Google has closed a $3 billion deal to secure 3,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power, as it looks to meet the data demands of its growing AI and cloud computing platforms by harnessing low-cost clean energy. Brookfield Asset Management's renewables division says that its deal with Google is the largest deal of its kind for hydroelectricity. The first phase of this deal will provide Google with 670MW of carbon-free electricity from Brookfield’s Holtwood and Safe Harbor plants in Pennsylvania.

The Hydro Framework Agreement (HFA) allows Google to upgrade or develop the existing facilities as it sees fit in an ongoing commitment to adding more power to the grid. At the outset, Google’s efforts will largely be focused on the PJM, the largest grid in the US with 65 million customers, which is currently struggling to keep up with the data demands of big tech’s seemingly insatiably power-hungry AI projects. In time, the new partners will have the option of expanding into other regions in the country. Google said in a statement that it was dedicated to "responsibly growing the digital infrastructure that powers daily life for people, communities and businesses."

Google’s latest energy deal comes in the same week that AI rival Meta said it will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a number of gigwatt-sized data centers, as part of its quest to create better-than-human-level "superintelligence" in all of its AI domains. The new campuses will be among the largest on earth, with the first to arrive being the Ohio-based Prometheus at some point next year.

A typical data center consumes around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but the emerging AI-focused complexes being built by tech giants could reportedly push this figure into the millions, as recently reported by The New York Times. When the volume of water needed to power these facilities eclipses what is readily available, local communities often bear the brunt through rising prices and potential water shortages in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-spends-%C2%A33-billion-on-securing-energy-for-its-data-centers-and-ai-expansion-145145966.html?src=rss

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Physicists with the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration have detected the gravitational wave signal (dubbed GW231123) of the most massive merger between two black holes yet observed, resulting in a new black hole that is 225 times more massive than our Sun. The results were presented at the Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves in Glasgow, Scotland.

The LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration searches the universe for gravitational waves produced by the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced Virgo, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India in 2021, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.

To date, the collaboration has detected dozens of merger events since its first Nobel Prize-winning discovery. Early detected mergers involved either two black holes or two neutron stars.  In 2021, LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA confirmed the detection of two separate "mixed" mergers between black holes and neutron stars.

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It's been textbook knowledge for over a century that our Milky Way galaxy is doomed to collide with another large spiral galaxy, Andromeda, in the next 5 billion years and merge into one even bigger galaxy. But a fresh analysis published in the journal Nature Astronomy is casting that longstanding narrative in a more uncertain light. The authors conclude that the likelihood of this collision and merger is closer to the odds of a coin flip, with a roughly 50 percent probability that the two galaxies will avoid such an event during the next 10 billion years.

Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies (M31) are part of what's known as the Local Group (LG), which also hosts other smaller galaxies (some not yet discovered) as well as dark matter (per the prevailing standard cosmological model). Both already have remnants of past mergers and interactions with other galaxies, according to the authors.

"Predicting future mergers requires knowledge about the present coordinates, velocities, and masses of the systems partaking in the interaction," the authors wrote. That involves not just the gravitational force between them but also dynamical friction. It's the latter that dominates when galaxies are headed toward a merger, since it causes galactic orbits to decay.

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