mobile provider, causing no casualties, and Russia’s Defence Ministry said it struck a data center belonging to Vodafone Ukraine, the country’s second-largest cell network operator, according to Reuters. In Kyiv, the National Academy of Sciences building was hit in the Shevchenkivskyi district and a woman died, according to the city military administration.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia has widened its attacks to target data centres and internet providers, according to BBC News. On Friday, September 25, 2026, a Russian drone hit a business centre in Kyiv, killing four people and damaging a data centre, the same report said. Russia’s defence ministry confirmed it had hit the Datagroup site, which it said was being used by Ukrainian military intelligence.