Abel Avellan is taking on SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper in the battle to provide broadband satellite internet directly to your smartphone. Last September, a crowd of seasoned spectators gathered at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took flight for the 373rd time. But it wasn’t carrying yet another of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to join the 7,100-plus he has already circling Earth. Onboard instead were five satellites from AST SpaceMobile, a tiny Starlink rival that SpaceX has derided as a “meme stock” in regulatory filings with the federal government. Each was equipped with a 700-square-foot antenna that would unfold in orbit, an early step in establishing a network AST hopes will someday best the incumbent mocking it. The size of these antennas—and the even larger 2,400-square-foot version that will succeed them—are key to CEO and founder Abel Avellan’s plan to win a new market: satellite internet beamed directly to your phone. In contrast to SpaceX, which uses thousands of satellites to connect residences, businesses, vehicles and even the White House to the internet, AST’s super-large antennas should give it global coverage with just 90 satellites. The company plans to launch 60 into orbit by the end of 2026. Jamel Toppin for Forbes The goal is to keep cellphones connected when out of range of a tower. You’d be able to make calls even when hiking in a remote area or from a boat miles offshore. Until recently, that required expensive satellite phones with special hardware. “Our vision is to provide connectivity without disadvantage to wherever people are located,” says Avellan, 54. This isn’t Starlink’s main business: Its $12.3 billion in revenue largely comes from providing internet to fixed-base stations attached to homes and businesses, not mobile phones. Nor is it the vision of Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper, a direct Starlink competitor, which launched the first 27 of a planned 3,200-plus satellites in late April. But Starlink isn’t totally ignoring the phone business. It’s currently in beta testing with T-Mobile to let users text on their phones via Starlink when they don’t have any bars, giving it an early lead over AST. It also has thousands of satellites, to AST’s five, and Musk’s insider status with the Trump administration could prove important in the heavily regulated telecom business. Starlink’s staggering $350 billion valuation dwarfs Midland, Texas–based AST’s market cap (it went public in April 2021 via a special purpose acquisition company) of around $8.7 billion. Still, AST has a shot at the emerging market for a satellite-based mobile cell plan, with a potentially substantial payoff. The big opportunity is not off-grid connectivity for Europeans and North Americans but providing internet to the more than 2.6 billion people, largely in the developing world, who struggle to get online at all. Most of them can’t afford Starlink. A basic base station starts at $350; then it’s around $80 per month for residential Wi-Fi. AST’s pricing is still largely theoretical, but the startup hopes it can deliver for just a few extra dollars a month on a cellphone bill. That’s a compelling proposition. When it comes to broadband, “the cheapest and most efficient way is through your phone,” Avellan says. Skipping out on building new cell towers entirely could mean major cost savings for the telecoms companies as well, if they can offer satellite internet in markets that don’t yet justify that investment. Deutsche Bank (which is not an AST investor) estimates that the company’s revenues could top $370 million in 2026 once its commercial service is up and running, and surpass $5 billion by 2030—with far less capital expenditure than Starlink will need to keep launching thousands of satellites. The big obstacle for both companies is the basic physics of satellite communication: namely, that you need a direct line of sight from a satellite to your phone to get a signal. Starlink, Project Kuiper and multiple Chinese firms plan to tackle this by flooding the zone with thousands of small, cheap satellites in low Earth orbit, which hop signals between them to maintain steady connections with ground-based dishes. The antenna in your phone is a lot smaller, making it harder to get bandwidth to do more than text. But AST’s satellites are outfitted with antennas at least 50 times the size of Starlink’s. It’s a tricky feat of engineering—the centimeters-thick antennas require assembly in clean rooms to be securely packed into satellites at launch; then they’re carefully unfolded again in orbit. It’s much more complicated than a Starlink satellite, and each AST satellite costs about $21 million compared to around $1.2 million to build each Starlink bird. But the result is true broadband connectivity. AST’s five satellites have successfully made video calls with phones on Verizon, Vodafone, Rakuten and AT&T networks. AST’s have a longer lifespan, too, requiring replacement every 10 years compared to five to seven years for Starlink. AST’s big antennas make broadband-to-cellphone connections easier to pull off, says John Baras, a University of Maryland aerospace engineering professor, because they cover a much larger area and are designed to deliver a signal to devices in motion. Starlink has a bigger challenge making its system work for phones, he says, because it was envisioned as a way to deliver internet to fixed stations on the ground—not to mobile phones that by definition move around. “Starlink is going to have problems,” he says. SpaceX did not respond to a comment request. JR Wilson, VP of towers and roaming at AT&T, a major AST investor, compares the tech race between Starlink and AST to the home-video race of the 1980s. “Beta came out first, but it didn’t have some of the same qualities as VHS,” he explained, recalling Sony’s ill-starred format which, despite delivering a better picture, failed because of its high price and short recording times. AT&T plans to start offering satellite connectivity using AST’s service once it has more satellites in orbit next year. AST currently has deals with dozens of other telecom providers around the world, including Vodafone, Rakuten and Verizon (all investors), offering potential access to around 3 billion subscribers. Partnering with big telecoms offers loads of advantages, says Mike Crawford, an analyst at Los Angeles–based B. Riley Securities. By avoiding the home satellite internet market that Starlink dominates, AST doesn’t have to spend money to attract subscribers or build costly ground infrastructure—its partners have already done that. Plus, it avoids going head-to-head with giant legacy telecoms. Avellan knows the ins and outs of the industry. Born in Venezuela, he studied engineering before starting his career at the Swedish telecom giant Ericsson. He founded his first company, Emer­ging Markets Communications, “with $50,000 and a pregnant wife” in 2000, he says, to provide satellite communication services to Africa and the Middle East, as well as cruise and cargo ships. He sold it to satellite company Global Eagle in 2016 for $550 million and used some of the proceeds to found AST the following year. After launching its first demonstration satellite in 2019, AST raised $110 million from Vodafone, Rakuten, AT&T and VC shops like London-based Shift Ventures. In 2021, it went public through a SPAC backed by private equity firm New Providence, raising an additional $462 million. The company’s stock has more than doubled since then, making Avellan, who owns about 25% of it, worth some $2.1 billion. In March, AST and Voda­fone announced plans for a joint venture spin-out company to offer AST’s satellite connectivity to mobile operators in Europe and Africa.PATRICK WELSH FOR FORBES How To Play It By John Buckingham For a more grounded play on soaring demand for connectivity, wireless communications and broadcast tower REIT American Tower should continue to benefit from mobile data proliferation and 5G deployments, while an expan­ding data center segment positions it to profit from the rise of hybrid IT and AI workloads. Meanwhile, shareholders are rewarded with a 3.3% dividend yield to go along with handsome capital appreciation potential from a conservative “picks-and-shovels” terrestrial player in the tech gold rush. Moody’s just awarded the company’s strong balance sheet, citing AMT’s lea­ding position in the global wireless infrastructure market, predic­table revenue and income, consistently solid fixed charge coverage and excellent liquidity (it’s also an investor in AST). John Buckingham is a principal of AFAM Capital and editor of The Prudent Speculator. These partnerships also unlock the parts of the radio spectrum that make communications between satellites and phones possible, which are primarily owned by legacy telecoms. Assu­ming regulators greenlight these deals—including a crucial lease from Ligado Networks for a frequency that would give AST’s data the equivalent of 4G speeds—its satellites will be able to offer coverage globally. SpaceX can offer only text right now, although obviously that could change. With far fewer partnerships, Starlink is “cash-rich but spectrum-poor,” according to Crawford, the B. Riley analyst. That’s not surprising, given Musk’s ruthless approach to business. “SpaceX famously partners with people to the point that they can extract what they want from you, and then they stomp on your face, right?” industry analyst Chris Quilty says. Still, Musk’s deep connections to the Trump administration could present an existential challenge to AST’s burgeoning business. It’s clear Musk’s company views AST as a threat. SpaceX has already taken it to the mat over an array of regulatory issues governed by the FCC: spectrum access, space junk, blocking astronomical observations. Those FCC filings are also where SpaceX dismissed AST as a “meme stock.” It has a point: While shares in AST have gained a total of 172% since it went public, the stock has been on a tear since last May, jumping more than 1,000% at its peak. The company still has virtually no revenue to support its multi­billion-dollar market cap; in 2024, AST spent $300 million but brought in only about $4 million in revenue due entirely to a contract with the Space Defense Agency to build military satellite communications infrastructure. And like all meme stocks, it has a flock of ardent believers online. AST’s investment community on Reddit has more than 30,000 active subscribers. When the company invited its retail investors to attend the September launch of its satellites, nearly 1,000 showed up. “People are enthusiastic about the prospect that no matter where you live or work, you can have broadband,” Avellan says of the attention. “If at the same time they can make money by investing and following what we do? Even better.” More from Forbes

