The Download

Morning Brew Inc.

TL;DR: New York just became the first US state to freeze new data center construction. It comes as the costs of the AI infrastructure build-out—to the air, the water, the grid, and your power bill—are landing in nearly every corner of the world. Still, hyperscalers remain committed to pumping billions into ever-bigger AI server farms.

What happened: New York’s moratorium covers data centers that draw 50 megawatts or more (which is to say, most of the behemoths proposed in recent years) and lasts for up to one year. That power threshold allows smaller data centers serving places like hospitals to keep building, according to the governor’s office.

Data centers’ impact is far from just an American worry, though. Here’s a rogues’ gallery of headlines from the last few months:

• Ireland is basically running a country for the servers. The nation’s data centers sucked up almost as much electricity as all residential homes last year, making up 23% of its power consumption despite a temporary freeze on new data center grid connections in the Dublin area in 2021.
• Denmark hits the brakes on its power grid. The country’s grid operator paused all new large-scale power connection requests because of demand overload: Roughly 14 gigawatts of new data center projects were waiting to be connected before the moratorium, double Denmark’s peak electricity demand.
• Chile’s megadrought vs. data centers. The data center boom is straining a Chilean wetland region that’s already been experiencing a 15-year drought. Servers in the area now account for about 62% of the community’s power consumption.
• Mon dieu! As of March, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft alone were putting out about a third of the CO2-equivalent emissions that all of France does, a figure that’s rising due to aggressive data center build-outs, per the Guardian.

AI companies, for their part, keep making promises to invest in the towns they’re building in and cover their own power costs—electricity in some parts of the US will cost consumers an extra $23 billion through 2028, largely thanks to data centers. (One proposed PR fix out of left field—designing “prettier” data centers.) And just yesterday, Meta announced that its already-under-construction Louisiana project will now have more than double the power capacity it originally planned, from 2 to 5GW.

Bottom line: The fight to slow down data centers is landing a lot of press, along with some real punches—but Big Tech is still winning the war, plowing ahead with its gigantic data center dreams. —WK

      

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How to download Apple’s iOS 27 beta (and the new Siri)

If you’ve been itching to try the new features coming to iPhone (like Siri AI), Apple released the iOS 27 public beta yesterday, and you can download it for free (not all iPhones are eligible, though, so check if yours is compatible first).

Keep in mind that this is a prerelease version of the operating system—so don’t be surprised if you run into the occasional bug or an app that doesn’t quite work as expected.

How to get the beta: Make sure to back up your iPhone first (just in case) → then sign up for the beta program using your Apple Account → on your iPhone, go to Settings → General → Software Update → Beta Updates and select iOS 27 Public Beta, then tap Update Now.

The same process should apply on Mac and iPad, too (once you’ve signed up for the beta program, you have access on all your devices). Apple Watch owners can now download the watchOS 27 public beta, but proceed with caution—once it’s installed, there’s no going back until the official release ships.

Once you’ve got the beta OS set up, you can also try Siri AI, the new chatbot-style version of Apple’s assistant (although, again, not all devices are eligible).

How to turn on Siri AI: Go to your Settings → scroll down to Siri → tap Try the new Siri (Beta) to join the waitlist → then sit tight.

Apple’s rolling out access to Siri AI gradually, so it could take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks for you to get it. Just know that it’s currently limited to iPhone 15 Pro and newer, and isn’t available yet in the EU or China.

If you don’t want to download the beta, iOS 27 is expected to roll out officially in September alongside some of the new iPhones. —SM

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The Zeitbyte

When AI gets employee of the month

Morning Brew Inc.

It’s bad enough when your coworker parrots your idea in a meeting and gets all the Teams reactions, but some workers are now gritting their teeth as AI grabs all the credit for work they did. One woman told Business Insider that she toiled over a big project for more than a year—only for her manager to request she talk up AI’s contribution in a meeting with senior leadership, and cut her off during her presentation to say that AI built it all in a minute. (Her boss even admitted the presentation was a factor in the middling performance review she got weeks later.) An IT developer, meanwhile, said that he suspects an “AI did it all” mentality at his workplace pumped the brakes on his promotion.

Saying you’ve used AI at all (even when your boss is the one handing you that AI subscription) may in fact be measurably bad for your career—studies have shown that employers tend to devalue employees’ work the second they cop to letting a bot help. It’s leaving workers with a genuine dilemma: Admit you used AI to tweak those pitch deck slides, or insist that you’ve never LLM’d in your life. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: ☕☕☕/5

• Oh no, here we go. Kalshi has released a Bloomberg-style Pro trading terminal.
• Robotaxi riders have gotten so comfortable that they’re dozing off, eating (and spilling) meals, and even giving birth in the back seat.
• You may actually start seeing more posts from your mutuals on X after a tweak to its algorithm.
• Do you want a phone with that e-reader? Hisense’s new e-ink phone comes with a detachable color LCD screen on the back.
• It’s not just AI companies… even Nvidia’s own automotive department has to fight for its compute.
• Parlez-vous français? New Anthropic research says Claude has different values depending on which language you use.
• If you don’t want Samsung Health to train its AI on your info, you’re reportedly out of luck—and it will delete your data if you withdraw consent.
• We’re sorry, what now?! SoftBank’s CEO says AI will cost $5 trillion a year by 2040.

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