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  • Americans are inundated with suspected scams. New polling shows why few victims report them


    WASHINGTON (AP) — Most Americans are inundated with scam attempts on a daily basis — and about 3 in 10 have personally lost money or personal information to scams, according to a new AP-NORC survey.

    The poll, conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in February, highlights the obstacle course that U.S. adults navigate daily as they screen calls, ignore messages or try to puzzle out if that urgent request from their cellphone provider is legitimate.

    A separate survey conducted by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance that was provided exclusively to the AP found that last year alone, about 1 in 10 U.S. adults said they or someone else from their household was deceived by a scammer into losing money or providing access to a financial account, with nearly half saying they lost more than $500.

    That leaves many Americans feeling like they’re constantly at risk of falling for a scam, often without a sense of recourse. In both surveys, few victims said they reported the scam to the federal government or local law enforcement. Many victims didn’t report the scam, Gallup found, because they didn’t think it would make a difference in getting money back.

    “You’ve got to be pretty sophisticated these days,” said Adam Pratter, 42. He has run into problems on dating apps — and once ended up sending money to a person who claimed they were overseas because of a military deployment and needed money to buy food. He realized it was a scam when the requests didn’t stop.

    Pratter thinks banks and social media companies have a responsibility to help people who have been scammed, but also believes the government needs to do more.

    “If federal regulation wanted to step in and make deals with these companies to get these people their money back, they could,” he said.

    For many Americans, scam attempts are constant

    Americans are flooded with scam attempts, according to both surveys. More than half, 58%, of U.S. adults in the AP-NORC poll said they receive daily text messages, phone calls, emails, online messages or online advertisements that they suspect are scams, while the Gallup survey found last year that about 4 in 10 experienced attempted scams on a daily basis.

    Porschel Smith, 22, gets multiple scam calls every day, and receives even more scam emails. Some of the scams are easy for her to identify. “They mention different types of programs that I know are nonexistent,” she said.

    But sometimes she ends up engaging with the scammer before realizing that something is wrong. “Some of them hack your account and pretend as if they’re someone that you know,” she said. “But then I get to asking questions and realize they’re scams.”

    Older people are more likely to say they receive scam attempts daily, according to the AP-NORC poll. About 7 in 10 U.S. adults ages 60 and older say they are contacted by a suspected scammer at least once a day, compared to about 4 in 10 Americans under 30.

    Among those who have received suspected scam attempts, the AP-NORC poll found that outreach involving package shipments or banking were among the most common methods. About 4 in 10 people who were contacted by scammers say at least one of the attempts they received over the past few years were through Facebook or Facebook Messenger, while about 2 in 10 said they were on WhatsApp, and a similar share said they were on Instagram.

    Around 30% of US adults say they’ve been scammed personally

    The impact of scams is far-reaching. About half, 51%, of U.S. adults know someone personally — such as a friend or family member — who has ever lost money as the result of a scam, the AP-NORC poll found, while about 3 in 10 U.S. adults say they have personally been scammed into giving away money or personal information.

    The Gallup survey found that about 1 in 10 U.S. adults said they or a member of their household was scammed out of money in 2025, with 6% saying they had been personally scammed.

    About half of people whose household experienced scams last year reported losing between $125 and $2,000, according to Gallup.

    About 1 in 10 U.S. adults have been scammed multiple times, Gallup found.

    “It’s not easy. They know what they’re doing,” said Towonna Harris, 50. Her son was once contacted by scammers who promised to give him money for tuition if he authorized a nominal credit card charge, which quickly spiraled into a much bigger set of charges.

    She’s experienced other kinds of scams on a smaller scale, too. “I ordered some stuff. I never got it,” she said. “I thought it was a legitimate company. And then I saw all these reviews saying it was a scam.”

    Few scam victims report to law enforcement

    Virtually all U.S. adults believe that scams pose a “major” or “minor” threat to individuals in the U.S., but few think the government is doing enough to solve the problem. About 8 in 10 Americans say the government is “definitely” or “probably” doing too little to prevent scams, according to the Gallup survey, including large majorities of Republicans and Democrats.

    When people are scammed, both surveys found that victims are much likelier to reach out to financial institutions than the federal government or local law enforcement. About half, 55%, of people who were scammed last year reported to a bank, credit union or other financial institution, the Gallup poll found, but only 18% contacted state or local law enforcement, while 13% reported to either federal law enforcement or the Federal Trade Commission.

    Many victims don’t make a report because they don’t think it will help, or don’t know where to go, Gallup found. Among people who were scammed in 2025, 75% said they didn’t report because they thought it wouldn’t make a difference in getting their money back, while 58% were uncertain where to report.

    More broadly, Americans express very low confidence that they’d know how to report a scam to the government if they needed to. According to the AP-NORC poll, most Americans, 55%, say they are “extremely” or “very” confident that if they were scammed, they’d know how to report it to banks or credit card companies, but only about one-quarter are similarly confident that they’d know how to report to federal or state law enforcement.

    Only about one-third of U.S. adults said they would know where to make a report if they lost $5,000 in a scam today, Gallup found.

    Max Anderson, 23, said that his parents are small business owners who were the victims of a costly and complex scam. “A scammer successfully imitated one of their employees and changed their direct deposit information. This went on for about 3 months. It went to $15,000,” he said.

