Wednesday, 8 July 2026

Tesla lodged a trademark application for Megapod, a product it describes as modular AI data center hardware, Electrek reported. The application, serial number 99893717, went to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through the company's longtime intellectual property counsel, according to Electrek.

Tesla already runs its own AI training hardware. Electrek reported that the Cortex cluster at Gigafactory Texas uses roughly 67,000 Nvidia H100-equivalent graphics processing units.

The filing comes after Tesla wound down an earlier in-house effort. According to Electrek, the company killed its Dojo supercomputer in August 2025, and Elon Musk called the Dojo 2 design an evolutionary dead end after much of the team departed.

Musk's separate AI venture already buys Tesla equipment. Electrek reported that xAI has purchased roughly USD 1 billion of Tesla Megapacks to power its training runs.

Tesla shares have fallen this year. According to Electrek, TSLA is down more than 20% year-to-date in 2026, weighed by the end of the electric vehicle tax credit and shrinking margins.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched an AI Environmental Transparency Initiative, urging AI firms to measure and publish the carbon, water, and land footprints of their systems, according to Climate Home News.

Guterres said the data centres running AI models already draw more electricity than most countries, per Climate Home News. "But AI is also hungry for land, water and power," he said.

Data centre emissions from purchased electricity are set to more than double between 2024 and 2030 under a high-growth scenario, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates, Climate Home News reported.

Global AI data centres could draw 945 terawatt-hours of electricity a year by 2030, roughly twice France's 2025 consumption, according to a UN University report cited by Climate Home News.

The demand curve is now colliding with local opposition. Around USD 64 billion in US data centre projects were delayed or blocked between May 2024 and March 2025 as communities resisted, according to nonprofit Data Center Watch, Climate Home News reported.

That resistance has reached the ballot box. Monterey Park in Los Angeles County was the first US city to enact a citywide ban on data centres through a voter-approved measure, Climate Home News reported.