The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the state. For years, they marketed the former agricultural fields as the Franklin Farm mega site, first to auto manufacturers (no takers) and after that to other industries that might want to occupy more than a thousand acres just off the interstate. This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s series “Power Hungry: AI and our energy future,” on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial-intelligence revolution. So it’s no wonder that state and local politicians were exuberant when Meta showed up. In December, the company announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial-intelligence models at the site, with operations to begin in 2028. “A game changer,” declared Governor Jeff Landry, citing 5,000 construction jobs and 500 jobs at the data center that are expected to be created and calling it the largest private capital investment in the state’s history. From a rural backwater to the heart of the booming AI revolution! The AI data center also promises to transform the state’s energy future. Stretching in length for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity, requiring two gigawatts for computation alone (the electricity for cooling and other building needs will add to that). When it’s up and running, it will be the equivalent of suddenly adding a decent-size city to the region’s grid—one that never sleeps and needs a steady, uninterrupted flow of electricity. To power the data center, Entergy aims to spend $3.2 billion to build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts and upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand. In its filing to the state’s power regulatory agency, Entergy acknowledged that natural-gas plants “emit significant amounts of CO2” but said the energy source was the only affordable choice given the need to quickly meet the 24-7 electricity demand from the huge data center. Meta said it will work with Entergy to eventually bring online at least 1.5 gigawatts of new renewables, including solar, but that it had not yet decided which specific projects to fund or when those investments will be made. Meanwhile, the new natural-gas plants, which are scheduled to be up and running starting in 2028 and will have a typical lifetime of around 30 years, will further lock in the state’s commitment to the fossil fuel. The development has sparked interest from the US Congress; last week, Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works issued a letter to Meta that called out the company’s plan to power its data center with “new and unabated natural gas generation” and said its promises to offset the resulting emissions “by funding carbon capture and a solar project are vague and offer little reassurance.” The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. While some climate advocates have hoped that cleaner renewable power would soon overtake it, the booming power demand from data centers is all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon. The reality on the ground is that natural gas is “the default” to meet the exploding power demand from AI data centers, says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-director of its Deep Decarbonization Project. “The natural-gas plant is the thing that you know how to build, you know what it’s going to cost (more or less), and you know how to scale it and get it approved,” says Victor. “Even for [AI] companies that want to have low emissions profiles and who are big pushers of low or zero carbon, they won’t have a choice but to use gas.” The preference for natural gas is particularly pronounced in the American South, where plans for multiple large gas-fired plants are in the works in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Utilities in those states alone are planning some 20 gigawatts of new natural-gas power plants over the next 15 years, according to a recent report. And much of the new demand—particularly in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia—is coming from data centers; in those 3 states data centers account for around 65 to 85% of projected load growth. “It’s a long-term commitment in absolutely the wrong direction,” says Greg Buppert, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. If all the proposed gas plants get built in the South over the next 15 years, he says, “we’ll just have to accept that we won’t meet emissions reduction goals.” But even as it looks more and more likely that natural gas will remain a sizable part of our energy future, questions abound over just what its continued dominance will look like. For one thing, no one is sure exactly how much electricity AI data centers will need in the future and how large an appetite companies will have for natural gas. Demand for AI could fizzle. Or AI companies could make a concerted effort to shift to renewable energy or nuclear power. Such possibilities mean that the US could be on a path to overbuild natural-gas capacity, which would leave regions saddled with unneeded and polluting fossil-fuel dinosaurs—and residents footing soaring electricity bills to pay off today’s investments. The good news is that such risks could likely be managed over the next few years, if—and it’s a big if—AI companies are more transparent about how flexible they can be in their seemingly insatiable energy demands. The reign of natural gas Natural gas in the US is cheap and abundant these days. Two decades ago, huge reserves were found in shale deposits scattered across the country. In 2008, as fracking started to make it possible to extract large quantities of the gas from shale, natural gas was selling for $13 per million Btu (a measure of thermal energy); last year, it averaged just $2.21, the lowest annual price (adjusting for inflation) ever reported, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Around 2016, natural gas overtook coal as the main fuel for electricity generation in the US. And today—despite the rapid rise of solar and wind power, and well-deserved enthusiasm for the falling price of such renewables—natural gas is still king, accounting for around 40% of electricity generated in the US. In Louisiana, which is also a big producer, that share is some 72%, according to a recent audit. Natural gas burns much cleaner than coal, producing roughly half as much carbon dioxide. In the early days of the gas revolution, many environmental activists and progressive politicians touted it as a valuable “bridge” to renewables and other sources of clean energy. And by some calculations, natural gas has fulfilled that promise. The power sector has been one of the few success stories in lowering US emissions, thanks to its use of natural gas as a replacement for coal.   But natural gas still produces a lot of carbon dioxide when it is burned in conventionally equipped power plants. And fracking causes local air and water pollution. Perhaps most worrisome, drilling and pipelines are releasing substantial amounts of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, both accidentally and by intentional venting. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and the emissions are a growing concern to climate scientists, albeit one that’s difficult to quantify. Still, carbon emissions from the power sector will likely continue to drop as coal is further squeezed out and more renewables get built, according to the Rhodium Group, a research consultancy. But Rhodium also projects that if electricity demand from data centers remains high and natural-gas prices low, the fossil fuel will remain the dominant source of power generation at least through 2035 and the transition to cleaner electricity will be much delayed. Rhodium estimates that the continued reign of natural gas will lead to an additional 278 million metric tons of annual US carbon emissions by 2035 (roughly equivalent to the emissions from a large US state such as Florida), relative to a future in which the use of fossil fuel gradually winds down. Our addiction to natural gas, however, doesn’t have to be a total climate disaster, at least over the longer term. Large AI companies could use their vast leverage to insist that utilities install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at power plants and use natural gas sourced with limited methane emissions. Entergy, for one, says its new gas turbines will be able to incorporate CCS through future upgrades. And Meta says it will help to fund the installation of CCS equipment at one of Entergy’s existing natural-gas power plants in southern Louisiana to help prove out the technology.   But the transition to clean natural gas is a hope that will take decades to realize. Meanwhile, utilities across the country are facing a more imminent and practical challenge: how to meet the sudden demand for gigawatts more power in the next few years without inadvertently building far too much capacity. For many, adding more natural-gas power plants might seem like the safe bet. But what if the explosion in AI demand doesn’t show up? Times of stress AI companies tout the need for massive, power-hungry data centers. But estimates for just how much energy it will actually take to train and run AI models vary wildly. And the technology keeps changing, sometimes seemingly overnight. DeepSeek, the new Chinese model that debuted in January, may or may not signal a future of new energy-efficient AI, but it certainly raises the possibility that such advances are possible. Maybe we will find ways to use far more energy-efficient hardware. Or maybe the AI revolution will peter out and many of the massive data centers that companies think they’ll need will never get built. There are already signs that too many have been constructed in China and clues that it might be beginning to happen in the US.  Despite the uncertainty, power providers have the task of drawing up long-term plans for investments to accommodate projected demand. Too little capacity and their customers face blackouts; too much and those customers face outsize electricity bills to fund investments in unneeded power. There could be a way to lessen the risk of overbuilding natural-gas power, however. Plenty of power is available on average around the country and on most regional grids. Most utilities typically use only about 53% of their available capacity on average during the year, according to a Duke study. The problem is that utilities must be prepared for the few hours when demand spikes—say, because of severe winter weather or a summer heat wave. The soaring demand from AI data centers is prompting many power providers to plan new capacity to make sure they have plenty of what Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, and his colleagues call “headroom,” to meet any spikes in demand. But after analyzing data from power systems across the country, Norris and his coauthors found that if large AI facilities cut back their electricity use during hours of peak demand, many regional power grids could accommodate those AI customers without adding new generation capacity. Even a moderate level of flexibility would make a huge difference. The Duke researchers estimate that if data centers cut their electricity use by roughly half for just a few hours during the year, it will allow utilities to handle some additional 76 gigawatts of new demand. That means power providers could effectively absorb the 65 or so additional gigawatts that, according to some predictions, data centers will likely need by 2029. “The prevailing assumption is that data centers are 100% inflexible,” says Norris. That is, that they need to run at full power all the time. But Norris says AI data centers, particularly ones that are training large foundation models (such as Meta’s facility in Richland Parish), can avoid running at full capacity or shift their computation loads to other data centers around the country—or even ramp up their own backup power—during times when a grid is under stress. The increased flexibility could allow companies to get AI data centers up and running faster, without waiting for new power plants and upgrades to transmission lines—which can take years to get approved and built. It could also, Norris noted in testimony to the US Congress in early March, provide at least a short-term reprieve on the rush to build more natural-gas power, buying time for utilities to develop and plan for cleaner technologies such as advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal. It could, he testified, prevent “a hasty overbuild of natural-gas infrastructure.” AI companies have expressed some interest in their ability to shift around demand for power. But there are still plenty of technology questions around how to make it happen. Late last year, EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute), a nonprofit R&D group, started a three-year collaboration with power providers, grid operators, and AI companies including Meta and Google, to figure it out. “The potential is very large,” says David Porter, the EPRI vice president who runs the project, but we must show it works “beyond just something on a piece of paper or a computer screen.” Porter estimates that there are typically 80 to 90 hours a year when a local grid is under stress and it would help for a data center to reduce its energy use. But, he says, AI data centers still need to figure out how to throttle back at those times, and grid operators need to learn how to suddenly subtract and then add back hundreds of megawatts of electricity without disrupting their systems. “There’s still a lot of work to be done so that it’s seamless for the continuous operation of the data centers and seamless for the continuous operation of the grid,” he says. Footing the bill Ultimately, getting AI data centers to be more flexible in their power demands will require more than a technological fix. It will require a shift in how AI companies work with utilities and local communities, providing them with more information and insights into actual electricity needs. And it will take aggressive regulators to make sure utilities are rigorously evaluating the power requirements of data centers rather than just reflexively building more natural-gas plants. “The most important climate policymakers in the country right now are not in Washington. They’re in state capitals, and these are public utility commissioners,” says Costa Samaras, the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. In Louisiana, those policymakers are the elected officials at the Louisiana Public Service Commission, who are expected to rule later this year on Entergy’s proposed new gas plants and grid upgrades. The LPSC commissioners will decide whether Entergy’s arguments about the huge energy requirements of Meta’s data center and need for full 24/7 power leave no alternative to natural gas.  