    Eventually, Anderson’s father got help from the FBI, he said.

    “I do like that the government stepped in with my parents, and I feel like that’s the way it should be,” he said. “It’s a big enough problem at this point that it falls to the government and companies to do something about it.”

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    Associated Press reporters Mary Rajkumar, Juliet Linderman and Erika Kinetz contributed to this report. Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism student Molly Wallace contributed to this report.

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    The AP-NORC poll of 1,133 adults was conducted Feb. 19-23 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.

    The Stop Scams Alliance-Gallup poll of 5,173 adults was conducted Jan. 8-Feb. 18 using a sample drawn from Gallup’s probability-based Gallup Panel. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.


  • Alibaba sues the US Defense Department in a bid to remove ‘Chinese military company’ designation


    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Chinese tech giant Alibaba has sued the U.S. Department of Defense, demanding that it be removed from the Pentagon’s list of Chinese military companies that prohibits them from landing U.S. defense contracts and carries reputational damage.

    In the petition filed this week in the San Jose division of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, Alibaba, which is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, argued that the designation, announced on June 8, has “no basis in fact or law” and that the Pentagon failed to reach its conclusion through any fair process.

    It is the latest lawsuit by a Chinese company against the Pentagon over such national security labels.

    In 2021, with some in Washington seeing China as a growing military threat, Congress asked the department to create a list of Chinese companies directly controlled by the Chinese military and security forces, as well as those it believed had contributed to the country’s defense industrial base.

    The current list includes 188 entities ranging from state-owned defense businesses, to private-sector tech companies like Alibaba and the robotics company Unitree. The designations have drawn protests from both the Chinese government and some of the targeted companies.

    On Monday, Beijing announced sanctions on 10 American military-related companies, raising the risk of elevating tensions between the two countries at a time when Beijing and Washington are seeking to stabilize relations.

    WuXi AppTec Co., a company that provides research, development and manufacturing services to hundreds of U.S. pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, has also been added to the list. According to the Pentagon, the company is “indirectly owned” by China’s state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. The Pentagon says it’s also “indirectly affiliated” with the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense and the People’s Liberation Army.

    WuXi AppTec is challenging the decision in the federal district court in the District of Columbia. In the petition filed on June 11, the company said the label has “already caused and will continue to cause several and irreparable harms.” It called the designation “the product of political pressure and inaccurate, unsupported assertions.”

    In a petition Tuesday, Alibaba said the company is losing backers in the U.S. and that the damage is significant because the company depends on the trust of its U.S. partners.

    The Pentagon asserts that Alibaba not only is affiliated with the China’s Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, but that it contributes to the nation’s industrial defense complex through its affiliation with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

    Alibaba said in its petition that it is governed by an independent board and holds no military certification or license. The company has no relationship with the Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, it said, and that like all companies operating in China, including U.S. companies, regulatory compliance with the ministry is mandatory.

    “A regulator is not an affiliate,” reads the petition.

    A U.S. judge last year ruled against DJI Technology, a Chinese drone maker, in its bid to be removed from the Pentagon’s list. DJI is appealing the case.

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    AP Business Writer Chan Ho-him in Hong Kong contributed


  • Agility Robotics heads to Wall Street in a $2.5B bet on staffing warehouses with humanoids


    A maker of humanlike robots that carry totes around warehouses is aiming to go public on Wall Street in a test of whether there is a market for putting AI-powered humanoid machines to work.

    Agility Robotics, based in Salem, Oregon, announced Wednesday a planned merger with an investment firm that will value the company at $2.5 billion as it becomes the first publicly traded company entirely devoted to building and selling humanoids.

    Its competitors include Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk has pitched its humanoid prototype Optimus as the future of the carmaker; and Chinese robotics company Unitree, which recently moved toward going public on Shanghai’s stock exchange.

    Designed to pick up and move heavy bins and totes, Agility’s flagship product, called Digit, is the “first humanoid robot employed and commercially operational in warehouse and industrial facilities,” said Michael Klein, co-founder and chairman of Churchill Capital Group, which runs the special-purpose acquisition company that intends to merge with Agility by the end of the year.

    Klein said on an investor call Wednesday that the company has backing from Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank and Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn. Its early customers include Toyota, industrial parts supplier Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre, the Latin American e-commerce giant.

    While Agility describes its fully autonomous robot as a humanoid, the company’s co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst told investors Wednesday that “we’ve never set out to build a machine that looks like a person.” Unlike other humanoids, like Tesla’s Optimus, Digit’s legs are more birdlike than human in a design that is meant to better fit the work they do. Its hands are more like grippers or claws.

    Agility CEO Peggy Johnson said Digit specializes in manual labor that for humans would be repetitive, dirty and prone to injury.

    “The demand here is large and increasing,” she said on the investor call. “We have companies reshoring production, older workers retiring, and younger generations just not opting for these types of menial jobs.”

    While earlier generations of industrial robots are typically so large and fast-moving that they must be fenced off from human workers, Hurst said upcoming versions of Digit will be able to work alongside humans in warehouses and manufacturing facilities. In the years to come, they could eventually find their way into hospitality, home services and elder care, he said.

