This week is going to be a doozey! We have the Semafor World Economy Conference and the World Bank Spring Meetings happening in DC which I will be attending. There is a lot of information going to be tossed around about data center infrastructure to geopolitics, so I’ll take notes! I got to do that in between classes, staying active, and finishing off work. 💀

DC Climate Week is happening the week after with its own fair share of climate events! To be honest, I won’t have as much time to attend all of the events in town but I am hosting an event with a partner organization on AI and energy. That will be fun!

Check out these interesting articles I found:

Ciao, 👋

Nate

From Power to Water: Startups Taking on Data Center Bottlenecks (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): Two iMasons Incubator startups pitch their tech for data center bottlenecks — SuperSix on next-gen supercapacitors for short-duration storage, and Water From Air on a low-energy atmospheric water extraction system that runs off data center waste heat.

On Early-Stage Risk, System Innovation & Investing Beyond the Data Centre (AI & Energy): Brightsmith's Conversations in Cleantech sits down with Sofie Käll and Anna Søndergaard of The Footprint Firm to talk about investing in digital infrastructure not from the asset itself, but from the edges of the system.

Will Power-Hungry Data Centers Overwhelm the Grid? (AI & Energy): Let's Talk Energy unpacks why the data center buildout is complicating the outlook for legacy grids, and whether the AI investment cycle is going to outrun what we can actually deliver power to.

The Energy Footprint of LLM-Based Environmental Analysis (AI & Energy): Compares the inference-time energy footprint of two domain-specific climate chatbots (ChatNetZero, ChatNDC) against generic GPT-4o-mini, decomposing the cost into retrieval, generation, and hallucination-checking. Authors: Bao et al.

EcoAssist: Embedding Sustainability into AI-Assisted Frontend Development (AI & Policy/ESG): A CHI 2026 paper on how to surface sustainability implications inside AI coding tools so frontend developers see the environmental cost of the code being suggested to them. Authors: Barrocas et al.

AI, Climate, and Regulation: From Data Centers to the AI Act (AI & Policy/ESG): Proposes a specific interpretation of the EU AI Act that would bring AI inference energy consumption back into reporting scope, and gives concrete guidance on operationalizing climate regulation for data centers. Authors: Ebert et al. Journal: arXiv.

Short-Term Energy Outlook — Electricity, Coal, Renewables (AI & Energy): EIA projects US electricity demand up 1.2% in 2026 with renewables doing the heavy lifting (solar +17%, hydro +6%, wind +5%). Authoring Body: U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Data Centres: The Leading Questions (AI & Infrastructure): Knight Frank's Q2 2026 quarterly take on the global data center market — supply, demand, capital flows, power availability, and sustainability across EMEA, APAC, and North America. Authoring Body: Knight Frank Research.

Not a Drop to Drink: How Britain's Data Centre Surge Threatens Water Security (AI & Water Resources): 84% of water-intensive data center developments in the UK are proposed for already-water-stressed areas. A single mid-sized facility uses as much water annually as several thousand UK households. Authoring Body: Global Action Plan.

The Limits of AI Scaling Laws – NVIDIA CEO Explains (AI & Multiple Applications): Jensen Huang on where the AI scaling laws hit their ceiling — straight from the mouth of the company building the picks and shovels.

Inside the Town Where OpenAI Is Building Its Biggest Data Center (AI & Environmental Impact): Soon's Dagsen Love travels to Abilene, TX to meet the small business owners, the radio DJ, and the mayor adjusting to OpenAI and Oracle's $500B Project Stargate sprouting in their community.

Goliath Has Fallen – The Audacious NIMBY: The Story of the Digital Gateway Project (AI & Climate Policy): How a community in Prince William County stopped what would have been the largest data center complex on the planet. Worth watching for anyone tracking grassroots organizing against hyperscaler buildouts.

re:cinq (AI & Environment): Bridging cloud-native and AI-native infrastructure with scalable platforms and organizational excellence. Location: Europe.

GridWise Alliance (AI & Energy): The electric grid and its supporting infrastructure as the foundational component of an advanced digital economy. Location: United States.

Giga Energy (AI & Energy): Manufactures and operates energy infrastructure that uses redirected flared natural gas from oil drilling to power Bitcoin mining and compute, monetizing stranded gas while reducing methane emissions. Location: United States.

Graphify (AI & Workforce Development): An open-source skill that turns folders of code, docs, papers, and images into queryable knowledge graphs — claims a 71.5x token reduction on mixed corpora vs. reading raw files. Price: FREE.

Data Center Impact Dashboard (AI & Infrastructure): An interactive dashboard from Rooted Futures Lab tracking water, energy, and emissions impacts of data centers. Price: FREE.

US Data Center Moratorium Tracker — 2026 (AI & Policy): Interconnected Capital's tracker for municipal, county, and state-level construction bans and moratoriums on data center development across the US in 2026. Price: FREE

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Thanks for reading the 36th issue of The Climate Code! It means a lot to me and we have more coming in the future, so definitely stick around! 💚

Nate

P.S.

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