Local opposition stalled at least 45 US data center projects worth about $68 billion in the second quarter of 2026, Data Center Watch says. For developers, where a campus can be built is now a cost and schedule risk in its own right.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives65
- Confidence50
NASA and Berkeley Lab researchers imaged heat-shield materials in 3D as they broke down at up to 900 degrees Celsius, using X-rays and a neural network. Engineers now have a record of how ablation starts, though their design simulations have yet to use it.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption20
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
Deep Isolation won a Texas Railroad Commission permit to drill a test borehole up to about 3 km deep near Austin, with Halliburton supplying drilling expertise. The trial uses no radioactive material and tests whether oilfield methods can build a disposal hole for spent fuel.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption8
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives70
- Confidence60
New Jersey's utilities board warned power bills could rise up to 20% from June 1, with data centers a key driver. Utilities elsewhere are building the same demand into their pricing, so energy belongs among the costs an operator should expect to climb.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption30
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives40
- Confidence50
Illinois and NASA researchers imaged two spacecraft ablators decomposing in 3D at up to 900 C, using X-ray tomography at Berkeley Lab. Modellers now have a real decomposition sequence to test against, though the heating stayed at least 750 C below reentry surface temperatures.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption35
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
The San Francisco startup wants drone fleets to thin clouds over solar farms. The uplift range comes from its own model, the first large flight is targeted for 2027, and standard FAA rules forbid the profile.
Reality
- Evidence22
- Adoption2
- Hype gap+70
- Incentives65
- Confidence55
UC Berkeley researchers say Mojave soil minerals adsorb CO2 at night and release it by day, moving 1 to 3 gigatons of carbon a year if scaled globally. Part of the soil exchange long credited to microbes may be physical, though the global figure rests on Mojave soils alone.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
A scanning tunneling microscope caught electrons inside molybdenum diselenide freezing into a crystal and melting into liquid-like waves, with the defect count in each sample deciding which state held. Quantum Monte Carlo simulations matched the images.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives65
- Confidence55
CNBC reports both labs have sounded out powered sites of roughly 20 to 30MW in the UK, the Nordics and the US. A hall that small is usable because inference requests can be routed independently.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption38
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives65
- Confidence52
A Berkeley Lab-led group spent years building a molybdenum diselenide device that a scanning tunneling microscope could read, and it says the defects in that device are what hold the electrons in place.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives62
- Confidence55
An AP-NORC and University of Chicago poll puts concern about AI's environmental impact at 53%, up from 41% a year ago, with majorities worried about local electricity prices and water supply.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption42
- Hype gap0
- Incentives45
- Confidence58
The five-year survey covers about 75 percent of the sky and roughly 4 billion objects, and what shows it has landed as a product is the 1,800 papers already citing it.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption74
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives66
- Confidence60
Berkeley Lab counts 2,061 GW still waiting for a grid connection, a tenth less than a year ago, but the pool shrank because developers abandoned the line faster than new ones joined it, and the arrivals were mostly gas.
Publishers:publicpower.org
Reality
- Evidence74
- Adoption58
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives55
- Confidence68
US data centres drew about 25GW in 2024, and BloombergNEF has them at 106GW by 2035. On that arithmetic, the question for anyone planning a cluster is when the megawatts arrive, not when the GPUs ship.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+24
- Incentives45
- Confidence47
If dark matter made the signal, the implied WIMP weighs at least 200 GeV, and LZ says its backgrounds there are very low. But the event came out of re-searching data already collected, so newer exposure has to settle it.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption14
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives58
- Confidence55
Twelve pennycress lines, 360 plants and more than 24,000 camera observations went into a nickel screen whose analysis now takes minutes, though the accumulation figures that would make phytomining a supply story sit outside the release.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption34
- Hype gap+42
- Incentives74
- Confidence52
The LZ collaboration says one event in 220 live days sits at 2.6 sigma, below the field's bar for evidence, and the two-thirds of its data still unanalysed is what will decide whether the anomaly grows or dissolves.
Perspective Coverage
5 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 47%
- Operator
- Operator 33%
- Investor
- Investor 20%
Reality
- Evidence46
- Adoption20
- Hype gap+37
- Incentives60
- Confidence63
Shapiro pulled AI data centers from fast-track review and attached power, water and disclosure conditions. AEP Ohio already showed what happens when the ask has to be backed with money.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption34
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives62
- Confidence40
Berkeley Lab counts 2,061 GW waiting to interconnect, and a wait that has grown by 25 months since 2015. The executives selling the bypass say buyers pay for it inside compute pricing.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption24
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives84
- Confidence44