    Agility’s plan to merge with Churchill’s special-purpose acquisition company, known as a SPAC, provides a quicker timeline for going public and fewer disclosure requirements.

    Johnson said the company will use the capital it raises to expand commercial deployments and scale production of its next robot model, Digit V5. It will be the fifth generation in a line of two-legged robots Agility first unveiled nearly a decade ago after spinning off from a robotics laboratory at Oregon State University.

    The company is predicting a more than $1 trillion market for the types of robots it is building, though it is far from the only one trying to make them.

    The surprise news of its planned public debut attracted a crowd of well-wishers to Agility’s booth Wednesday at the sprawling Automate robotics trade show in Chicago, said Aaron Prather, director of market intelligence at the Association for Advancing Automation, which helped organize the event.

    Prather said the race between Agility and China’s Unitree to go public also underscored the different approaches of companies designing humanoids, with Agility narrowing its focus on “worker bee” robots and Unitree frequently showing off machines that dance on two or four legs and do backflips and other entertaining gimmicks.

    “Maybe it’s just maturing of the marketplace and these manufacturers are trying to find where their sweet spot is,” Prather said. “They’ll probably compete in some areas. But the space is so wide open, and everyone I think is trying to find where they fit.”


  • AI is an energy and water hog, here’s what you can do to counter that


    WASHINGTON (AP) — As the world tries to curb human-caused climate change and not run dry of water, every online query is increasing our environmental footprint and exacerbating the problem.

    Artificial intelligence and the data centers they require use growing amounts of energy and are water hogs — and AI companies aren’t transparent about how much of those resources they use, experts said. So each time you turn to the internet and seek an AI-fueled response, it’s gobbling up precious resources.

    “AI is going in the opposite direction to decarbonization efforts,” said cognitive computer scientist Sasha Luccioni, co-founder and chief scientific officer of the Sustainable AI Group. “We should be thinking about where we are going towards. If you’re recycling and a vegan but then you’re using ChatGPT to do your multiplication for you, well that’s kind of against the trend.”

    “It’s like one other thing among many to think about when you’re like developing these daily habits,” Luccioni said. “It is not too late. You are not obliged to use AI for everything. You can opt out, you can have a say and you can kind of just like think about how you engage with this technology.”

    But she also said Big Tech companies are making it hard by “integrating generative AI into everything. … There’s like this bait-and-switch going on. I feel that nowadays you use the same tools that you used to use, but now they’re generative AI.”

    There are a few ways climate conscious individuals aren’t completely powerless, said several experts in water use, artificial intelligence, data center placement and environmental sustainability.

    Use AI less

    The advice from experts is simple: Just use AI less often.

    “The cleanest form of AI use is no use,” Kaveh Madani, a water scientist and director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada. “So when you could avoid using AI, don’t use it.”

    Don’t use it for simple things. Don’t use it for calculations, directions, store hours, recipes or shopping lists, which are all searches people used to do without AI, but now do it with AI and waste power and water, Luccioni said.

    “Yeah, it’s great. You can generate a chocolate chip cookie recipe with Claude, or you can open a damn book. Like, those still exist. You really don’t need Claude,” Luccioni said. “You really don’t need all of these generative AI technologies to do day-to-day tasks. I do agree there are some productivity gains to be had but I think that it’s a pretty small percentage of what people are currently using.”

    And when you make a query, make it concise because more information translates into more computing and more energy and water used. No need to be polite. Don’t give unnecessary background information, Madani and others said.

    Every query means more energy use, experts said.

    The power and water cost of a query

    Last year, global data centers used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries of the world, and it is expected to more than double in the next four years, according to a new report from the United Nations University. By then, it will have moved up in rankings to just behind five countries for power use.

    By 2030, just the electricity that data centers use — not including the massive amounts of water needed to cool them — would require nearly 2.5 trillion gallons of water (9.3 trillion liters), which is enough drinking water for the entire world for 1.7 years, said Madani, the study’s co-author.

    Getting an AI text response is the equivalent to using an efficient light bulb for two and a half minutes, but that’s being done 2.5 billion times a day with ChatGPT alone, according to the report and Madani. Using AI to generate a complex video is the equivalent of 42 hours of that light bulb burning and using a gallon of water (4 liters), he said.

    Lack of transparency is a problem

    Except for a mention in a blogpost and scant information, private AI companies aren’t transparent about the energy and water costs of queries, said Luccioni and other experts who have tried to calculate those costs. That reality forces them to just make estimates based on less common open source AI.

    “We have no way of knowing and getting a sense of the amount of energy,” said University of Michigan computer science professor Mosharaf Chowdhury, who tracks energy consumption of open source models.

    “If there’s no transparency, we have no choice. We’re really not choosing. We are being given whatever is being given to us,” said Ana Pinheiro Privette, a former top sustainability official for Amazon Web Services, who also used to direct the University of Illinois’ water security center and was a data scientist at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “That’s the power. The power is to say ‘I actually want to understand what I’m consuming’.”

    Forced into AI use but you can opt out

    When you go online, many search engines, including Google, answer via AI and promote it, without users asking for machine learning to kick in. You have to opt out of AI, when you should have to opt in, Luccioni said.