In the application it filed last fall with LPSC, Entergy said natural-gas power was essential for it to meet demand “throughout the day and night.” Teaming up solar power with battery storage could work “in theory” but would be “prohibitively costly.” Entergy also ruled out nuclear, saying it would take too long and cost too much. Others are not satisfied with the utility’s judgment. In February, the New Orleans–based Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a motion with the Louisiana regulators arguing that Entergy did not do a rigorous market evaluation of its options, as required by the commission’s rules. Part of the problem, the groups said, is that Entergy relied on “unsubstantiated assertions” from Meta on its load needs and timeline. “Entergy is saying [Meta] needs around-the-clock power,” says Paul Arbaje, an analyst for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But we’re just being asked to take [Entergy’s] word for it. Regulators need to be asking tough questions and not just assume that these data centers need to be operated at essentially full capacity all the time.” And, he suggests, if the utility had “started to poke holes at the assumptions that are sometimes taken as a given,” it “would have found other cleaner options.”       In an email response to MIT Technology Review, Entergy said that it has discussed the operational aspects of the facility with Meta, but “as with all customers, Entergy Louisiana will not discuss sensitive matters on behalf of their customers.” In a letter filed with the state’s regulators in early April, Meta said Entergy’s understanding of its energy needs is, in fact, accurate. The February motion also raised concern over who will end up paying for the new gas plants. Entergy says Meta has signed a 15-year supply contract for the electricity that is meant to help cover the costs of building and running the power plants but didn’t respond to requests by MIT Technology Review for further details of the deal, including what happens if Meta wants to terminate the contract early. Meta referred MIT Technology Review’s questions about the contract to Entergy but says its policy is to cover the full cost that utilities incur to serve its data centers, including grid upgrades. It also says it is spending over $200 million to support the Richland Parish data centers with new infrastructure, including roads and water systems.  Not everyone is convinced. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, which works on behalf of Louisiana residents, says that the large investments in new gas turbines could mean future rate hikes, in a state where residents already have high electricity bills and suffer from one of country’s most unreliable grids. Of special concern is what happens after the 15 years. “Our biggest long-term concern is that in 15 years, residential ratepayers [and] small businesses in Louisiana will be left holding the bag for three large gas generators,” says Logan Burke, the alliance’s executive director. Indeed, consumers across the country have good reasons to fear that their electricity bills will go up as utilities look to meet the increased demand from AI data centers by building new generation capacity. In a paper posted in March, researchers at Harvard Law School argued that utilities “are now forcing the public to pay for infrastructure designed to supply a handful of exceedingly wealthy corporations.” The Harvard authors write, “Utilities tell [public utility commissions] what they want to hear: that the deals for Big Tech isolate data center energy costs from other ratepayers’ bills and won’t increase consumers’ power prices.” But the complexity of the utilities’ payment data and lack of transparency in the accounting, they say, make verifying this claim “all but impossible.” The boom in AI data centers is making Big Tech a player in our energy infrastructure and electricity future in a way unimaginable just a few years ago. At their best, AI companies could greatly facilitate the move to cleaner energy by acting as reliable and well-paying customers that provide funding that utilities can use to invest in a more robust and flexible electricity grid. This change can happen without burdening other electricity customers with additional risks and costs. But it will take AI companies committed to that vision. And it will take state regulators who ask tough questions and don’t get carried away by the potential investments being dangled by AI companies. Huge new AI data centers like the one in Richland Parish could in fact be a huge economic boon by providing new jobs, but residents deserve transparency and input into the negotiations. This is, after all, public infrastructure. Meta may come and go, but Louisiana’s residents will have to live with—and possibly pay for—the changes in the decades to come.

The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the state. For years, they marketed the former agricultural fields as the Franklin Farm mega site, first to auto manufacturers (no takers) and after that to other industries that might want to occupy more than a thousand acres just off the interstate. This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s series “Power Hungry: AI and our energy future,” on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial-intelligence revolution. So it’s no wonder that state and local politicians were exuberant when Meta showed up. In December, the company announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial-intelligence models at the site, with operations to begin in 2028. “A game changer,” declared Governor Jeff Landry, citing 5,000 construction jobs and 500 jobs at the data center that are expected to be created and calling it the largest private capital investment in the state’s history. From a rural backwater to the heart of the booming AI revolution! The AI data center also promises to transform the state’s energy future. Stretching in length for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity, requiring two gigawatts for computation alone (the electricity for cooling and other building needs will add to that). When it’s up and running, it will be the equivalent of suddenly adding a decent-size city to the region’s grid—one that never sleeps and needs a steady, uninterrupted flow of electricity. To power the data center, Entergy aims to spend $3.2 billion to build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts and upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand. In its filing to the state’s power regulatory agency, Entergy acknowledged that natural-gas plants “emit significant amounts of CO2” but said the energy source was the only affordable choice given the need to quickly meet the 24-7 electricity demand from the huge data center. Meta said it will work with Entergy to eventually bring online at least 1.5 gigawatts of new renewables, including solar, but that it had not yet decided which specific projects to fund or when those investments will be made. Meanwhile, the new natural-gas plants, which are scheduled to be up and running starting in 2028 and will have a typical lifetime of around 30 years, will further lock in the state’s commitment to the fossil fuel. The development has sparked interest from the US Congress; last week, Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works issued a letter to Meta that called out the company's plan to power its data center with “new and unabated natural gas generation” and said its promises to offset the resulting emissions "by funding carbon capture and a solar project are vague and offer little reassurance.” The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. While some climate advocates have hoped that cleaner renewable power would soon overtake it, the booming power demand from data centers is all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon. The reality on the ground is that natural gas is “the default” to meet the exploding power demand from AI data centers, says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-director of its Deep Decarbonization Project. “The natural-gas plant is the thing that you know how to build, you know what it’s going to cost (more or less), and you know how to scale it and get it approved,” says Victor. “Even for [AI] companies that want to have low emissions profiles and who are big pushers of low or zero carbon, they won’t have a choice but to use gas.” The preference for natural gas is particularly pronounced in the American South, where plans for multiple large gas-fired plants are in the works in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Utilities in those states alone are planning some 20 gigawatts of new natural-gas power plants over the next 15 years, according to a recent report. And much of the new demand—particularly in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia—is coming from data centers; in those 3 states data centers account for around 65 to 85% of projected load growth. “It’s a long-term commitment in absolutely the wrong direction,” says Greg Buppert, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. If all the proposed gas plants get built in the South over the next 15 years, he says, “we’ll just have to accept that we won’t meet emissions reduction goals.” But even as it looks more and more likely that natural gas will remain a sizable part of our energy future, questions abound over just what its continued dominance will look like. For one thing, no one is sure exactly how much electricity AI data centers will need in the future and how large an appetite companies will have for natural gas. Demand for AI could fizzle. Or AI companies could make a concerted effort to shift to renewable energy or nuclear power. Such possibilities mean that the US could be on a path to overbuild natural-gas capacity, which would leave regions saddled with unneeded and polluting fossil-fuel dinosaurs—and residents footing soaring electricity bills to pay off today’s investments. The good news is that such risks could likely be managed over the next few years, if—and it’s a big if—AI companies are more transparent about how flexible they can be in their seemingly insatiable energy demands. The reign of natural gas Natural gas in the US is cheap and abundant these days. Two decades ago, huge reserves were found in shale deposits scattered across the country. In 2008, as fracking started to make it possible to extract large quantities of the gas from shale, natural gas was selling for $13 per million Btu (a measure of thermal energy); last year, it averaged just $2.21, the lowest annual price (adjusting for inflation) ever reported, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Around 2016, natural gas overtook coal as the main fuel for electricity generation in the US. And today—despite the rapid rise of solar and wind power, and well-deserved enthusiasm for the falling price of such renewables—natural gas is still king, accounting for around 40% of electricity generated in the US. In Louisiana, which is also a big producer, that share is some 72%, according to a recent audit. Natural gas burns much cleaner than coal, producing roughly half as much carbon dioxide. In the early days of the gas revolution, many environmental activists and progressive politicians touted it as a valuable “bridge” to renewables and other sources of clean energy. And by some calculations, natural gas has fulfilled that promise. The power sector has been one of the few success stories in lowering US emissions, thanks to its use of natural gas as a replacement for coal.   But natural gas still produces a lot of carbon dioxide when it is burned in conventionally equipped power plants. And fracking causes local air and water pollution. Perhaps most worrisome, drilling and pipelines are releasing substantial amounts of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, both accidentally and by intentional venting. