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Wall Street is rallying on Friday toward its best day in months after the head of the Federal Reserve hinted the cuts to interest rates that investors and President Donald Trump crave so much may be on the way. The S&P 500 leaped 1.6%, and its first gain in six days has it on track to top its all-time high set last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 939 points, or 2.1%, and was above its last all-time high, which was set in December. The Nasdaq composite was up 1.9%, as of 11:55 a.m. Eastern time. Ka-Powell is how Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management, described the reaction to Jerome Powell’s highly anticipated speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The Fed isnt going to be the party-pooper. The hope among investors had been that Powell would hint that the Fed’s first cut to interest rates of the year may be imminent. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give a boost to the economy and to investment prices, even if they risk worsening inflation at the same time. Trump has angrily been calling for lower rates, often insulting Powell while doing so. And a surprisingly weak report on job growth this month pushed many on Wall Street to assume cuts may come as soon as the Feds next meeting in September. Powell encouraged them on Friday after saying he’s seen risks rise for the job market. The Feds two jobs are to keep the job market healthy and to keep a lid on inflation, and it often has to prioritize one because it has just one tool to fix either. But Powell also would not commit to any kind of timing. He said the job market looks OK at the moment, even if it is a curious kind of balance where fewer new workers are chasing after fewer new jobs. Inflation, meanwhile, still has the potential to push higher because of Trumps tariffs. In sum, Powell said that the stability of the unemployment rate and other labor market measures allows us to proceed carefully as we consider changes to our policy stance. Treasury yields tumbled in the bond market as bets nevertheless built that the Fed would cut its main interest rate in September. Traders see an 89% chance of that, up from 75% a day earlier, according to data from CME Group. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.26% from 4.33% late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, sank to 3.68% from 3.79% in a notable move for the bond market. On Wall Street, stocks of smaller companies led the way. They can benefit more from lower interest rates because of their need to borrow money to grow. The smaller stocks in the Russell 2000 index surged 3.9% toward its best day since April. Homebuilders jumped on hopes that easier interest rates could encourage more people to buy homes. Lennar, PulteGroup and D.R. Horton all rose at least 4.5%. Travel companies, meanwhile, climbed amid hopes that easier interest rates could help U.S. households spend more. Norwegian Cruise Line rallied 6.1%, Delta Air Lines flew 6% higher and Caesars Entertainment rose 6.4%. Shares of Nio, a Chinese electric-vehicle maker, that trade in the United States leaped 16.2% after it began pre-sales of its flagship premium SUV model, the ES8. Nvidia rose 1.8% to trim its loss for the week. The company, whose chips are powering much of the worlds move in to artificial-intelligence technology, has seen its stock struggle recently amid criticism that it and other AI superstars shot too high, too fast and became too expensive. Nvidias CEO, Jensen Huang, said Friday that the company is discussing a potential new computer chip designed for China with the Trump administration. The chips are graphics processing units, or GPUs, a type of device used to build and update a range of AI systems. But they are less powerful than Nvidias top semiconductors today, which cannot be sold to China due to U.S. national security restrictions. In stock markets abroad, Germanys DAX returned 0.3% after government data showed that its economy shrank by 0.3% in the second quarter compared with the previous three-month period. Indexes rose across much of Asia, with stocks climbing 1.4% in Shanghai and 0.9% in South Korea. Stan Choe, AP business writer AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.
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As demand for artificial intelligence technology boosts construction and proposed construction of data centers around the world, those computers require not just electricity and land, but also a significant amount of water. Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also use water indirectly, through the water required to produce the electricity to power the facility. The amount of water used to produce electricity increases dramatically when the source is fossil fuels compared with solar or wind. A 2024 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons (64 billion liters) of water directly through cooling, and projects that by 2028, those figures could doubleor even quadruple. The same report estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed an additional 211 billion gallons (800 billion liters) of water indirectly through the electricity that powers them. But that is just an estimate in a fast-changing industry. We are researchers in water law and policy based on the shores of Lake Michigan. Technology companies are eyeing the Great Lakes region to host data centers, including one proposed for Port Washington, Wisconsin, which could be one of the largest in the country. The Great Lakes region offers a relatively cool climate and an abundance of water, making the region an attractive location for hot and thirsty data centers. The Great Lakes are an important, binational resource that more than 40 million people depend on for their drinking water and supports a US$6 trillion regional economy. Data centers compete with these existing uses and may deplete local groundwater aquifers. Our analysis of public records, government documents and sustainability reports compiled by top data center companies has found that technology companies dont always reveal how much water their data centers use. In a forthcoming Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal article, we walk through our methods and findings using these resources to uncover the water demands of data centers. In general, corporate sustainability reports offered the most access and detailincluding that in 2024, one data center in Iowa consumed 1 billion (3.8 billion liters) gallons of waterenough to supply all of Iowas residential water for five days. How do data centers use water? The servers and routers in data centers work hard and generate a lot of heat. To cool them down, data centers use large amounts of waterin some cases over 25% of local community water supplies. In 2023, Google reported consuming over 6 billion gallons of water (nearly 23 billion liters) to cool all its data centers. In some data centers, the water is used up in the cooling process. In an evaporative cooling system, pumps push cold water through pipes in the data center. The cold water absorbs the heat produced by the data center servers, turning into steam that is vented out of the facility. This system requires a constant supply of cold water. In closed-loop cooling systems, the cooling process is similar, but rather than venting steam to the air, air-cooled chillers cool down the hot water. The cooled water is then recirculated to cool the facility