    “End users, you and me, we have absolutely no control other than saying ‘OK we don’t want to use any of it’ and even then the companies force it onto us,” Chowdhury said.

    You can opt out of AI in Google searches by putting “-ai” at the end of your search, Luccioni said. Or you can click on “Web” in search options.

    There are search engines that reduce their carbon footprints by planting trees and use less energy in their AI, such as Ecosia, Luccioni said. And search engines DuckDuckGo and Startpage have no-AI options.

    Consumers and neighbors have some power

    “The big power I think the consumer has is the market message because I’ve seen that when I worked at Amazon,” Privette said. “They listen. They listen if everybody suddenly starts caring about not having a footprint.”

    Years ago, when data centers wanted to build in an area, it was no problem. Now that they are multiplying in high population centers and people are speaking up and against them, said Privette. For example, data centers in two Virginia counties near Washington used 2.1 billion gallons (8 billion liters) of water in 2023.

    Balaji Tammabattula, chief operating officer of BaRupOn which makes energy-ready data center campuses, said, “the moment you say that you’re building a data center, there’s a backlash. The data center is the new boogeyman.”

    So he said companies like his have to listen and when they do, they use less water and energy.

    “AI is not going anywhere,” Tammabattula said. “It has to be done. But it has to be with the help of the community, where we’re understanding the concerns of the community.”

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.


  • Top developers are pivoting from chatbots to physical AI


    PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Computer scientist Louis Castricato was in his eighth year studying large language models — the artificial intelligence technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude — when he started to feel like he was hitting a dead end.

    “We basically have passed the point of doing real fundamental LLM research,” Castricato said. “Now it’s just applications.”

    The researcher quit his doctoral studies at Brown University and started a new company, called Overworld. Its ambition is in its name: AI that can understand and navigate a world, not just words.

    There’s still plenty of money to be made from AI chatbots — investors are counting on it as they commit trillions of dollars to leading developers like Anthropic and OpenAI. But a growing number of AI entrepreneurs are dedicating themselves to what they see as the next frontier: “world models” that teach AI systems, and sometimes robots, how to react in a physical environment.

    They include some of the field’s most prominent scientists, such as “Godmother of AI” Fei-Fei Li, who describes the concept of a world model as “one of the most important and most overloaded terms in AI today.”

    Scientists are applying AI in new dimensions with ‘world models’

    At the heart of world model research is the idea that AI can’t be truly intelligent if it can only read a book. It also needs to read the room.

    “Where language models learn the statistical structure of text, world models learn the statistical structure of space and time: how light falls on a surface, how a garden looks from an angle no camera has captured, how objects respond to force and follow the laws of physics,” wrote Li, founder of the San Francisco startup World Labs, in an essay published this month.

    Another proponent is AI pioneer Yann LeCun, who quit his job as Meta’s chief AI scientist last year to start Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs.

    “World model is quickly becoming a buzzword,” LeCun said on a recent “Unsupervised Learning” podcast. He said he views it as something that enables an AI agent “to predict the consequences of its own actions.”

    There are multiple ways of defining world models, often based on the technologies someone hopes to build with it — be it robots or a more interactive video game.

    Robots can’t learn much from AI models trained on books

    Training on all of humanity’s books, news articles and visual media, as AI language models have done, has led to AI assistants that are changing the nature of office-based work and some creative fields. But some proponents see limitations in generative AI models that work by repeatedly predicting the next word or pixel to produce new dialogue, images or lines of code.

    Chatbots can’t pick up a coffee mug, notes Martial Hebert, dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

    “There’s all the geometry of the world, the dynamic of how I move my hand, the physical interaction of the contact with the cup,” Hebert said. “This is much more complex than just predicting the next word in a sentence.”

    For scientists like Hebert, who has spent more than four decades researching robotics, the most useful application for world models is as a faster and cheaper path to “physical AI” — another tech industry buzzword.

    “Some people may have different definitions, but physical and embodied AI are kind of the evolution of what we used to call robotics,” Hebert said in an interview. Some of the AI advances that have made chatbots so useful can also be applied to building AI with a broad enough awareness of its environment to work like a robot’s brain, he said.

    “In your body and spinal cord you have a very general model of how to balance, how to walk around, and you can adapt to your knee hurting in the morning, so you now walk a little differently,” he said. “You don’t need to think about that. You have a general model somewhere in your nervous system and brain that allows your body to adapt very quickly.”

    Simulated worlds are drawing interest from investors

    Smarter robots aren’t the only end game for world models. Castricato started Overworld last year and the tiny Rhode Island-based startup is now building video game worlds where a scene, say, of a spooky forest, can adapt as a virtual character moves through it and interacts with the objects in it.

    “There’s no other world model where you can just walk through doors or where you can interact with a detailed environment like this,” he said in an interview. “We optimize for interaction above anything else.”

    While the near-term applications aren’t as readily apparent as AI coding tools, world model makers are attracting interest from venture capitalists like Steve Jang, co-founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures.

    The firm is investing in Overworld and other world model-focused companies, including Causal Labs, which is building AI models for weather prediction, and Extropic, which is building specialized computer chips suited to world models.

    “I think that the future is many different types of models with many different philosophies and architectures,” Jang said. “I don’t think that it’ll be one large, dense model to rule them all.”

