Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the Guardian’s US tech editor.
One year ago today, Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States. Standing alongside him that day were the leaders of the tech industry’s most powerful companies, who had donated to him in an unprecedented bending of the knee. In the ensuing year, the companies have reaped enormous rewards from their alliance with Trump, which my colleague Nick Robins-Early and I wrote about last month after Trump signed an executive order prohibiting states from passing laws regulating AI. Trump has sponsored the tech industry with billions in government funding and with diplomatic visits that featured CEOs as his fellow negotiators in massive, lucrative deals.
As year two of Trump’s second term begins, Silicon Valley’s titans appear poised to enrich themselves even more with the president’s enthusiastic aid.
Today in tech, we’re exploring the political consequences of the expansion of datacenters in the US and Europe as well as taking stock of Australia’s under-16 social media ban.
Trump thinks datacenters might cost his party an election
Donald Trump is worried about datacenters. Specifically, he is concerned about their effects on an already expensive electricity market in the United States. Will Americans’ resentment of sharply rising energy costs scuttle his goal of total deregulation of AI and his party’s November election ambitions?
Trump’s anxiety is evident in two actions last week. On 13 January, Trump and Microsoft’s president jointly announced that the tech giant would pay more for its datacenters, paying full property taxes and accepting neither tax reductions nor electricity rate discounts in towns where it operates datacenters.
““We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI. Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Thank you, and congratulations to Microsoft.”
And then on Friday, Trump and governors of states in the north-east US directed the country’s largest power grid operator to hold an emergency reliability power auction by September, per Bloomberg. The move could force tech giants to pay for the construction of new power plants by requiring them to bid on the future reliability of the electricity they plan to draw from the grid.
“I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” Trump said.
Trump is tugging at the edges of the problem of rapidly rising electricity demand. He promised Americans he’d slash their electricity bills by half. But as my colleagues Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor reported over the weekend, there’s little…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