again. This does not require constant addition of large volumes of water, but it uses a lot more energy to run the chillers. The actual numbers showing those differences, which likely vary by the facility, are not publicly available. One key way to evaluate water use is the amount of water that is considered consumed, meaning it is withdrawn from the local water supply and used upfor instance, evaporated as steamand not returned to its source. For information, we first looked to government data, such as that kept by municipal water systems, but the process of getting all the necessary data can be onerous and time-consuming, with some denying data access due to confidentiality concerns. So we turned to other sources to uncover data center water use. Sustainability reports provide insight Many companies, especially those that prioritize sustainability, release publicly available reports about their environmental and sustainability practices, including water use. We focused on six top tech companies with data centers: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Digital Realty and Equinix. Our findings revealed significant variability in both how much water the companies data centers used, and how much specific information the companies reports actually provided. Sustainability reports offer a valuable glimpse into data center water use. But because the reports are voluntary, different companies report different statistics in ways that make them hard to combine or compare. Importantly, these disclosures do not consistently include the indirect water consumption from their electricity use, which the Lawrence Berkeley Lab estimated was 12 times greater than the direct use for cooling in 2023. Our estimates highlighting specific water consumption reports are all related to cooling. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/A3wvg/1 Amazon releases annual sustainability reports, but those documents do not disclose how much water the company uses. Microsoft provides data on its water demands for its overall operations, but does not break down water use for its data centers. Meta does that breakdown, but only in a company-wide aggregate figure. Google provides individual figures for each data center. In general, the five companies we analyzed that do disclose water usage show a general trend of increasing direct water use each year. Researchers attriute this trend to data centers. A closer look at Google and Meta To take a deeper look, we focused on Google and Meta, as they provide some of the most detailed reports of data center water use. Data centers make up significant proportions of both companies water use. In 2023, Meta consumed 813 million gallons of water globally (3.1 billion liters)95% of which, 776 million gallons (2.9 billion liters), was used by data centers. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/EOHnU/1 For Google, the picture is similar, but with higher numbers. In 2023, Google operations worldwide consumed 6.4 billion gallons of water (24.2 billion liters), with 95%, 6.1 billion gallons (23.1 billion liters), used by data centers. Google reports that in 2024, the companys data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, consumed 1 billion gallons of water (3.8 billion liters), the most of any of its data centers. The Google data center using the least that year was in Pflugerville, Texas, which consumed 10,000 gallons (38,000 liters)about as much as one Texas home would use in two months. That data center is air-cooled, not water-cooled, and consumes significantly less water than the 1.5 million gallons (5.7 million liters) at an air-cooled Google data center in Storey County, Nevada. Because Googles disclosures do not pair water consumption data with the size of centers, technology used or indirect water consumption from power, these are simply partial views, with the big picture obscured. Given societys growing interest in AI, the data center industry will likely continue its rapid expansion. But without a consistent and transparent way to track water consumption over time, the public and government officials will be making decisions about locations, regulations and sustainability without complete information on how these massive companies hot and thirsty buildings will affect their communities and their environments. Peyton McCauley is a water policy specialist and Sea Grant UW Water Science-Policy Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Melissa Scanlan is a professor and director of the Center for Water Policy, School of Freshwater Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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naged. Some of the best were extremely productive. Others were great team players. Others made the people around them better. Another called me out when I wasn’t performing as well as I could, something I didn’t enjoy but always appreciated. Then I thought about Mark Cuban. Over the years, he’s led hundreds of people across a wide variety of ventures and industries. Here’s Cuban’s perspective on what makes an employee outstanding: The people that tend to work for me a long time not only are smart, not only are driven, not only are learners.They understand that the greatest value you can offer a boss is to reduce their stress. The people who tend to think that they are invaluable are typically the ones who create the most stress by creating firestorms and creating drama and making things more difficult for me.Anybody who reduces my stress becomes invaluable to me. I never want to get rid of them. And for good reason. No matter how talented, people who create drama almost always do more harm than good to an organization, and create more headaches than value for a boss. They take credit where credit is not due. They steal ideas. They can always find the dark cloud. They constantly find a way to take somethinganythingpersonally. Smart. Driven. Constantly learning. And constantly reducing stress. For me, that was Robbie. He was a high-performing machine operator. He fit seamlessly into any crew. His mechanical skills were outstanding. But more than that, he solved problems before I knew problems existed. He would stop me and say, “We have a problem with a conveyor. I lined up an electrician and we’re going to take lunch early so we won’t have any downtime.” He would stop me and say, “Next month, Mark’s going to need a couple of weeks off because his wife will have an operation. I know there won’t be any relief operators available, so we’re training Steve to take his place.” He would say, “You need to talk to Doug. He’s frustrated that he hasn’t gotten promoted, and it’s becoming a problem.” Not only did Robbie never create stress for me, he also reduced stress I might have felt by stepping in to take care of actual problems. By stepping in to eliminate potential problems. By letting me know about small issues that, left unattended, could become big issues. Outstanding performer. Outstanding stress reducer. Invaluable. While stress reduction isn’t a category on a performance evaluation, it should be a consideration. Because the people who do their job well, and help you do your job well by not creating stress you have to deal with, and by actively reducing the level of stress you might otherwise feel? They’re likely to be your best employees, too. And should be paid accordingly. By Jeff Haden This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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