    In her recent essay, Li sought to create a “taxonomy of world models” to help sort out the confusion about the competing visions.

    “A video model that produces gorgeous but physically impossible flames, a language model improvising a playable game, and a physics engine that faithfully simulates combustion all go by the same name,” she wrote.

    She divided world models into three categories. The most commercially viable today are “renderers” that prioritize the visual fidelity of the virtual worlds they create but can’t be trusted to teach robots much.

    Then, there are “simulators” that create virtual training grounds that faithfully represent the physical structure of a world; and “planners” that try to predict what an AI agent or robot should do in an unstructured world.

    “A robot that can plan is a robot that can work, and the entire industry is racing to be the one that gets there first,” she wrote.


  • Trump administration announces $17.5 billion in loans for 10 new large nuclear reactors


    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is providing $17.5 billion to speed the development of 10 new large nuclear reactors to meet the skyrocketing power demand from massive data centers.

    Energy Secretary Chris Wright cited “tremendous interest” among developers of data centers that would buy the power, as well as utilities and energy companies. The nuclear plants could begin construction by 2030 and become operational in the mid-2030s, Wright and other officials said Tuesday.

    “This is the start,” Wright said on a call with reporters. “We’re going to move with the players that are ready to stand up and move quickly. Once that supply chain is up and running, do we think there will be dozens of these built going forward? I’d be very surprised if there were not.”

    Most U.S. nuclear power plants were built between 1970 and 1990. Only two new large reactors have been built from scratch in the United States in recent decades. Those two reactors, at Georgia Power Co.’s Plant Vogtle, were completed years late and billions of dollars over budget. The 10 new reactors will use the same design, Westinghouse’s AP1000.

    Wright said the Plant Vogtle project struggled because of bad planning, supply chain problems and the COVID-19 pandemic. But, he said, the reactor design is “robust and sound.”

    “By building in volume and at multiple locations, we think we will create and stand up a large supply chain and build a lot of construction expertise,” Wright said. “We expect the timing and cost of these plants to well outperform what was done on Vogtle.”

    Seven utilities and energy companies signed letters of intent that identified sites, the Energy Department said. The agency plans to pick five, which would host two reactors at each site. The federal financing would be used to purchase nuclear components with long lead times, and are not construction loans.

    The department declined to name the utilities involved or the states they are in, calling it premature until the selections are made. It did not give a timeline for making those selections.

    President Donald Trump set a goal of quadrupling domestic production of nuclear power within the next 25 years, and he has signed executive orders to speed development. The administration is working to advance new nuclear technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors.

    Dan Sumner, president and chief executive officer of Westinghouse, said industrialized nuclear power needs to be built at fleet scale, in order for the United States to lead in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and the industries that will define the next century.

    Critics of building more nuclear reactors say they’re too expensive and riskier than other low-carbon energy sources. Several states restrict or ban new nuclear power plant construction.

    Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said the Energy Department has the authority to issue these loan guarantees, but he doesn’t think the executive branch should be so heavily involved in the electricity sector.

    If the past is any indication, the next administration will use similar authorities to favor a different set of energy resources, he added. “Remove the state barriers and the federal favoritism and let companies build the power plants that pass the market test,” Fisher wrote in an e-mail Tuesday.

    Data centers used 4% to 5% of the nation’s total electricity in 2024, a share that could nearly triple by 2028, according to government estimates. Some analysts predict nationwide electricity use to rise as much as 20% in the next decade, with data centers a big reason.

    The Energy Department said the loans could speed up the development of these 10 reactors by up to three years and lower construction costs. Its goal is for all 10 to be under construction by 2030, to start providing power in the mid-2030s.

    The utilities and Westinghouse will be expected to contribute up to $5 billion in equity in total across the five, two-reactors projects. Wright said his department provides up to $17.5 billion in loans, or $3.5 billion per project, in debt to pair with the equity. He said it’s “very, very low risk to the American taxpayers.”

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    McDermott reported from Providence, R.I.

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.


  • AI stock slump raises the question if investors are just taking profits or getting very nervous


    Technology companies are spending big to incorporate artificial intelligence into their businesses and to build huge data centers. Investors who had jumped on the bandwagon appear to be having second thoughts.

    Proponents of artificial intelligence see it as the next great revolution for the global economy. The revolution won’t come cheap. Just four companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft — plan to spend up to $720 billion this year, primarily on AI data centers.

    This week, investors are looking at the huge sums being spent and questioning whether AI can produce the profits and productivity necessary to make all the investment worth it. Critics have been talking about the possibility of a bubble in AI investment. On Monday, Amazon and Alphabet fell about 5%.

    On Tuesday, several companies that make the chips needed for the data center buildup — Nvidia, Micron Technology, Broadcom and Lam Research — led the market lower.

    At first, Microsoft, Alphabet and other so-called hyperscalers turned to cash on hand to fund the AI expansion. But they’re increasingly relying on the markets to raise cash.

    AI buildout needs cash

    Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said earlier this month that it’s raising $80 billion in cash to help pay for its investments by selling shares of its stock. Overall, Alphabet is planning to spend as much as $190 billion this year — more than all the stock of The Walt Disney Co. is worth, and Alphabet is forecasting its spending on investments next year will “significantly increase.”

