Energy

The AI boom is taxing power grids and pushing builders of data centers to rethink their sources of electricity.

A reinforcement learning model maintains cooler temperatures in large data centers and other buildings.

The metals needed to meet rocketing demand for electric cars and renewable power plants are in short supply. A startup is using machine learning to discover new sources.

Machine learning is making wind power more predictable. Engie SA, a multinational energy utility based in France, is the first customer for an AI-powered tool from Google that predicts the energy output of wind farms.

Nuclear fusion technology, long touted as an unlimited source of safe, clean energy, took a step toward reality with a machine learning algorithm that molds the fuel in a reactor’s core.

A new study examines a major strain of recent research: huge models pretrained on immense quantities of uncurated, unlabeled data and then fine-tuned on a smaller, curated corpus.

Machine learning is helping to design energy cells that charge faster and last longer. Battery developers are using ML algorithms to devise new chemicals, components, and charging techniques faster than traditional techniques allow.

Companies in Africa and the Middle East are building AI capacity in very different ways, a new study found. AI is growing fast in both regions despite shortages of talent and data.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are developing machine learning tools for the fossil fuel industry even as they pledge to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The business world continues to shape deep learning’s future. Commerce is pushing AI toward more efficient consumption of data, energy, and labor, according to a report on trends in machine learning from market analyst CB Insights.

Solar-thermal power plants concentrate the sun’s energy using huge arrays of mirrors. AI is helping those arrays stay in focus.