The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
Why Electricity is AI's Biggest Problem
24 Oct 2025
AI’s growth is colliding head-on with America’s aging power grid. This episode dives into why electricity—not compute or data—is emerging as AI’s biggest bottleneck, driving costs, political backlash, and stalled data-center projects across the U.S. From surging energy prices to billion-dollar infrastructure overhauls, it unpacks how the race for AI dominance is reshaping the global energy map.Brought to you by:KPMG – Discover how AI is transforming possibility into reality. Tune into the new KPMG 'You Can with AI' podcast and unlock insights that will inform smarter decisions inside your enterprise. Listen now and start shaping your future with every episode. https://www.kpmg.us/AIpodcastsAssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - https://www.assemblyai.com/briefBlitzy.com - Go to https://blitzy.com/ to build enterprise software in days, not months Robots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results https://robotsandpencils.com/The Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Interested in sponsoring the show? [email protected]
Full Episode
Today on the AI Daily Brief, why electricity is AI's biggest problem, and before that in the headlines, another restructuring of Meta's AI efforts. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.
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Meta is cutting 600 roles in their AI division in an attempt, apparently, to move faster. Axios reports the downsizing will impact a significant chunk of the several thousand strong AI team.
Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang wrote in a memo to staff, "...by reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be load-bearing and have more scope and impact." Staff reportedly learned if they were among the cuts on Wednesday morning.
Affected employees were encouraged to apply for other jobs at Meta, and Wang expects most of them to find another position internally where they could apply their AI skills. He wrote, This is a talented group of individuals and we need their skills in other parts of the company. Now, by some accounts, this is now the fifth restructuring of Meta's AI division this year.
Meta disputes that characterization, instead viewing this as a continuous effort to nail down the right organizational structure. Notably, one of those reorgs involved rolling up existing AI teams into the newly constituted superintelligence lab. From there, the expensive superstar hires that took place over the summer were concentrated into a subdivision known as TBD Labs.
Reporting states that the layoffs won't impact TBD Labs, instead thinning out the FAIR AI Research Lab, the AI Product Team, and the AI Infrastructure Unit. Meta also continues to actively recruit more elite AI researchers for TBD Labs, even as they're doing these other layoffs. Bringing together multiple divisions and figuring out how to make this all work in harmony is no easy task.
Just ask Google, who took over a year to do this between their various AI organizations as well. Still, to some, this feels like a recipe for even more discontent in Meta's AI organization. Earlier reporting had suggested that bringing existing AI workers into the superintelligence lab was an effort to quell morale issues.
There was a suggestion that existing workers didn't want to be left out of the company's new initiative and stuck working on legacy projects like updates to Llama 4. The good news for the folks impacted is that this is an absolute hiring bonanza for every other AI company, and they are jumping on it very quickly.
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