    In March, Amazon sold $54 billion of bonds in the U.S. and Europe as it plans to spend around $200 billion this year on AI investments.

    Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX was on a three-day skid heading into Tuesday. It regained some lost ground, but ended trading slightly below the closing price on its first day of trading on June 12. Musk acknowledges that SpaceX will have to spend heavily to fulfill its plans of sending AI data centers into space, and the company has announced that part of an upcoming bond offering will fund its AI buildout.

    High-priced chip companies

    Chip companies have benefitted as the demand for memory chips and processing power for AI data centers and other projects has led to a supply shortage and a surge in prices. Investors have bid up the share prices of these companies now in anticipation of big profits down the road. By one measure, which compares a company’s stock price to its earnings per share, these companies might look expensive.

    Marvell Technologies lost money for five straight years before turning a profit of $2.7 billion in the fiscal year ended in January, thanks to gains in its data center business. The stock has more than tripled so far this year and its price-to-earnings ratio has gone from about 30 at the start of 2026 to near 100.

    Some data storage companies have seen even more eye-popping gains. Sandisk shares have soared more than 700% year to date and its P/E ratio stands at 68. Whether Sandisk shares are overvalued will depend on whether it meets Wall Street’s lofty expectations for the next 12 months — earnings per share of $188.05 per share compared with $29.16 per share for the 12 months ended March 31. When the current stock price is compared to the forecast, the price-to-earnings ratio falls to around 11.

    The current price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 is around 25.

    On Tuesday, investors unloaded at least some of their holdings in these stocks. Sandisk sank 13.6%, while Marvell lost 9.4%.

    The sell-off also took a bite out of exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that invest heavily in tech stocks. The Invesco QQQ Trust Series ETF was down 3.3%, while iShares Semiconductor ETF slumped 7.9%.

    Pocketing some gains

    While some investors may have doubts that companies going full throttle on AI infrastructure spending will ultimately be able to generate profits to justify their investment, it’s likely some of the selling this week may be investors pausing to pocket some of their gains after the stock market’s recent string of all-time highs.

    “With no clear catalyst driving the move lower, we believe today’s pullback likely reflects profit-taking following a strong rally from the March lows,” said Brock Weimer, an investments strategy analyst at Edward Jones.

    Big Tech gains have powered major stock indexes on record-setting runs this year. Within the S&P 500, the tech sector alone is up nearly 27% just over the last three months and roughly 17% for the year. In Asia, South Korea’s Kospi has nearly doubled so far in 2026.

    Heavy selling on Tuesday triggered a halt in trading in the Kospi, which set the stage for the wave of tech stock selling when trading opened in U.S. markets, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a research note Tuesday.

    Overall AI enterprise demand in Asia is “showing no cracks in the armor, which continue to make us very bullish on owning the tech AI winners over the coming year,” he added.

    Still, tech companies’ race to invest in the expansion of AI infrastructure could ultimately be sowing the seeds of future oversupply, according to Philip Straehl, chief investment officer at Morningstar Wealth.

    “Periods of elevated capital investment have historically not translated into strong outcomes for investors, leaving us cautious on the outlook,” Straehl wrote in a report last week.

    He expects that the rapid expansion of AI computing power will weigh on pricing, hurting companies’ returns and eventually result in a pullback in investing. Semiconductor companies are “particularly exposed to this dynamic,” Straehl wrote.


  • Supreme Court kills suit claiming Cisco’s technology helped China persecute Falun Gong members


    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted tech giant Cisco’s bid to shut down a lawsuit claiming that the company’s technology was used to persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in China.

    The justices ruled that American courts are the wrong forum for the suits, rejecting arguments made by the plaintiffs that the suits should go forward under the 18th-century Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), first enacted in 1991.

    The decision was the latest to rule against plaintiffs seeking to use U.S. courts as a venue to seek justice over the acts of foreign governments, especially those that took place abroad.

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her majority opinion that the justices “close the door” that the court slightly opened in 2004 when it suggested that some human-rights claims might be viable under the ATS. “In truth, this class is a null set,” Barrett wrote, while acknowledging such cases “frequently involve heinous and inhumane acts.”

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the court “closes the courthouse doors not just to respondents, but to virtually every future litigant seeking redress for a violation of international law under the ATS.”

    Falun Gong members had sought to overcome the court’s skepticism by arguing that a substantial portion of Cisco’s activities involving China took place in the United States.

    An Associated Press investigation last year showed that American tech companies, to a large degree, designed and built China’s surveillance state, encouraged by both Republican and Democratic administrations, even as activists warned such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious groups and target minorities. Last month, AP won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for its stories.

    In 2008, documents leaked to the press showed Cisco saw the “Golden Shield,” China’s internet censorship effort, as a sales opportunity. The company quoted a Chinese official calling the Falun Gong an “evil cult.” A Cisco presentation reviewed by the AP from the same year said its products could identify over 90% of Falun Gong material on the web.

    Other presentations reviewed by the AP show that Cisco represented Falun Gong material as a “threat” and built out a national information system to track Falun Gong believers. In 2011, Falun Gong members sued Cisco, alleging the company tailored technology for Beijing that it knew would be used to track, detain and torture believers.

