Patrick Coffey

Welcome to Tech News Briefing.

It's Friday, February 20th.

I'm Patrick Coffey for The Wall Street Journal.

The AI revolution is no longer just a software race, and hyperscalers are hurrying to put the right infrastructure in place.

Data centers are a booming business, and their rapid expansion is being felt across industries.

On today's show, we're taking a look at two.

First, in the battle for AI dominance, every engine of the economy is getting recruited into the fight, and that includes literal ones made for jets.

We're unpacking how it all works.

Then, in some regions of the country, big tech is buying up a lot of land to build data centers, and homeowners aren't happy.

We're diving into how these new developments are unfolding and where they might go next.

But first, tech giants and their developer partners are rushing to set up these massive data centers as fast as they can.

And that translates into an unprecedented demand for energy.

One of the most effective and convenient sources on hand turns out to be jet engines, which can be converted into turbines

powered by natural gas.

The journal's Jinju Lee covers the energy sector for our herd on the street column, and she's here to tell us more about what is quickly becoming its own little-known but very profitable AI-adjacent industry.

Jinju, how exactly do jet engines help power these AI data centers?

So then we have some that are refurbished that were actually used in jet engines and some that are designed specifically for this purpose.

Exactly.

And I'm trying to imagine how that looks like just sort of like rows and rows of jet engines, essentially just kind of churning.

And these are serving as alternatives to other power sources like, I don't know, nuclear energy or...