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Meta has announced three new agreements to purchase nuclear power for its AI infrastructure as well as the Prometheus supercluster, a 1-gigawatt data center being built in Ohio. The social media giant is partnering with power companies Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo to deliver an expected 6.6 gigawatts of generation to its projects by 2035. The company's agreement with TerraPower will fund the development of two new reactors capable of delivering up to 690 megawatts of power as early as 2032. The deal also gives Meta rights to energy from six other reactors that could deliver an additional 2.1 gigawatts by 2035. All this power would come from TerraPower's "Natrium" reactors, which use sodium instead of water as a coolant. A partnership with Oklo will bring 1.2 gigawatts of nuclear power online as early as 2030. Meta says the agreement opens the door to the construction of multiple Oklo reactors, which it claims will create thousands of construction and long-term operations jobs in Ohio. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of Oklo's largest investors, and owns just over 4 percent of the company. Metas agreement with Vistra focuses on keeping existing nuclear plants running longer and boosting their output. Through new 20-year deals, Meta will buy more than 2.1 gigawatts of electricity from some of Vistras existing plants in Ohio, while also backing added capacity at those sites, plus another in Pennsylvania. Vistra expects the added capacity, totaling 433 megawatts, to come online in the early 2030s. Big tech is increasingly turning to nuclear to power its AI ambitions. Meta signed a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy for nuclear power last year. Meanwhile Microsoft is famously reopening Three Mile Island and will be the plants sole customer as part of a 20-year deal.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/meta-announces-a-slew-of-nuclear-energy-agreements-165337159.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
LG opened CES 2026 by outlining its vision to reduce the physical effort and mental burden of life. Buy enough of the devices its presently working on and youll exist in an environment of ambient care, coddled by the machinery in your home. It sounds positively utopian: When the sensors in your bed know youve not slept well and are getting a cold, a robot will wake you with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. When youre in a rush to get to work, the robot will make you a sandwich for you to eat on the go, sparing you the effort of making it yourself. The more I roamed the halls of the show after that, the more I couldnt help feeling uneasy about what so many companies here were pitching. To me, the vision of the future on show here is equal parts solitary and infantilized.Theres obvious reasons for this: AI swallowed the tech industrys oxygen, sapping any chance of innovation in consumer hardware. The advent of Panther Lake is a win for Intel, but its not going to enable dramatic changes in how people work with their PCs on a daily basis. The US policy shift away from EVs and toward fossil fuel-powered vehicles, too, means that the big names in auto manufacture have similarly shied away from the show. That left CES full of various robotics startups offering early visions of humanoid robots designed to work on production lines, take care of your home and replace your pet. I saw more than a few stands where booth attendants were pretending to delight in teaching their wheeled robot pets to play fetch. At least, I hope they were pretending.Im painfully aware of how many devices felt like they were only a hop, skip and a jump away from the Sharper Image catalog. Gadgets that are designed to fill some perceived hole in your life that wont actually make things better or easier in the long run. Im leery about denigrating assistive technology that offers a vital lifeline to people with accessibility needs. Im also leery about knocking devices that may enable people to keep working despite wrestling with long term injuries I've got one eye on the raft of exoskeletons exhibited at the show which might help me work in the garden despite the weakness in my lower back. But Im also not quite sold on how many toilet computers, massage chairs and scootcases we all need in our daily lives. Theres also the elephant in the room that many of these innovations seem intent on acting as a replacement, substitute or supplement for real interaction. Robotic panda bears scuttling around your home to save you the effort of caring for a real flesh-and-blood pet. Holographic AI waifus that will obsequiously respond to whatever you ask of it with nothing but flattery and agreement. The sheer volume of AI Labubus operating as friend, enemy, companion or a combination of all the above. Cuddly home robots that are little more than a tablet on a moveable base thatll keep your kids entertained so you dont have to. Yes, Im being unfair, but sometimes shows like this make me sound like someones grandpa angrily insisting you darn kids get off your screens. I feel some of these gadgets are specifically designed to enable a degree of detachment from our own bodies. Were spending so much time getting dopamine from our devices that were no longer able to pay attention to how our bodies are feeling. In LGs vision of the future, moving around for ourselves and making our own food is a thing of the past, which will, surely, put a dent in our physical and mental health. We lose the ability to connect with the people around us because weve spent too long being flattered by our AI lackeys. We need a machine to monitor the food we eat and the crap we excrete because were not willing to pay attention to what were doing. Much in the same way that AI encourages us to take shortcuts rather than enjoy the process of being creative, the rest of the tech industry seemingly wants us to shortcut the fundamentals of life.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ces-2026-offered-a-lonely-vision-of-the-future-160000993.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
There were no idle hands at Sharpa's CES booth. The company's humanoid may have been the busiest bot at show, autonomously playing ping-pong, dealing blackjack games and taking selfies with passersby. On display wasn't just the robot and its smarts, but also SharpaWave, a highly dexterous 1:1 scale human hand. The hand has 22 active degrees of freedom, according to the company, allowing for precise and intricate finger movements. It mirrored my gestures as I wiggled my hand in front of its camera, getting everything mostly right, which was honestly pretty cool. Each fingertip contains a minicamera and over 1,000 tactile pixels so it can pick up objects with the appropriate amount of delicateness for the task at hand, like plucking a playing card from a deck and placing it gently on the table. Sharpa's robot was a pretty good ping-pong player, too. We've seen ping-pong robots plenty of times before, but these typically come in the form of a disembodied robotic arm, not one that's humanoid from the waist up. The company's products are meant to be general-purpose, with the ability to handle a wide range of jobs, and its humanoid wore a lot of hats at CES to drive the point home. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/sharpas-ping-pong-playing-blackjack-dealing-humanoid-is-working-overtime-at-ces-2026-150000488.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
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