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and the emissions are a growing concern to climate scientists, albeit one that’s difficult to quantify. Still, carbon emissions from the power sector will likely continue to drop as coal is further squeezed out and more renewables get built, according to the Rhodium Group, a research consultancy. But Rhodium also projects that if electricity demand from data centers remains high and natural-gas prices low, the fossil fuel will remain the dominant source of power generation at least through 2035 and the transition to cleaner electricity will be much delayed. Rhodium estimates that the continued reign of natural gas will lead to an additional 278 million metric tons of annual US carbon emissions by 2035 (roughly equivalent to the emissions from a large US state such as Florida), relative to a future in which the use of fossil fuel gradually winds down. Our addiction to natural gas, however, doesn’t have to be a total climate disaster, at least over the longer term. Large AI companies could use their vast leverage to insist that utilities install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at power plants and use natural gas sourced with limited methane emissions. Entergy, for one, says its new gas turbines will be able to incorporate CCS through future upgrades. And Meta says it will help to fund the installation of CCS equipment at one of Entergy’s existing natural-gas power plants in southern Louisiana to help prove out the technology.   But the transition to clean natural gas is a hope that will take decades to realize. Meanwhile, utilities across the country are facing a more imminent and practical challenge: how to meet the sudden demand for gigawatts more power in the next few years without inadvertently building far too much capacity. For many, adding more natural-gas power plants might seem like the safe bet. But what if the explosion in AI demand doesn’t show up? Times of stress AI companies tout the need for massive, power-hungry data centers. But estimates for just how much energy it will actually take to train and run AI models vary wildly. And the technology keeps changing, sometimes seemingly overnight. DeepSeek, the new Chinese model that debuted in January, may or may not signal a future of new energy-efficient AI, but it certainly raises the possibility that such advances are possible. Maybe we will find ways to use far more energy-efficient hardware. Or maybe the AI revolution will peter out and many of the massive data centers that companies think they’ll need will never get built. There are already signs that too many have been constructed in China and clues that it might be beginning to happen in the US.  Despite the uncertainty, power providers have the task of drawing up long-term plans for investments to accommodate projected demand. Too little capacity and their customers face blackouts; too much and those customers face outsize electricity bills to fund investments in unneeded power. There could be a way to lessen the risk of overbuilding natural-gas power, however. Plenty of power is available on average around the country and on most regional grids. Most utilities typically use only about 53% of their available capacity on average during the year, according to a Duke study. The problem is that utilities must be prepared for the few hours when demand spikes—say, because of severe winter weather or a summer heat wave. The soaring demand from AI data centers is prompting many power providers to plan new capacity to make sure they have plenty of what Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, and his colleagues call “headroom,” to meet any spikes in demand. But after analyzing data from power systems across the country, Norris and his coauthors found that if large AI facilities cut back their electricity use during hours of peak demand, many regional power grids could accommodate those AI customers without adding new generation capacity. Even a moderate level of flexibility would make a huge difference. The Duke researchers estimate that if data centers cut their electricity use by roughly half for just a few hours during the year, it will allow utilities to handle some additional 76 gigawatts of new demand. That means power providers could effectively absorb the 65 or so additional gigawatts that, according to some predictions, data centers will likely need by 2029. “The prevailing assumption is that data centers are 100% inflexible,” says Norris. That is, that they need to run at full power all the time. But Norris says AI data centers, particularly ones that are training large foundation models (such as Meta’s facility in Richland Parish), can avoid running at full capacity or shift their computation loads to other data centers around the country—or even ramp up their own backup power—during times when a grid is under stress. The increased flexibility could allow companies to get AI data centers up and running faster, without waiting for new power plants and upgrades to transmission lines—which can take years to get approved and built. It could also, Norris noted in testimony to the US Congress in early March, provide at least a short-term reprieve on the rush to build more natural-gas power, buying time for utilities to develop and plan for cleaner technologies such as advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal. It could, he testified, prevent “a hasty overbuild of natural-gas infrastructure.” AI companies have expressed some interest in their ability to shift around demand for power. But there are still plenty of technology questions around how to make it happen. Late last year, EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute), a nonprofit R&D group, started a three-year collaboration with power providers, grid operators, and AI companies including Meta and Google, to figure it out. “The potential is very large,” says David Porter, the EPRI vice president who runs the project, but we must show it works “beyond just something on a piece of paper or a computer screen.” Porter estimates that there are typically 80 to 90 hours a year when a local grid is under stress and it would help for a data center to reduce its energy use. But, he says, AI data centers still need to figure out how to throttle back at those times, and grid operators need to learn how to suddenly subtract and then add back hundreds of megawatts of electricity without disrupting their systems. “There’s still a lot of work to be done so that it’s seamless for the continuous operation of the data centers and seamless for the continuous operation of the grid,” he says. Footing the bill Ultimately, getting AI data centers to be more flexible in their power demands will require more than a technological fix. It will require a shift in how AI companies work with utilities and local communities, providing them with more information and insights into actual electricity needs. And it will take aggressive regulators to make sure utilities are rigorously evaluating the power requirements of data centers rather than just reflexively building more natural-gas plants. “The most important climate policymakers in the country right now are not in Washington. They’re in state capitals, and these are public utility commissioners,” says Costa Samaras, the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. In Louisiana, those policymakers are the elected officials at the Louisiana Public Service Commission, who are expected to rule later this year on Entergy’s proposed new gas plants and grid upgrades. The LPSC commissioners will decide whether Entergy’s arguments about the huge energy requirements of Meta’s data center and need for full 24/7 power leave no alternative to natural gas.  In the application it filed last fall with LPSC, Entergy said natural-gas power was essential for it to meet demand “throughout the day and night.” Teaming up solar power with battery storage could work “in theory” but would be “prohibitively costly.” Entergy also ruled out nuclear, saying it would take too long and cost too much. Others are not satisfied with the utility’s judgment. In February, the New Orleans–based Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a motion with the Louisiana regulators arguing that Entergy did not do a rigorous market evaluation of its options, as required by the commission’s rules. Part of the problem, the groups said, is that Entergy relied on “unsubstantiated assertions” from Meta on its load needs and timeline. “Entergy is saying [Meta] needs around-the-clock power,” says Paul Arbaje, an analyst for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But we’re just being asked to take [Entergy’s] word for it. Regulators need to be asking tough questions and not just assume that these data centers need to be operated at essentially full capacity all the time.” And, he suggests, if the utility had “started to poke holes at the assumptions that are sometimes taken as a given,” it “would have found other cleaner options.”       In an email response to MIT Technology Review, Entergy said that it has discussed the operational aspects of the facility with Meta, but "as with all customers, Entergy Louisiana will not discuss sensitive matters on behalf of their customers.” In a letter filed with the state’s regulators in early April, Meta said Entergy’s understanding of its energy needs is, in fact, accurate. The February motion also raised concern over who will end up paying for the new gas plants. Entergy says Meta has signed a 15-year supply contract for the electricity that is meant to help cover the costs of building and running the power plants but didn't respond to requests by MIT Technology Review for further details of the deal, including what happens if Meta wants to terminate the contract early. Meta referred MIT Technology Review’s questions about the contract to Entergy but says its policy is to cover the full cost that utilities incur to serve its data centers, including grid upgrades. It also says it is spending over $200 million to support the Richland Parish data centers with new infrastructure, including roads and water systems.  Not everyone is convinced. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, which works on behalf of Louisiana residents, says that the large investments in new gas turbines could mean future rate hikes, in a state where residents already have high electricity bills and suffer from one of country’s most unreliable grids. Of special concern is what happens after the 15 years. “Our biggest long-term concern is that in 15 years, residential ratepayers [and] small businesses in Louisiana will be left holding the bag for three large gas generators,” says Logan Burke, the alliance’s executive director. Indeed, consumers across the country have good reasons to fear that their electricity bills will go up as utilities look to meet the increased demand from AI data centers by building new generation capacity. In a paper posted in March, researchers at Harvard Law School argued that utilities “are now forcing the public to pay for infrastructure designed to supply a handful of exceedingly wealthy corporations.” The Harvard authors write, “Utilities tell [public utility commissions] what they want to hear: that the deals for Big Tech isolate data center energy costs from other ratepayers’ bills and won’t increase consumers’ power prices.” But the complexity of the utilities’ payment data and lack of transparency in the accounting, they say, make verifying this claim “all but impossible.” The boom in AI data centers is making Big Tech a player in our energy infrastructure and electricity future in a way unimaginable just a few years ago. At their best, AI companies could greatly facilitate the move to cleaner energy by acting as reliable and well-paying customers that provide funding that utilities can use to invest in a more robust and flexible electricity grid. This change can happen without burdening other electricity customers with additional risks and costs. But it will take AI companies committed to that vision. And it will take state regulators who ask tough questions and don’t get carried away by the potential investments being dangled by AI companies. Huge new AI data centers like the one in Richland Parish could in fact be a huge economic boon by providing new jobs, but residents deserve transparency and input into the negotiations. This is, after all, public infrastructure. Meta may come and go, but Louisiana's residents will have to live with—and possibly pay for—the changes in the decades to come.