    At arguments in April, Sotomayor said Cisco “knew that those people will be tortured.” A lawyer for the company said, “Cisco vigorously disputes those allegations.”


  • AI companies should release environmental impact, commit to clean energy, says UN chief


    United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday called on artificial intelligence companies to release information about the carbon pollution they create, along with the water and land used to power their operations.

    While urging action in an address at London Climate Action Week, Guterres proposed the AI Environmental Transparency Initiative, arguing AI companies should measure and disclose the impact of their increasingly in-demand technology — impact which has been cited by opponents as reasons to curb the rapid growth of data centers. These companies have faced mounting pressure, both from governments and locally in areas with data centers that support AI, for increased transparency and more standardized reporting across the industry.

    Guterres said AI companies should also commit to powering their facilities with electricity produced with renewable technologies, such as wind and solar, by 2030.

    “No more hidden costs,” Guterres said at Europe’s largest independent climate conference. “No more shifting the burden onto those least able to bear it. It is time to come clean.”

    AI’s needs are growing

    Many major tech companies have vowed to power their operations using cleaner sources, some by the end of the decade. Some plan to do so especially using solar and nuclear, including tech giants Amazon and Google.

    But the race to deploy AI has complicated those commitments and sent soaring greenhouse gas emissions, which come from the burning of fuels like oil, coal and gas, and heat the planet. Regulatory barriers have also hindered climate-friendly projects.

    Currently, coal sources about 30% of the electricity consumed by data centers globally, according to the International Energy Agency. Renewable energy – primarily wind, solar and hydro powers – supplies about 27%, natural gas, 26%, and nuclear, 15%. Renewables are expected to meet just half of that demand over the next five years.

    As AI booms, many, including Guterres, have touted its ability to accelerate climate solutions. It could improve energy efficiency, and reduce pollution and emissions.

    At the same time, the environmental footprint of data centers already rivals some of the world’s largest countries, according to a U.N. report released earlier this month.

    That report also said the water, energy use and pollution associated with AI will double in just four years. Data centers needed to fuel AI accounted for about 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption in 2025, and will account for nearly 3% of the world’s projected electricity use by 2030.

    “Despite these obvious concerns, communities are often left in the dark about the environmental impact of the infrastructure rising around them,” Guterres said in his remarks.

    The UN continues to sound urgent alarms

    The U.N. chief has long urged the world to take serious climate action, and will once again convene leaders at the annual Conference of Parties, this year in Turkey, to negotiate plans.

    On Tuesday, addressing AI was just a number of steps he said needed to be taken to keep the world below the warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times, a goal set during the 2015 Paris Agreement.

    Last year was the first time that the three-year temperature average broke through that threshold.

    “Every major emitter must accelerate action,” Guterres said. “And every country must over-deliver on its commitments.”

    He called for cutting methane, a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for around one-third of global warming and significantly more potent than carbon dioxide, though comparatively it lingers for less time in the atmosphere. He also called for a reduction in dependence on coal, oil and gas.

    Renewables progress seen around th
    e globe but challenges remain

    Guterres noted in his remarks positive developments in renewable energy, as scale drives down the costs of the technologies and adoption increases.

    Clean power generation — largely driven by solar and wind — exceeded overall global electricity demand growth last year. The share of renewables also hit more than one-third of the world’s electricity mix for the first time in modern history in 2025, and coal power saw its share fall below one-third of global generation.

    China continues to drive the world’s clean energy transition, and in Europe, fossil generation is generally trending down.

    But the U.S. under President Donald Trump has embraced coal, oil and gas and slashed support for renewables and broader climate action — all amid the global energy crisis exacerbated by the U.S. war in Iran, which Guterres called “the mother of all energy shocks.”

    Guterres referred to the current state of the world as “A Tale of Two Crises,” drawing a metaphor to the Charles Dickens’ novel, “A Tale of Two Cities” — also a nod to London where the address was given.

    “For the climate agenda, this is indeed the best of times and the worst of times,” he said. “The worst – because climate impacts are intensifying, tipping points are looming, and the energy crisis has exposed the deep risks of dependence on fossil fuels. But also the best – because the renewables revolution is well underway.”

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    Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

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    Read more of AP’s climate coverage.

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.


  • World Cup ticket buyers are left stranded as resale purchases fall through


    ATLANTA (AP) — Bina Ramroop broke down in tears when she realized she wasn’t going to get the World Cup tickets she had bought for her grandson’s 13th birthday.

    As thousands poured into Atlanta Stadium on Monday to see Spain face Cape Verde in what turned out to be a remarkable scoreless draw, Ramroop stood outside, increasingly stressed as she went back and forth for hours between StubHub representatives on the phone and FIFA representatives in the ticket booth. Each blamed the other.

    No one could figure out why the tickets Ramroop bought months ago on StubHub for $485 apiece couldn’t be transferred from the original seller to the FIFA ticketing app. StubHub offered her a refund and, as Ramroop heard the crowd roar for the start of the match, she knew she had no choice but to give up and take the offer.

    “I didn’t want a refund, I didn’t want my money back,” Ramroop said. “I wanted to go to the game.”

