To fast-track the buildout of data centers that power artificial intelligence (AI), tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and OpenAI are pouring money into construction projects. Globally, companies are predicted to spend $375 billion in 2025 on AI infrastructure—a 67% surge from last year, according to an estimate by bank UBS.

While this new era of rapid data center construction aims to power innovation, from scientific breakthroughs to AI-enhanced public services, it comes with distinct challenges and more isn’t always better, warn Virginia Tech artificial intelligence experts Walid Saad and Dimitri Nikolopoulos. Here’s why.

Data centers carry high environmental costs

“Training ever-larger models on massive data sets requires enormous computing power, which in turn drives up energy demand and environmental costs,” Saad said. “It is not the most sustainable path for better AI.”

“What we’ve learned is that true AI progress requires more than brute-force computing. The next leap forward will come from algorithms that build an internal understanding of how the world works, often called ‘world models.’

“These models let AI learn efficiently, generalize to new situations, and make decisions using far less data and energy. Leading research groups, such as Meta’s FAIR lab and our own Virginia Tech teams, are pioneering this direction because it holds the key to both sustainable AI and smarter AI.”

Data centers need to be sustainable, distributed, and accessible

“Without strong public-interest guardrails, more data centers may just deepen existing divides and environmental costs,” Nikolopoulos said. “It’s not just about how many data centers we build—but what kinds, where, and for whom.”

“To truly lead, the country needs AI infrastructure that is powered by clean energy and designed for efficiency, that is widely distributed in locations beyond just Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia, and that is accessible to researchers, startups, and public-interest institutions—not just Big Tech.”

Data center construction requires smart guidelines

“More data centers means increased environmental impact for the grid, water resources, and emissions,” Saad said. “It is important to at least have some guidelines so that our critical infrastructure can sustain this growth. AI innovation and environmental responsibility can advance hand in hand, not by scaling up endlessly, but by scaling smartly, designing algorithms that learn more like humans and waste far less energy.”

Data centers should benefit everyone

“If AI is to shape education, medicine, and governance, we must ensure the infrastructure is not gatekept behind closed platforms or unaffordable services controlled by a few firms,” Nikolopoulos said.

“U.S. leadership in AI should be measured not just in processing speed, but in how broadly the benefits are shared and how wisely the resources are used. We need to shift our mindset from ‘scale at all costs’ to ‘impact per watt, per dollar, per community.'”

Legal experts WIRED spoke with say that the ICE monitoring and documentation apps that Apple has removed from its App Store are clear examples of protected speech under the US Constitution’s First Amendment. “These apps are publishing constitutionally protected speech. They’re publishing truthful information about matters of public interest that people obtained just by witnessing public events,” says David Greene, a civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from attacking the developers behind these ICE-related apps. When ICEBlock first rose to a top spot in Apple’s App Store in April, the Trump administration responded by threatening to prosecute the developer. “We are looking at him,” Bondi said on Fox News of ICEBlock’s Aaron. “And he better watch out.”

Neither the White House nor ICE immediately responded to requests for comment.

Digital rights researchers say that the situation illustrates the dangers when key platforms and communication channels are centrally controlled—whether directly by governments or by other powerful entities like big tech companies. Regardless of what is officially available through the Google Play store, Android users can sideload apps of their choosing. But Apple’s ecosystem has always been a walled garden, an approach that the company has long touted for its security advantages, including the ability to screen more heavily for malicious apps.

For years, a group of researchers and enthusiasts have tried to create “jailbreaks” for iPhones to essentially hack their own devices as a way around Apple’s closed ecosystem. Recently, though, jailbreaking has become less common. This is partly the result of advances in iPhone security, but partly related to the trend in recent years of attackers exploiting complex chains of vulnerabilities that could potentially be used for jailbreaking for malware instead, particularly mercenary spyware.

“The closed ecosystem motivation sort of dwindled as Apple added capabilities that previously required a jailbreak—like wallpapers, tethering, better notifications, and private mode in Safari,” says longtime iOS security and jailbreak researcher Will Strafach. “But this situation with ICE apps highlights the issue with Apple being the arbiter and single point of failure.”

Stanford’s Pfefferkorn warns that while US tech companies are not state-controlled, they have in her view become “happy handmaidens” when it comes to “repressing free speech and dissent.”

“It’s especially disappointing,” Pfefferkorn says, “coming from the company that brought us the Think Different ad campaign, which invoked MLK, Gandhi, and Muhammad Ali—none of whom would likely be big fans of ICE today.”

Lots of single-use water bottles made from poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) end up in landfills, but there’s a growing interest in upcycling them instead. Researchers in Energy & Fuels report on new heat-based fabrication methods to transform PET into supercapacitor electrodes and separator films for upcycled energy storage devices. In demonstrations, an all-plastic supercapacitor made from discarded water bottles outperformed a similar design that used a traditional glass fiber separator.

“PET is used to produce over 500 billion single-use beverage bottles each year, which generates a significant amount of plastic waste and poses a major environmental challenge,” says lead researcher Yun Hang Hu. “PET-derived supercapacitors hold great potential for diverse applications in transportation and automotive systems, electronics and consumer devices, as well as industrial and specialized sectors.”

Converting waste plastics like PET into carbon-based materials, especially ones that are electrically conductive, is an attractive way to manufacture more cost-effective and sustainable energy storage devices like supercapacitors. These devices use highly conductive carbon electrodes to store and release a large amount of energy quickly and repeatedly. So, Hu and colleagues wanted to upcycle old water bottles into components for a type of supercapacitor called an electrical double-layer capacitor (EDLC). This device is characterized by two porous carbon-based electrodes separated by a thin, perforated film immersed in a liquid electrolyte.

Hu’s team developed two processes to turn used PET water bottles into components for the upcycled device:

• For the electrodes, the researchers cut the plastic bottles into tiny, couscous-sized grains. They added calcium hydroxide and heated the mixture to nearly 1300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Celsius) in a vacuum. This process converts the plastic into a porous, electrically conductive carbon powder. The researchers combined the carbon powder, carbon black and a polymer binder, and then dried it into thin layers.
• For the separator, the researchers flattened small plastic pieces about the size of postage stamps and poked holes in them using hot needles. The holes’ pattern optimized the passage of current through the electrolyte.

To assemble their PET-based supercapacitor, the researchers submerged two porous carbon electrodes in a liquid potassium hydroxide electrolyte and separated them with the perforated PET film. In demonstrations, the upcycled supercapacitor retained 79% of its capacitance (storage ability), while a similar device with a glass fiber separator retained 78%.

Hu and colleagues say this research introduces a potential strategy for transforming PET waste into supercapacitor components, “opening new opportunities for circular energy storage technologies.” In addition, they say the upcycled EDLC is less expensive to produce than devices made with glass fiber and is itself fully recyclable.

“With further optimization, PET-derived supercapacitors might realistically transition from laboratory prototypes to market-ready devices within the next five to 10 years,” says Hu, “especially as demand grows for sustainable, recyclable energy storage technologies.”