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The Mets have summoned a veteran utilityman to the West Coast after their latest injury headache.

Big Tech Is Funding Space Solar And Fusion While Running On Gas

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

• Meta signed a deal with startup Overview Energy to develop up to 1 gigawatt of space-based solar power, though a pilot satellite won't launch until 2028 at the earliest -- and commercial viability remains years away.

• Despite clean energy ambitions, Big Tech is still heavily dependent on natural gas: Meta is funding 10 new gas plants for its Louisiana data center campus, and Google is building a major gas facility in North Texas.

• Google admitted its carbon emissions rose 48% in five years and has conceded its 2030 net-zero target may be out of reach as AI energy demand continues to accelerate.

The AI boom has unleashed an energy monster unlike anything the world has ever seen before. No one is exactly sure how much energy the AI sector will require in the coming years as large language models continue to advance and expand. In fact, we don’t even really know how much energy it’s consuming now. But most experts agree that we can expect a sharp and continuing rise in demand from the data centers that power the tech sector in the coming years as the global economy increasingly integrates AI into virtually every market sector on Earth.

“AI’s integration into almost everything from customer service calls to algorithmic ‘bosses’ to warfare is fueling enormous demand,” the Washington Post reported last year. “Despite dramatic efficiency improvements, pouring those gains back into bigger, hungrier models powered by fossil fuels will create the energy monster we imagine.”

And, so far, it’s consumers who are bearing the burden of this ‘energy monster.’ As data centers place unprecedented strain on local power grids, consumers are paying the price for the extra competition at the meter. But this system is unsustainable, and in flux. In May, as a result of voter outcry ahead of the midterm elections, Big Tech firms signed a pledge to either purchase or provide their own energy supplies to power their energy-hungry data centers in order to buffer consumers from rising energy prices.

As a result, major tech firms are starting to invest more heavily in next-gen and clean energy alternatives in a bid to find ways to power their enormous future needs without throwing their climate pledges out the window. Just this week, Meta announced a deal with Overview Energy to start developing a solar power system in space, which would be able to beam energy down to Earth even in darkness.

Overview Energy is a startup seeking to put solar satellites into Earth’s orbit, where they can harvest power from the sun at all times of day and night. Meta, the company behind Facebook, has signed a deal with the energy startup to develop up to 1 gigawatt of space solar power, or the equivalent of the energy output of a nuclear reactor.

However, the deal is all theoretical at this point, as the technology of space solar has not yet caught up to the vision set out by the two companies. Overview Energy aims to launch a pilot satellite into orbit by 2028 – meaning that a gigawatt of power is still quite a few years away from becoming a reality, if it comes to fruition at all. But proponents of the technology feel that it’s just a matter of time before space-based solar becomes commercially viable, and some contend that it could even be cost-competitive with other energy sources as soon as 2040.

Silicon Valley is also investing more and more into a high-stakes bet on nuclear fusion as a silver bullet solution to slay the AI energy monster. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of ChatGPT firm OpenAI, said at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It motivates us to go invest more in fusion,” he went on to specify.

Tech giants, including Meta and Google are also increasingly investing in next-gen geothermal energy research, which uses enhanced drilling methods borrowed from the oil and gas sector and even, in some projects, from nuclear fusion to drill down to tap into the Earth’s heat from nearly anywhere on the surface.

In the meantime, however, Meta and other Big Tech firms are heavily relying on natural gas to power its massive AI ambitions. Meta alone is funding the development of 10 new gas-fired plants for its biggest-ever AI data center campus in rural Louisiana. Meanwhile, Google is developing a massive natural gas facility attached to a data center campus in North Texas.

So while Big Tech has major clean energy ambitions, these technologies are still years away, and real-time emissions are continuing to balloon. In 2024, Google admitted that the firm’s carbon emissions had risen 48 percent in five years thanks to the AI boom. Google had previously pledged to reach net zero by 2030, but the officials have conceded that “as we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging.”

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/03/2026 - 11:40

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Will Black Voters Rescue The GOP In 2026?

The Republican Party is bracing for a brutal midterm election this year. Polls show Democrats ahead in the generic congressional ballot, and prediction markets give them solid odds of taking the House and a modest chance of flipping the Senate. But despite polls and prediction markets, there are signs that the GOP could defy history.

And it comes down to black voters.

Could black voters actually be the secret weapon that keeps Republicans in power after the 2026 midterms? The numbers, at least according to CNN's Harry Enten, suggest the question is worth asking seriously.

Enten laid out a striking case, walking through data that shows Donald Trump and the GOP making inroads with African American voters that the Republican Party simply hasn't seen in decades. 

While there’s no doubt that Democrats still have a solid advantage among black voters, that advantage is shrinking, and in tight races, even modest shifts can flip outcomes.

Trump's approval rating among black voters sat at 12% during his first term. It's now at 16%. It’s a modest shift that could be consequential, Enten argues, in states like Georgia, where margins are razor-thin, and every percentage point is a battleground. "Republicans absolutely love the shift that's going on," Enten said, "because Democrats have had such a long-term advantage." He argued that Trump "actually gaining ground versus where he was in term number one... has major implications for elections down the line."

The party identification numbers are another good sign for the GOP in November. Democrats have a 51-point advantage with African-American voters, which may sound good, but it’s actually a devastating number when you consider that during Trump's first term, Democrats held a 63-point advantage. 

The Democratic advantage has shrunk by 12 points. 

"This to me was absolutely stunning," Enten said, noting that the Democratic lead among black voters is now "actually smaller than any lead from 2006 to 2021" - a stretch of time that includes Barack Obama's two presidential runs.

What makes this more than just a polling curiosity is that the gains appear to be sticking. Democrats got shellacked with black voters in 2024. Trump turned in what Enten called a "historically strong performance" with that group, and Democrats had their worst showing in a generation. The natural assumption would be that some of that was a one-cycle anomaly, and that current economic concerns and opposition to the war in Iran would erase the gains Trump made. 

But the data says otherwise. 

Pre-election polling ahead of 2024 showed Kamala Harris leading among Black voters by 63 points. That number now sits at 62 points. "Republicans are holding onto the gains that they made among African Americans in 2024," Enten observed.

Whether these gains will stick after Trump leaves office remains to be seen, but as far as the 2026 midterm elections go, it’s clear there’s no Democratic bounce-back. The voters who drifted toward Trump or away from the Democratic Party haven't come back. This is a huge problem for the Democratic Party coalition, which has relied heavily on the loyalty of black voters.

 "The Donald Trump-led Republican Party is making gains among African Americans that we simply put have not seen the Republican Party make in a generation." 

Trump's GOP is holding on to the generational gains they made with Black voters in the 2024 election.

The GOP has gained 12 pts on the Dems on party id with African Americans vs. Trump term 1 at this point.

Trump's approval with Black voters is higher than it was in term 1. pic.twitter.com/EKiEv561jk

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) April 30, 2026

The implications of these numbers is huge for the 2026 midterms.

Southern states with competitive House and Senate races depend heavily on black voter turnout and margins. This means that if Democrats are hemorrhaging even a few percentage points of that support, the math gets ugly for them really

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/03/2026 - 11:05

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