Technologies

Data Centers Are ‘AI Factories.’ Google and Meta Are Spending Big Bucks to Build Them

It’s not just the spending that will be big. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg envisions a single data center, the footprint of which would occupy as much acreage as a good chunk of Manhattan.

Tech giants Google and Meta have a lot riding on the growth and success of AI, and to support those efforts, they’re also committing significant sums of money to build the data centers they’re going to need to run that power-hungry technology.

On Tuesday, Google announced that it plans to invest $25 billion in data centers and other AI infrastructure tied to the PJM Interconnection, the biggest electric grid in the US. The PJM Interconnection reaches across 13 states in the eastern half of the US. The new data centers are expected to be in and around Pennsylvania.

To help meet the energy demands of the new data centers, Google also said it will invest $3 billion in hydropower. That use of a renewable energy source fits in with Google’s goal to become carbon-free by 2030. (Similarly, Meta is aiming to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030.)

«I think there is a race on to co-locate data centers close to reliable, plentiful and inexpensive sources of energy,» Ramayya Krishnan, professor of management science and information systems at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.

The advent of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta AI is accelerating the demands on data centers, which also support everyday cloud computing tasks like photo sharing and movie streaming.

«Data centers are a critical part of the AI production process and its deployment,» said Krishnan. «Think of them as AI factories.»

Google already operates dozens of data centers worldwide.

Google’s announcement comes on the same day that President Donald Trump is attending an energy summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where investment in AI is a key topic.

On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company will invest «hundreds of billions of dollars» in the computing needed to build superintelligence, a lofty aspiration to create AI that surpasses human capabilities.

Zuckerberg said that Meta has «several multi-[gigawatt] clusters» in the works, referring to the power consumption of the data centers. «We’re calling the first one Prometheus, and it’s coming online in ’26. We’re also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.» Earlier this year, Zuckerberg introduced one of Meta’s newest data centers, a 2GW facility being built in Louisiana.

These facilities could be mammoth. In a post on Threads, Zuckerberg showed the outline of a single data center that would cover «a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.»

As the big new data centers get built, that could bring both opportunities and stresses to the communities near them

In a recent Airedale by Modine survey of 600 Americans, 70% of respondents said they wouldn’t mind living near a data center and remained hopeful that the facilities would positively impact their community. Among those who opposed data centers being built near their homes, their top concerns involved increased energy demand, noise pollution and hits to property value.

Krishnan noted the potential pluses and minuses. Data centers could raise energy prices for residential customers if the energy supply is limited, and they also use significant amounts of water, which could create environmental concerns.

«On the positive side,» Krishnan said, «data centers could create an eco-system of partners increasing employment opportunities in the region and [consequential] growth.»

Technologies

Wikipedia Says It’s Losing Traffic Due to AI Summaries, Social Media Videos

The popular online encyclopedia saw an 8% drop in pageviews over the last few months.

Wikipedia has seen a decline in users this year due to artificial intelligence summaries in search engine results and the growing popularity of social media, according to a blog post Friday from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia.

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In the post, Miller describes an 8% drop in human pageviews over the last few months compared with the numbers Wikipedia saw in the same months in 2024.

«We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,» Miller wrote.

Blame the bots

AI-generated summaries that pop up on search engines like Bing and Google often use bots called web crawlers to gather much of the information that users read at the top of the search results.

Websites do their best to restrict how these bots handle their data, but web crawlers have become pretty skilled at going undetected.

«Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated and trying to appear human,» Miller wrote.

After reclassifying Wikipedia traffic data from earlier this year, Miller says the site «found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots built to evade detection.»

The Wikipedia blog post also noted that younger generations are turning to social-video platforms for their information rather than the open web and such sites as Wikipedia.