The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the state. For years, they marketed the former agricultural fields as the Franklin Farm mega site, first to auto manufacturers (no takers) and after that to other industries that might want to occupy more than a thousand acres just off the interstate. This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s series “Power Hungry: AI and our energy future,” on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial-intelligence revolution. So it’s no wonder that state and local politicians were exuberant when Meta showed up. In December, the company announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial-intelligence models at the site, with operations to begin in 2028. “A game changer,” declared Governor Jeff Landry, citing 5,000 construction jobs and 500 jobs at the data center that are expected to be created and calling it the largest private capital investment in the state’s history. From a rural backwater to the heart of the booming AI revolution! The AI data center also promises to transform the state’s energy future. Stretching in length for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity, requiring two gigawatts for computation alone (the electricity for cooling and other building needs will add to that). When it’s up and running, it will be the equivalent of suddenly adding a decent-size city to the region’s grid—one that never sleeps and needs a steady, uninterrupted flow of electricity. To power the data center, Entergy aims to spend $3.2 billion to build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts and upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand. In its filing to the state’s power regulatory agency, Entergy acknowledged that natural-gas plants “emit significant amounts of CO2” but said the energy source was the only affordable choice given the need to quickly meet the 24-7 electricity demand from the huge data center. Meta said it will work with Entergy to eventually bring online at least 1.5 gigawatts of new renewables, including solar, but that it had not yet decided which specific projects to fund or when those investments will be made. Meanwhile, the new natural-gas plants, which are scheduled to be up and running starting in 2028 and will have a typical lifetime of around 30 years, will further lock in the state’s commitment to the fossil fuel. The development has sparked interest from the US Congress; last week, Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works issued a letter to Meta that called out the company's plan to power its data center with “new and unabated natural gas generation” and said its promises to offset the resulting emissions "by funding carbon capture and a solar project are vague and offer little reassurance.” The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. While some climate advocates have hoped that cleaner renewable power would soon overtake it, the booming power demand from data centers is all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon. The reality on the ground is that natural gas is “the default” to meet the exploding power demand from AI data centers, says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-director of its Deep Decarbonization Project. “The natural-gas plant is the thing that you know how to build, you know what it’s going to cost (more or less), and you know how to scale it and get it approved,” says Victor. “Even for [AI] companies that want to have low emissions profiles and who are big pushers of low or zero carbon, they won’t have a choice but to use gas.” The preference for natural gas is particularly pronounced in the American South, where plans for multiple large gas-fired plants are in the works in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Utilities in those states alone are planning some 20 gigawatts of new natural-gas power plants over the next 15 years, according to a recent report. And much of the new demand—particularly in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia—is coming from data centers; in those 3 states data centers account for around 65 to 85% of projected load growth. “It’s a long-term commitment in absolutely the wrong direction,” says Greg Buppert, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. If all the proposed gas plants get built in the South over the next 15 years, he says, “we’ll just have to accept that we won’t meet emissions reduction goals.” But even as it looks more and more likely that natural gas will remain a sizable part of our energy future, questions abound over just what its continued dominance will look like. For one thing, no one is sure exactly how much electricity AI data centers will need in the future and how large an appetite companies will have for natural gas. Demand for AI could fizzle. Or AI companies could make a concerted effort to shift to renewable energy or nuclear power. Such possibilities mean that the US could be on a path to overbuild natural-gas capacity, which would leave regions saddled with unneeded and polluting fossil-fuel dinosaurs—and residents footing soaring electricity bills to pay off today’s investments. The good news is that such risks could likely be managed over the next few years, if—and it’s a big if—AI companies are more transparent about how flexible they can be in their seemingly insatiable energy demands. The reign of natural gas Natural gas in the US is cheap and abundant these days. Two decades ago, huge reserves were found in shale deposits scattered across the country. In 2008, as fracking started to make it possible to extract large quantities of the gas from shale, natural gas was selling for $13 per million Btu (a measure of thermal energy); last year, it averaged just $2.21, the lowest annual price (adjusting for inflation) ever reported, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Around 2016, natural gas overtook coal as the main fuel for electricity generation in the US. And today—despite the rapid rise of solar and wind power, and well-deserved enthusiasm for the falling price of such renewables—natural gas is still king, accounting for around 40% of electricity generated in the US. In Louisiana, which is also a big producer, that share is some 72%, according to a recent audit. Natural gas burns much cleaner than coal, producing roughly half as much carbon dioxide. In the early days of the gas revolution, many environmental activists and progressive politicians touted it as a valuable “bridge” to renewables and other sources of clean energy. And by some calculations, natural gas has fulfilled that promise. The power sector has been one of the few success stories in lowering US emissions, thanks to its use of natural gas as a replacement for coal.   But natural gas still produces a lot of carbon dioxide when it is burned in conventionally equipped power plants. And fracking causes local air and water pollution. Perhaps most worrisome, drilling and pipelines are releasing substantial amounts of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, both accidentally and by intentional venting. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and the emissions are a growing concern to climate scientists, albeit one that’s difficult to quantify. Still, carbon emissions from the power sector will likely continue to drop as coal is further squeezed out and more renewables get built, according to the Rhodium Group, a research consultancy. But Rhodium also projects that if electricity demand from data centers remains high and natural-gas prices low, the fossil fuel will remain the dominant source of power generation at least through 2035 and the transition to cleaner electricity will be much delayed. Rhodium estimates that the continued reign of natural gas will lead to an additional 278 million metric tons of annual US carbon emissions by 2035 (roughly equivalent to the emissions from a large US state such as Florida), relative to a future in which the use of fossil fuel gradually winds down. Our addiction to natural gas, however, doesn’t have to be a total climate disaster, at least over the longer term. Large AI companies could use their vast leverage to insist that utilities install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at power plants and use natural gas sourced with limited methane emissions. Entergy, for one, says its new gas turbines will be able to incorporate CCS through future upgrades. And Meta says it will help to fund the installation of CCS equipment at one of Entergy’s existing natural-gas power plants in southern Louisiana to help prove out the technology.   But the transition to clean natural gas is a hope that will take decades to realize. Meanwhile, utilities across the country are facing a more imminent and practical challenge: how to meet the sudden demand for gigawatts more power in the next few years without inadvertently building far too much capacity. For many, adding more natural-gas power plants might seem like the safe bet. But what if the explosion in AI demand doesn’t show up? Times of stress AI companies tout the need for massive, power-hungry data centers. But estimates for just how much energy it will actually take to train and run AI models vary wildly. And the technology keeps changing, sometimes seemingly overnight. DeepSeek, the new Chinese model that debuted in January, may or may not signal a future of new energy-efficient AI, but it certainly raises the possibility that such advances are possible. Maybe we will find ways to use far more energy-efficient hardware. Or maybe the AI revolution will peter out and many of the massive data centers that companies think they’ll need will never get built. There are already signs that too many have been constructed in China and clues that it might be beginning to happen in the US.  Despite the uncertainty, power providers have the task of drawing up long-term plans for investments to accommodate projected demand. Too little capacity and their customers face blackouts; too much and those customers face outsize electricity bills to fund investments in unneeded power. There could be a way to lessen the risk of overbuilding natural-gas power, however. Plenty of power is available on average around the country and on most regional grids. Most utilities typically use only about 53% of their available capacity on average during the year, according to a Duke study. The problem is that utilities must be prepared for the few hours when demand spikes—say, because of severe winter weather or a summer heat wave. The soaring demand from AI data centers is prompting many power providers to plan new capacity to make sure they have plenty of what Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, and his colleagues call “headroom,” to meet any spikes in demand. But after analyzing data from power systems across the country, Norris and his coauthors found that if large AI facilities cut back their electricity use during hours of peak demand, many regional power grids could accommodate those AI customers without adding new generation capacity. Even a moderate level of flexibility would make a huge difference. The Duke researchers estimate that if data centers cut their electricity use by roughly half for just a few hours during the year, it will allow utilities to handle some additional 76 gigawatts of new demand. That means power providers could effectively absorb the 65 or so additional gigawatts that, according to some predictions, data centers will likely need by 2029. “The prevailing assumption is that data centers are 100% inflexible,” says Norris. That is, that they need to run at full power all the time. But Norris says AI data centers, particularly ones that are training large foundation models (such as Meta’s facility in Richland Parish), can avoid running at full capacity or shift their computation loads to other data centers around the country—or even ramp up their own backup power—during times when a grid is under stress. The increased flexibility could allow companies to get AI data centers up and running faster, without waiting for new power plants and upgrades to transmission lines—which can take years to get approved and built. It could also, Norris noted in testimony to the US Congress in early March, provide at least a short-term reprieve on the rush to build more natural-gas power, buying time for utilities to develop and plan for cleaner technologies such as advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal. It could, he testified, prevent “a hasty overbuild of natural-gas infrastructure.” AI companies have expressed some interest in their ability to shift around demand for power. But there are still plenty of technology questions around how to make it happen. Late last year, EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute), a nonprofit R&D group, started a three-year collaboration with power providers, grid operators, and AI companies including Meta and Google, to figure it out. “The potential is very large,” says David Porter, the EPRI vice president who runs the project, but we must show it works “beyond just something on a piece of paper or a computer screen.” Porter estimates that there are typically 80 to 90 hours a year when a local grid is under stress and it would help for a data center to reduce its energy use. But, he says, AI data centers still need to figure out how to throttle back at those times, and grid operators need to learn how to suddenly subtract and then add back hundreds of megawatts of electricity without disrupting their systems. “There’s still a lot of work to be done so that it’s seamless for the continuous operation of the data centers and seamless for the continuous operation of the grid,” he says. Footing the bill Ultimately, getting AI data centers to be more flexible in their power demands will require more than a technological fix. It will require a shift in how AI companies work with utilities and local communities, providing them with more information and insights into actual electricity needs. And it will take aggressive regulators to make sure utilities are rigorously evaluating the power requirements of data centers rather than just reflexively building more natural-gas plants. “The most important climate policymakers in the country right now are not in Washington. They’re in state capitals, and these are public utility commissioners,” says Costa Samaras, the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. In Louisiana, those policymakers are the elected officials at the Louisiana Public Service Commission, who are expected to rule later this year on Entergy’s proposed new gas plants and grid upgrades. The LPSC commissioners will decide whether Entergy’s arguments about the huge energy requirements of Meta’s data center and need for full 24/7 power leave no alternative to natural gas.  In the application it filed last fall with LPSC, Entergy said natural-gas power was essential for it to meet demand “throughout the day and night.” Teaming up solar power with battery storage could work “in theory” but would be “prohibitively costly.” Entergy also ruled out nuclear, saying it would take too long and cost too much. Others are not satisfied with the utility’s judgment. In February, the New Orleans–based Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a motion with the Louisiana regulators arguing that Entergy did not do a rigorous market evaluation of its options, as required by the commission’s rules. Part of the problem, the groups said, is that Entergy relied on “unsubstantiated assertions” from Meta on its load needs and timeline. “Entergy is saying [Meta] needs around-the-clock power,” says Paul Arbaje, an analyst for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But we’re just being asked to take [Entergy’s] word for it. Regulators need to be asking tough questions and not just assume that these data centers need to be operated at essentially full capacity all the time.” And, he suggests, if the utility had “started to poke holes at the assumptions that are sometimes taken as a given,” it “would have found other cleaner options.”       In an email response to MIT Technology Review, Entergy said that it has discussed the operational aspects of the facility with Meta, but "as with all customers, Entergy Louisiana will not discuss sensitive matters on behalf of their customers.” In a letter filed with the state’s regulators in early April, Meta said Entergy’s understanding of its energy needs is, in fact, accurate. The February motion also raised concern over who will end up paying for the new gas plants. Entergy says Meta has signed a 15-year supply contract for the electricity that is meant to help cover the costs of building and running the power plants but didn't respond to requests by MIT Technology Review for further details of the deal, including what happens if Meta wants to terminate the contract early. Meta referred MIT Technology Review’s questions about the contract to Entergy but says its policy is to cover the full cost that utilities incur to serve its data centers, including grid upgrades. It also says it is spending over $200 million to support the Richland Parish data centers with new infrastructure, including roads and water systems.  Not everyone is convinced. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, which works on behalf of Louisiana residents, says that the large investments in new gas turbines could mean future rate hikes, in a state where residents already have high electricity bills and suffer from one of country’s most unreliable grids. Of special concern is what happens after the 15 years. “Our biggest long-term concern is that in 15 years, residential ratepayers [and] small businesses in Louisiana will be left holding the bag for three large gas generators,” says Logan Burke, the alliance’s executive director. Indeed, consumers across the country have good reasons to fear that their electricity bills will go up as utilities look to meet the increased demand from AI data centers by building new generation capacity. In a paper posted in March, researchers at Harvard Law School argued that utilities “are now forcing the public to pay for infrastructure designed to supply a handful of exceedingly wealthy corporations.” The Harvard authors write, “Utilities tell [public utility commissions] what they want to hear: that the deals for Big Tech isolate data center energy costs from other ratepayers’ bills and won’t increase consumers’ power prices.” But the complexity of the utilities’ payment data and lack of transparency in the accounting, they say, make verifying this claim “all but impossible.” The boom in AI data centers is making Big Tech a player in our energy infrastructure and electricity future in a way unimaginable just a few years ago. At their best, AI companies could greatly facilitate the move to cleaner energy by acting as reliable and well-paying customers that provide funding that utilities can use to invest in a more robust and flexible electricity grid. This change can happen without burdening other electricity customers with additional risks and costs. But it will take AI companies committed to that vision. And it will take state regulators who ask tough questions and don’t get carried away by the potential investments being dangled by AI companies. Huge new AI data centers like the one in Richland Parish could in fact be a huge economic boon by providing new jobs, but residents deserve transparency and input into the negotiations. This is, after all, public infrastructure. Meta may come and go, but Louisiana's residents will have to live with—and possibly pay for—the changes in the decades to come.

You can now visit the Viking world of How to Train Your Dragon and walk among the dragon trainers from the hit DreamWorks Animation franchise. io9 was on hand for opening week’s media preview in advance of this Friday’s first day for the newest theme park to join Universal Orlando’s offerings: Epic Universe. Of the portal realms we have visited so far, the Isle of Berk has probably the most impressive tech when it comes to bringing the fantasy franchise’s main component to life. As Hiccup says, they have dragons, and boy, will they blow you away. The first encounter we had when arriving was meeting one of the NightLights, the offspring of the franchise’s hero dragon Toothless and the Lightfury, Pouncer. Gizmodo has written about those scary-looking robot dogs in the past—and what struck me when the baby dragon walked out on its own (without a person, on all fours, in the scorching humid heat) is that its legs looked to move very similarly to the Boston Dynamics models. The flame-throwing version of the robot style makes a whole lot of sense now—kidding, these don’t breathe fire, but they could, though theme parks don’t have a good track record with fire breathing dragons, just ask the other guys. But isn’t it so darn cute? We got to see it do a little wiggle and strut with the face of a precious pure little guy who totally wouldn’t hurt us, unlike its military cousins. There’s more dragons throughout the land, which highlight various areas. Near the outdoor dining stations serving Viking fare like grilled meats, veggies, and mac and cheese in bread horns, you get to witness the snow wraith emit its icy blast at unsuspecting passers-by. It’s delightful when it catches people off guard. Then of course dragons are placed in various areas that correspond with their abilities, so you really get a sense of the co-op way they live with the Vikings of Berk. Character meet and greets with the dragon riders from the films such as Hiccup and Astrid also include their winged friends. Meeting Toothless is totally magical because of the seamless tech; various functions of articulation really work within the role they play. When you have your one-on-one moment with a dragon, they react and respond in such a life-like manner, it’s kind of alarming how quickly you let your guard down with the blink of those two big adorable eyes. They make the noises that give you the same cuteness aggression you’d get from a dog or cat. I really thought I needed a dragon’s nod of approval when Toothless sent me off on a high-flying ride on what’s probably my favorite family-friendly thrill coaster, Hiccup’s Winged Gliders. And it being set to John Powell’s movie score, is chef’s kiss. I really felt like I was soaring. So far on this visit, we haven’t gotten a chance to watch The Untrainable Dragon, the land’s stage show, which is set to feature a flying dragon as part of the production. But if all the other dragons make you feel like you’re right at home in Berk, we’ve got a good feeling about it. I don’t think any other land has gone to the lengths Berk does to incorporate the film’s fantasy creatures in this way. Sure, at lands such as Jurassic World-themed ones, there are some creatures beyond the boat raft, and it’s crazy cool to witness their simulated escape or get to meet in scheduled moments with the gentler giants. Berk just takes it to a new level. The dragons don’t just come out like your average characters at any park, they feel like an active part of the land that you can encounter within the story-play of Berk’s immersion. And that’s a high-flying feat. Epic Universe opens this Friday at Universal Studios Orlando. Travel and accommodations were provided for the purposes of this review. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

D-Wave Quantum shares soar 20% as company releases latest computing system

Last year, Klarna announced a significant initiative to leverage its internally developed AI systems, powered by OpenAI, across its operations. This wasn’t empty talk for the buy now, pay later giant. The company not only ended its pricey contract with Salesforce CRM, but also curtailed its hiring efforts, allowing AI to do some of the work previously performed by humans. Klarna announced Monday its reliance on AI is driving significant efficiency for the company, and it’s on track to reach $1 million in revenue per employee, up from $575,000 per worker a year prior, according to the company’s latest financials. While the company claims most functions became more efficient thanks to its AI efforts, the largest financial impact was the significant reduction in customer service costs. Klarna said last year it planned to replace nearly 700 full-time customer service contractors with AI chatbots. However, last week, the company said customers would again have the option to speak with a human agent.    In March, the Swedish company filed paperwork for its highly anticipated U.S. IPO. Klarna postponed those plans last month due to the volatility in the stock market triggered by President Trump’s tariff announcement. Despite a 13% revenue increase to $701 million in Q1 2025, the company provided no timeline for resuming its IPO plans.

