Friday, 9 October 2026

The U.S. Department of Energy announced 12 Phase II Genesis Mission project awards totaling USD 159 million.

Alongside the awards, the department launched the Genesis Mission Graduate Fellowship, a funding opportunity it said is designed to develop the next generation of American scientists and engineers and to strengthen U.S. scientific leadership.

HIVE Digital Technologies has started construction on an additional 100 MW at its Yguazú campus in Paraguay, according to TokenPost.

The project would raise the company's renewable power capacity in Paraguay to 400 MW, TokenPost reported. The expansion will draw hydroelectric power from the Itaipú Dam.

Construction is targeted for completion during calendar 2026, according to TokenPost.

Law firm Quinn Emanuel's March memo laid out worst-case scenarios for the data-center debt financing the AI buildout, according to Semafor Net Zero. The memo circulated in recent days, addressing the hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed and spent to fund the buildout.

The firm flagged structural gaps in a Google-backed project in upstate New York. Google's backstop does not begin until construction is complete, and the deal documents contemplate a disagreement over whether it has been triggered at all. A six-month construction delay would let the tenant, AI company Fluidstack, walk away, Quinn Emanuel said.

The memo applied a similar legal dissection to Meta's USD 28 billion Louisiana complex, CoreWeave's GPU-backed loans and Oracle's off-balance-sheet lease obligations, according to Semafor Net Zero.

Quinn Emanuel described depreciating GPUs setting off insolvency cascades, with collateral disputes and margin calls following.

Epic Systems has drilled roughly 6,100 wells in Verona, Wisconsin, that heat and cool about 40 campus buildings using waste heat from a 3.5 MW data center, according to The Conversation Energy.

The wells run 300 to 800 feet deep. What sets the system apart, The Conversation Energy reported, is that Epic deposits data center heat into the ground during summer and draws it back out months later.

The underground rock itself holds the heat, retaining warmth near where it was deposited because rock conducts heat poorly, according to The Conversation Energy. That weak conductivity keeps the stored warmth close to its original location.

The recovered heat warms offices, supplies hot water to the campus dining halls and melts snow off sidewalks, The Conversation Energy reported.