When people search with AI, they’re less likely to click through

There is now promising research on the impact of generative AI on the internet, especially concerning online publishers with business models that rely on users visiting their webpages.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

In July, Pew Research examined browsing data from 900 US adults and found that the AI-generated summaries at the top of Google’s search results affected web traffic. When the summary appeared in a search, users were less likely to click on links compared to when the search results didn’t include the summaries.

Google search is especially important, because Google.com is the world’s most visited website — it’s how most of us find what we’re looking for on the internet.

«LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow sustainably,» Miller wrote. «With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.»

Last year, CNET published an extensive report on how changes in Google’s search algorithm decimated web traffic for online publishers.

Technologies

OpenAI Says It’s Working With Actors to Crack Down on Celebrity Deepfakes in Sora

Bryan Cranston alerted SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, when he saw AI-generated videos of himself made with the AI video app.

OpenAI said Monday it would do more to stop users of its AI video generation app Sora from creating clips with the likenesses of actors and other celebrities after actor Bryan Cranston and the union representing film and TV actors raised concerns that deepfake videos were being made without the performers’ consent.

Actor Bryan Cranston, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and several talent agencies said they struck a deal with the ChatGPT maker over the use of celebrities’ likenesses in Sora. The joint statement highlights the intense conflict between AI companies and rights holders like celebrities’ estates, movie studios and talent agencies — and how generative AI tech continues to erode reality for all of us.

Sora, a new sister app to ChatGPT, lets users create and share AI-generated videos. It launched to much fanfare three weeks ago, with AI enthusiasts searching for invite codes. But Sora is unique among AI video generators and social media apps; it lets you use other people’s recorded likenesses to place them in nearly any AI video. It has been, at best, weird and funny, and at worst, a never-ending scroll of deepfakes that are nearly indistinguishable from reality.

Cranston noticed his likeness was being used by Sora users when the app launched, and the Breaking Bad actor alerted his union. The new agreement with the actors’ union and talent agencies reiterates that celebrities will have to opt in to having their likenesses available to be placed into AI-generated video. OpenAI said in the statement that it has «strengthened the guardrails around replication of voice and likeness» and «expressed regret for these unintentional generations.»

OpenAI does have guardrails in place to prevent the creation of videos of well-known people: It rejected my prompt asking for a video of Taylor Swift on stage, for example. But these guardrails aren’t perfect, as we’ve saw last week with a growing trend of people creating videos featuring Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They ranged from weird deepfakes of the civil rights leader rapping and wrestling in the WWE to overtly racist content.

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The flood of «disrespectful depictions,» as OpenAI called them in a statement on Friday, is part of why the company paused the ability to create videos featuring King.

Statement from OpenAI and King Estate, Inc.
The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (King, Inc.) and OpenAI have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr.…

— OpenAI Newsroom (@OpenAINewsroom) October 17, 2025

Bernice A. King, his daughter, last week publicly asked people to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her father. She was echoing comedian Robin Williams’ daughter, Zelda, who called these sorts of AI videos «gross.»

I concur concerning my father.
Please stop. #RobinWilliams #MLK #AI https://t.co/SImVIP30iN

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) October 7, 2025

OpenAI said it «believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used» and that «authorized representatives» of public figures and their estates can request that their likeness not be included in Sora. In this case, King’s estate is the entity responsible for choosing how his likeness is used.

This isn’t the first time OpenAI has leaned on others to make those calls. Before Sora’s launch, the company reportedly told a number of Hollywood-adjacent talent agencies that they would have to opt out of having their intellectual property included in Sora. But that initial approach didn’t square with decades of copyright law — usually, companies need to license protected content before using it — and OpenAI reversed its stance a few days later. It’s one example of how AI companies and creators are clashing over copyright, including through high-profile lawsuits.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for Oct. 21, #863

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Oct. 21, #863.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle has a diverse mix of topics. Remember when you see a word like «does» that it could have multiple meanings. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Deal me in.

Green group hint: I can get that.

Blue group hint: Hoops.

Purple group hint: The clicker.