    The World Cup has delivered thrills on the pitch, but fans have flooded social media with complaints about tickets that never arrived, orders that were canceled at the last minute and hours they spent trying to sort out problems between FIFA’s ticketing system and outside resale platforms. The vast majority seem to be about industry titan StubHub, but people who bought through competitors such as SeatGeek and Vivid Seats have also reported issues. Interviews with fans and industry experts show that some cases stem from technical glitches in the transfer process, while others could involve sellers who never had tickets to deliver in the first place, though StubHub denies such sales happen on its platform.

    A grandmother’s disappointment

    FIFA has urged fans to buy resale tickets through its own marketplace, where it slaps a 30% surcharge on every resold ticket — 15% each from the buyer and seller. But many fans bought through other resale sites, either out of habit or because those sites have lower prices or are easier to navigate.

    Ramroop didn’t realize she was taking a risk when she bought through StubHub, which she had used in the past without issues.

    As she and her grandson Elijah Gomes took the long, lonely train ride back to the Atlanta suburbs, Elijah followed the score on his phone. The match had ended scoreless, and he tried to cheer up his devastated grandmother by telling her they hadn’t missed much after all (Cape Verdeans would beg to differ ).

    “He’s telling me, ‘Grandma, it’s OK, Grandma.’ And he’s trying to console me,” Ramroop said the next day.

    She was hardly alone. An Associated Press journalist witnessed more than a dozen frustrated fans at the match who said they were stuck in similar situations.

    StubHub blamed FIFA for the transfer problems that buyers like Ramroop have experienced. In a statement, it said FIFA has “poor technology infrastructure,” enacted last-minute transfer restrictions and didn’t launch its new ticketing app until a few weeks before the tournament. The company also called out organizers that “take anti-competitive actions” that limit where fans can buy and sell tickets.

    Asked about the technical issues, FIFA on Wednesday reiterated that sales through its official site are guaranteed to go through.

    An industry’s longstanding problem

    Industry observers say the problems appear to stem from more than one cause. For some, it may indeed be technical glitches — an issue that StubHub says is “very, very rare” and one that it is hard at work to solve. For others, they say it’s likely a more longstanding scourge: speculative sellers.

    Scott Friedman, an industry veteran and co-founder of a consultancy called the Ticket Talk Network, said some sellers list tickets before they actually have them, betting that prices will fall closer to the event so they can buy the tickets at a better price later. But because World Cup ticket prices have surged since the tournament began, those sellers have been forced to either buy expensive tickets to fulfill their orders or cancel and accept penalties from resale platforms. StubHub’s penalties are typically 200% of the ticket price, Friedman said.

    “This is not new at all,” said Friedman, pointing to other high-profile events where frustrated fans were left empty-handed, including Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. “This has been going on, but it’s making global news because it’s the World Cup.”

    StubHub says it requires sellers to prove they have tickets before they list them.

    But regardless of the reason for the canceled sales, Friedman said “StubHub should fill every single order to make sure fans get in the biggest global sporting event that happens every four years.”

    That’s what many fans say they expected when they purchased through StubHub.

    StubHub’s FanProtect Guarantee promises replacement tickets or a refund if tickets fail to arrive. But the policy repeatedly says those remedies are provided at StubHub’s “sole discretion,” meaning the company can choose a refund instead of securing replacement seats.

    “That is pretty explicit language,” said Michael McCann, a sports law expert at the University of New Hampshire. McCann noted that a buyer could try to challenge the language under state consumer protection laws, but it would be an uphill battle.

    A father’s regrets

    Pape Ndaw is crestfallen that the high school graduation gift he got for his son — tickets for them to see the Netherlands and Japan near their home city of Dallas — never arrived.

    He bought the tickets for about $550 apiece in December. Then, two days before the June 14 match, he received an email from StubHub telling him, “The seller can’t deliver your original tickets.”

    Ndaw accepted store credit rather than a refund, thinking he would use the funds to quickly get replacements, only to then realize that the cheapest last-minute tickets were going for more than $1,500 each. Not only were they not going to get to go to the game, but Ndaw said StubHub rejected his belated request for a refund instead of store credit.

    Breaking the news to his soccer-obsessed son was brutal, Ndaw said.

    “It was a disastrous thing,” he said. “He had told all his friends that he was going to that game. He literally cried. I mean, he is a 17-year-old kid, but he cried.”

    A family’s attempt to make the best of it

    Others fared somewhat better.

    Patrick O’Neil of Pittsboro, North Carolina, traveled to Atlanta with his wife, son and relatives after purchasing five tickets through StubHub for the Spain-Cape Verde match. Two tickets transferred successfully, but three never arrived.

    O’Neil’s 15-year-old son and his uncle ended up using the two tickets, while O’Neil, his wife and another relative watched from a nearby bar.

    After local media caught wind of their ordeal, O’Neil said StubHub contacted the family and offered tickets to another game. Since the family had already bought tickets to one, though, he and his wife asked the company to instead give the seats to local nonprofit Soccer in the Streets so they could go to people who otherwise might not be able to attend a match.

    “StubHub is not evil, but they’re part of the whole system that makes it really hard for just normal kids and people who might want to see a match get to go,” O’Neil said.

    On Thursday, a StubHub representative confirmed to the AP that the company would honor the O’Neils’ request and send tickets to the nonprofit.

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    AP World Cup: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-world-cup