Since President Donald Trump excitedly announced that he would be accepting a $400 million plane from the Qatari government to serve as the next Air Force One, even members of his own party have expressed alarm. There’s the price tag of refurbishing the plane with top-secret systems—upward of $1 billion, according to some estimates. Then there are the conflicts of interest from accepting such a large present from a foreign nation—what some say would be the most valuable gift ever given to the U.S. But it would also mark a striking departure from tradition. While they’re often variants of commercial planes, presidential planes have almost always been U.S. military aircraft, flown and maintained by the Air Force. The first White Houses in the sky I’m an aviation historian who once worked in the United States Air Force’s history program for three years, so I’m well acquainted with the history of presidential aircraft. Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first president to fly while in office. In January 1943, he boarded the Navy-owned, civilian-operated Boeing Dixie Clipper—a seaplane—for a trip to Casablanca to meet with Allied leaders. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the first presidential flight on a Dixie Clipper, a seaplane built by Boeing. [Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images] The security measures needed to safely transport the president—especially during wartime—spurred the creation of the first custom-built aircraft for presidential use, a heavily modified VC-54 Skymaster. Though officially named “The Flying White House,” the new presidential aircraft became better known by its nickname, the “Sacred Cow.” President Harry Truman used the Sacred Cow as his presidential aircraft through much of his first term in office. In late 1947, the U.S. Air Force ordered a second custom-built presidential aircraft, a modified DC-6, which Truman named the Independence. While in office, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman flew on a modified Douglas C-54, nicknamed the “Sacred Cow.” [Photo: © Museum of Flight/CORBIS/Corbis/Getty Images] During Dwight D. Eisenhower’s two terms, the president flew on two different planes operated by the Air Force: the Columbine II, which was a customized, military version of Lockheed’s commercial airliner the Constellation, and the Columbine III, which was a Super Constellation. Embracing the jet age In the 1960s, the use of jet engine technology in U.S. commercial aircraft revolutionized air travel, allowing planes to fly higher, farther, and faster. Jet travel became associated with the glamorous and the elegant lifestyles of the “jet set” crowd. So it’s fitting that President John F. Kennedy—who was sometimes called the “the first celebrity president”—was the first White House occupant to fly in a jet, the Boeing 707. Kennedy’s aircraft was also the first painted in the distinctive light-blue-and-white scheme that’s still used today. First lady Jacqueline Kennedy developed it with the help of industrial designer Raymond Loewy. It would go on to serve eight presidents before leaving the presidential fleet in 1990, when Boeing delivered the first of two modified Boeing 747s. These are the aircraft that continue to serve as the president’s primary plane. Boeing signed a contract to provide two new aircraft in 2017, during Trump’s last term. In 2020, the company decided to refurbish two existing aircraft that were originally built for another customer. The refurbishment has been more cumbersome and expensive than building a new aircraft from scratch. But it’s the only option because Boeing closed its 747 assembly line in late 2022. A nickname sticks On a trip to Florida, the crew of Columbine II first used “Air Force One” as the plane’s call sign to clearly distinguish the plane from other air traffic. While the public has associated the name Air Force One with the modified Boeing 707s and 747s and their distinctive colors, any plane with the president aboard will carry that call sign. They include several smaller aircraft, also operated by the Air Force, such as the North American T-39 Sabreliner used to transport Lyndon B. Johnson to his ranch in Texas and the Lockheed VC-140B JetStars, the fleet of backup planes used by several presidents, which Johnson jokingly called “Air Force One Half.” A cultural and political symbol Air Force One has long served as a symbol of the power and prestige of the presidency. It became an indelible part of U.S. history in November 1963, when Johnson took his oath of office from Air Force One’s cabin while Kennedy’s body lay in rest in the back of the aircraft. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as president aboard Air Force One following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. [Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images] Air Force One carried President Richard M. Nixon to China and the Soviet Union for historic diplomatic missions. But it also famously flew him from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to his home state, California, after he resigned from office. On that day, the plane took off as Air Force One. But it landed as SAM 27000, the plane’s call sign used when the president wasn’t on board. Trump has been compared to Nixon in more ways than one. And Trump’s complaint that Arab leaders have bigger and more impressive airplanes than the current Air Force One is reminiscent of Nixon’s own concerns of being outclassed on the world stage. When president, Nixon strongly advocated for American supersonic transport—a 270-passenger plane designed to be faster than the speed of sound—that he hoped could be modified to serve as a new Air Force One. He feared the failure to develop supersonic transport would relegate the U.S. to second-tier status, as other world leaders—particularly those from England, France, and the USSR—traversed the globe in sleeker, better performing aircraft. Trump’s concerns about Air Force One seem less focused on safety and security and more on size and opulence. His longing for a “palace in the sky” is befitting for a president drawn to soaring skyscrapers, lavish parades, and gold ornamentation. Janet Bednarek is a professor of history at the University of Dayton. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last year, Klarna announced a significant initiative to leverage its internally developed AI systems, powered by OpenAI, across its operations. This wasn’t empty talk for the buy now, pay later giant. The company not only ended its pricey contract with Salesforce CRM, but also curtailed its hiring efforts, allowing AI to do some of the work previously performed by humans. Klarna announced Monday its reliance on AI is driving significant efficiency for the company, and it’s on track to reach $1 million in revenue per employee, up from $575,000 per worker a year prior, according to the company’s latest financials. While the company claims most functions became more efficient thanks to its AI efforts, the largest financial impact was the significant reduction in customer service costs. Klarna said last year it planned to replace nearly 700 full-time customer service contractors with AI chatbots. However, last week, the company said customers would again have the option to speak with a human agent.    In March, the Swedish company filed paperwork for its highly anticipated U.S. IPO. Klarna postponed those plans last month due to the volatility in the stock market triggered by President Trump’s tariff announcement. Despite a 13% revenue increase to $701 million in Q1 2025, the company provided no timeline for resuming its IPO plans.

