Last week was a madhouse! We had the Green IO conference in New York and I had my half-marathon in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Finished 13 miles in 2 hours and 30 minutes which is not terrible, but not good either…

Anyway, I got 3 weeks left of school, and then after that I’ll be done with my second Master’s degree! What comes next? 🤔 Hm, searching for a full-time position, finishing part-time fellowships, and beta-testing some product ideas that I have in mind.

Here are some interesting news articles/resources/video clips of the week:

Ciao, 👋

Nate

The Data Center Coalition on AI's Growing Energy Demand (AI & Energy): The Data Center Coalition argues that the real challenge facing the country is not whether electricity demand is growing, but whether America is prepared to build the energy infrastructure to support that growth affordably and reliably.

Dwarkesh Goes Inside Jane Street's Latest AI Data Center (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): Dwarkesh tours Jane Street's new Texas datacenter, home to 4,032 liquid-cooled GPUs. Twenty years ago, their "cluster" was 6 Dells stacked on the office floor.

What the AI Data Center Build Out Looks Like From The Ground Up (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): What happens when a community votes no but #AI datacenter construction starts anyway? That's exactly what happened in Saline Township, Michigan, when a $16B OpenAI-Oracle data center was rejected twice locally and broke ground weeks later anyway. The developer sued, the town settled, and they had no real choice.

The Environmental Impact of ICT in the Era of Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI & Environment): Examines the conflicting claims about AI's environmental footprint, addressing lack of transparency, market expectations, and standardized methodology. Provides a top-down analysis and a framework for assessing both direct and indirect effects. Authors: Rottenberg et al. Journal: arXiv.

Power System Costs and Emissions From Data Center and Cryptocurrency Mining Expansion in the United States (AI & Energy): Projects that data center growth could increase power sector CO2 emissions by up to 28%, with electricity costs rising up to 57% in some regions. Northern Virginia would see a resurgence in coal-fired generation, while Texas would rely on natural gas. Restoring federal renewable energy incentives could significantly mitigate both impacts. Authors: Johnson et al. Journal: Environmental Research Letters.

Better Together: Evaluating the Complementarity of Earth Embedding Models (AI & Climate Science): Demonstrates that combining multiple Earth observation embedding models (AlphaEarth, Tessera, GeoCLIP, SatCLIP) produces superior results compared to using individual models alone. Their novel complementarity index suggests future progress depends less on individual model improvements and more on strategic combinations. Authors: Van Der Plas et al. Journal: arXiv.

H.R.2940 - Advancing Water Reuse Act (AI & Water Resources): A bipartisan House bill aimed at reducing water waste at data centers. Authoring Body: Representative Darin LaHood.

Roadmap: The AI Data Center Stack (AI & Multiple Applications): A market roadmap mapping the full AI data center stack, from compute to cooling to power. Authoring Body: Bessemer Venture Partners.

A Blueprint for 800 VDC Data Centers (AI & Infrastructure): A technical blueprint for next-generation 800 VDC data center power architecture, designed to handle dense AI workloads more efficiently than legacy AC distribution. Authoring Body: Heron Energy.

Data Quality Scoring System for Datacenter IT Embodied Carbon Accounting (AI & Environmental Impact): How confident are you in your upstream Scope 3 numbers? Through the OCP Sustainability Project, Fraunhofer IZM, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and AWS are developing a multi-criteria data quality scoring system for IT hardware Life Cycle Assessments built on PACT's Data Quality Indicators.

Scaling Design for Sustainability Across Meta's Hardware Organization (AI & Environmental Impact): In 2025, Meta embedded sustainability into its hardware New Product Introduction process. With AI-powered tooling, teams estimate Scope 3 emissions before BOMs exist, reducing weeks of analysis to days. In its first year, the program covered 100% of new designs and achieved ~12% weighted emission reductions.

A Framework for Reliable Hardware Circularity at Scale (AI & Circular Economy): The unprecedented expansion of AI is driving explosive demand for compute infrastructure while supply chain volatility creates persistent component shortages. This presentation introduces a field-proven framework embedding circularity into hardware design and operations, with a three-phase approach across Proof-of-Concept, NPI, and mass production.

Prometheus Fuels (AI & Energy): Turning renewable electricity and atmospheric CO2 into zero net carbon gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Location: United States.

Sustainable AI Group (AI & Sustainability): AI can be sustainable. They help enterprises make it happen. Location: Europe.

AI Hub for Sustainable Development (AI & Sustainability): Endorsed by G7 leaders and powered by MIMIT, the AI Hub is re-imagining global AI partnerships with Africa. Location: Africa.

Fields of the World (AI & Agriculture & Food Systems): An open global field boundary ecosystem with benchmark datasets, baseline models, and a browser-based inference app that detects agricultural field boundaries from Sentinel-2 imagery anywhere in the world. Draw a region, pick a model, download as GeoParquet or GeoJSON. Price: FREE.

Co-Scientist (AI & Workforce Development): A collaborative multi-agent AI partner from Google DeepMind that helps researchers develop new hypotheses in life sciences and beyond. Price: PAID.

Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) (AI & Workforce Development): Published in Nature, ERA is an AI tool for expert-level scientific coding that helped build the Computational Discovery prototype, now available through a trusted tester program in Google Labs. Price:PAID.

If you have resources that you wish to submit to the AI & Environment Resource Hub, fill out the Google Form! Thank you for suggesting resources to add to the Resource Hub. 🙃

Thanks for reading the 42nd 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.

New here? Check out the AI & Environment Resource Hub if you have no idea what it is. 😆