What makes for a quintessentially country farmhouse living room? When you think about the classic, homey style, you likely imagine a warm space filled with a sink-into-me sofa (perhaps positioned around an inviting fireplace), a comfy chair for reading or cross-stitching, and that one special quilt everyone calls first dibs on. There might be a wood-clad ceiling overhead, a perfectly imperfect worn rug underfoot, and charming shiplap or wainscoting wrapping the room. Whatever design elements make up the rustic farmhouse living room of your dreams, you’ll find loads of decorating inspiration here in these pictures of farmhouse living room ideas from our favorite country homes.For a collected-over-time style, a cozy farmhouse living room with color and pattern brings a lived-in, homespun feel (think cottagecore design vibes). In these rooms, you’ll find classic checks and florals, vintage items and antiques, and personal collections on display. For modern farmhouse living room ideas, look for more contemporary and calming ideas—neutral backdrops and architectural features like stone, wood beams, and windows. Bring traditional farmhouse living room designs to your home, wherever you live.Love farmhouse style? Here are more farmhouse decorating ideas for other rooms in your home: 1Divide an Open SpaceJane BeilesIn this 200-year-old Federal farmhouse, a barn (really!) was attached to the house to create a soaring entertaining area. “It was music to my ears—I’d always wanted to do it,” says homeowner Ali Mahon. To utilize the open space, it was divided into “rooms,” including a dining nook and two stories of living areas filled with character-rich antiques, including a wicker trunk-turned-coffee table and a graphic 19th-century banner weather vane. A large handcrafted iron chandelier looms above. 2Celebrate Organic FinishesKate S. JordanThis cozy farmhouse living room’s warmth comes from the reclaimed hemlock floorboards, newly exposed original wood beams and rafters, and gypsum plaster walls custom-tinted a soft putty color. The room’s curvy wood-framed chairs, recovered in mohair and boucle fabrics, complement the coffee table designed by Percy Bright of Jersey Ice Cream Co. A decorative screen from a Vermont antiques shop conceals the woodburning stove. Underfoot, a Scandinavian kilim rug subtly speaks to the other folk art motifs seen throughout the home.RELATED: See more of this Scandi farmhouse that will change the way you paint your walls.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below3Balance Heavy Wood Tones With White Sara Ligorria-TrampMany of the great room’s interior elements, from the arched ceiling beams to the unfinished floor planks, were milled from spruce and hemlock trees on this home’s Washington property. The abundance of wood never feels heavy, though, as it’s smartly balanced by the surrounding white wood-paneled and tinted plaster walls. Plentiful windows let sunlight pour into the open-concept rustic paradise. Get the Look:Wall Paint Color: Snow White Milk Paint by General Finishes (3⁄4 paint, 1⁄4 water)Trim Paint Color: Milk Mustache by Dunn-Edwards PaintRELATED: See more of the new-build barn house that really masters the modern rustic look.4Pick the Right Scale FurnitureRikki Snyder for Country LivingSometimes, massive modern furniture simply doesn’t sit right in an older home. In this cozy farmhouse den, designer Christina Salway opted for a more petite sofa and assorted chairs, including these two wingbacks covered in a bold leafy motif. Even the wooden coffee table is “perfectly undersized for the space,” says Christina. New thin brick flooring ups the coziness factor, as does a jute floral rug and aviary artwork.Get the Look: Door Paint Color:Inchyra Blue by Farrow & BallAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below5Cozy Up to the FireplaceAlpha Smoot for Country LivingWith saturated blue walls (“It’s sort of a gentleman’s navy,” says homeowner Justin Reis), weathered floorboards, and hand-hewn beams, the living room has a built-in warm and cozy feel. The warming cabinet above the fireplace, which likely had a door at one time, offers a spot to tuck in collected treasures. The fire and candlelight emit a magical glow.Get the Look:Wall Paint Color: Dark Navy by BehrRELATED: See more of this Connecticut Georgian Colonial that is an old house lover's dream.6Wrap the Room in Reclaimed WoodLincoln BarbourThe owners of this Mississippi barn used locally sourced materials to cover the walls and ceiling. Raw and distressed wood panels from a nearby military depot wrap the room in warmth and texture. Loads of windows bring in natural light during the day, while a chandelier and mounted sconces make for a romantic glow come nighttime.RELATED: These wood ceiling ideas bring country charm to any room.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below7Establish a Worry-Free VibeRoger Davies, styling by Liz StrongNo velvet ropes here! In this California living room that has English cottage sensibilities, being worry-free is key. Items like the weathered antique butcher-block coffee table, washable slipcovers on the deep sofa and swivel chairs, and a thick sisal rug establish the home’s kick-up-your-feet feeling.RELATED: Tour more of this cozy California cottage. 8Build with Reclaimed MaterialsBrie Williams for Country LivingBuilt with North Carolina stone, this living room’s fireplace gives a proud nod to the home’s location. Other rustic architectural details, like log skins that were salvaged from old barns in the Midwest and the reclaimed beams from an 1800s Massachusetts mill, add loads of been-there-forever charm to this new farmhouse build.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below9Celebrate (Unpainted) ShiplapVictoria Pearson, styling by Liz StrongDuring this home renovation, the couple uncovered original wood shiplap beneath the paneling. They removed the pieces one by one, cleaned them up, and then repurposed the boards as the wall in this sitting room, as well as in the entry, kitchen, and bunk room. A vintage bookcase from a medical office is home to books and various collectibles.RELATED: See more of how this run-down Texas farmhouse became this family's dream home.10Add Instant Patina with Salvaged BeamsStephen Karlisch for Country LivingWood beams salvaged from deconstructed barns and other old buildings add instant age to this beautifully calming living room. Rustic architectural accents, artwork, and the pretty patterned rug are the visual focus in this warm, neutral space. RELATED: 6 Best Places to Find or Buy Reclaimed Wood Near YouAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below11Roll Out a One-of-a-Kind RugDavid A. Land for Country LivingA rug really pulls a room together in a way no other accessory does. As a general rule, the front legs of all seating pieces should comfortably fit on the rug. If you have a smaller rug that doesn’t quite fit that requirement, layer it atop a larger sisal rug. We love this trick for a farmhouse living room decorating idea on a budget!RELATED: See more of this restored 1800s farmhouse that is proof that some things just get better with age.12Get Cozy with ColorNick JohnsonIn this cozy farmhouse living room, high-end fabrics (predominantly in stunning blues) on the sofa, velvet ottoman, chair, and pillows balance this country home’s rustic characteristics. The painted fireplace facade ties the whole room together. RELATED: See more of this 100-year-old Michigan farmhouse that oozes vintage charm.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below13Redefine RusticZIO AND SONSIn this modern farmhouse living room, architectural elements—wide-planked wood floors, ceiling beams, horizontal shiplap wainscoting—are softened with a comfy sectional piled with pillows and sleek, streamlined design choices, like the hanging chair, wood-and-iron coffee table, and handmade oak stump side table. A round iron chandelier crowns the family space.RELATED: 30 Charming Farmhouse Decor Items You Can Buy Now on Amazon14Play Around with PatternRoger Davies for Country LivingChecks and florals live in perfect harmony in this cozy living room. To keep the family space from leaning too traditional with the iconic buffalo check-covered sofa and wildflower chintz chair, designer Bailey McCarthy brought in a clean-lined steel-framed coffee table and a graphic longhorn painting for over the fireplace. RELATED: This darling white farmhouse in Texas proves that old-fashioned favorites are new again.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below15Incorporate Vintage TreasuresAnnie SchlechterAtop a fresh coat of crisp white paint on the walls, trim, and mantel, vintage scores take center stage. Found objects always tell a story. Here, in this small farmhouse living room, the banners hanging above the striped sofa came from a church, the trunk-turned-coffee table came from a Tennessee stable, and the black-and-white family photos lend personal history.RELATED: See more of this old Kentucky farmhouse gets the ultimate makeover.16Leave Windows BareMax Kim-BeeThanks to no window coverings, natural light pours in to this pretty Catskills living room. Bold painted window trim contrasts the creamy white walls and frames the view beyond.RELATED: Refresh your space with our favorite living room paint colors.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below17Create a Focal PointJames MerrellA stone fireplace provides a cozy focal point for a pair of comfy armchairs and ottoman, all upholstered in a pretty floral pattern. Hand-hewn log cabin walls and rustic ceiling beams wrap the room in natural warmth. RELATED: 50 Fireplace and Mantel Decor Ideas for a Cozy Upgrade18Pack In the CharmHelen NormanWe love this space for its small farmhouse living room ideas—packed-in charm, mismatched furniture (a handsome leather Chesterfield sofa, wood pieces)—and its architectural elements, like the painted pine-paneled walls, ceiling beams, four-pane windows, and a front-and-center fireplace. RELATED: Tour more of this charming cottage that is straight out of a storybook.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below19Start with a Neutral BaseLincoln BarbourWrapping the room in a clean white provides a blank canvas for this inviting living room’s layered, lived-in look. Starting with the weathered ceiling beams that were salvaged from an old warehouse, top-to-bottom texture brings character galore. A pair of tufted velvet armchairs, layered rugs (genius for filling a large living room space!), a plaid blanket, and rustic accessories like the tobacco basket above the fireplace, are the secret to this room’s success.RELATED: See more of this rustic Tennessee home that does white totally right.20Feature Favorite AntiquesAdam Albright, styling by Matthew GleasonThis lake house living room is big on the farmhouse style rule of living with antiques and vintage finds. A tufted navy sofa is piled with pillows made from old camp blankets and draped with a red-and-white antique quilt. A collection of paint-by-numbers surrounds an antique cuckoo clock on the painted shiplap wall above.RELATED: 50+ Gallery Wall Ideas to Display All Your Favorite ThingsAmy MitchellManaging EditorAmy Mitchell is the managing editor for VERANDA and Country Living, where she writes articles on a variety of topics—decorating and design, gardens, and holidays. Amy’s experience in the shelter magazine category spans more than 20 years, as she’s previously held positions at Coastal Living and Cottage Living. Her personal pursuits include cooking, gardening, and hunting her favorite tag sale spots for the next piece of Pyrex for her prized collection.