On what was recently farmland, Amazon data centers have been built as close as 50 feet from residential houses in the Loudoun Meadows neighborhood on January 20, 2023, in Aldie, VA.
Jahi Chikwendiu | The Washington Post | Getty Images
In January, Oregon lawmakers submitted a bill to the state’s legislature that sought to curb the carbon output of new data centers and cryptocurrency miners — facilities that have rapidly sprung up across Oregon due to the relatively low cost of power and favorable tax incentives. It would have required new data center and crypto mining facilities to run entirely on clean energy sources by 2040, in line with the state’s climate targets established in 2021.
On Monday, the bill, known as HB2816, died in a legislative committee. Proponents of the measure are pointing to aggressive lobbying efforts by Amazon, which operates severaldata centers in the state, as a major culprit behind the bill’s demise.
Amazon’s opposition to the clean energy measure is at odds with its broader push to improve its environmental impact. The company has committed to being carbon neutral by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge launched in 2019. Amazon says it’s on a path to using 100% renewable energy across its business by 2025, and is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy.
“From the very first moment we started talking about this bill, Amazon started organizing against it,” said Oregon state Rep. Pam Marsh, a co-sponsor of HB2816, in an interview.
Representatives from Oxley & Associates, a lobbying firm hired by Amazon, were spotted in the halls of the capitol building, speaking with members of the state legislature committee who would eventually hear the bill, said Marsh, who is a Democrat representing Oregon’s District 5.
AWS spokesperson David Ward declined to comment on the company’s lobbying efforts related to the bill, but acknowledged Amazon’s opposition to the measure, saying it failed to address the build-out of infrastructure that’s needed to bring more clean energy to the U.S. electricity grid.
“Building new renewable projects requires infrastructure investments in the grid and today there are hurdles in key areas like permitting and interconnection,” Ward said in a statement. “Accelerating energy infrastructure permitting and interconnections for renewables like solar and wind would have a greater impact on reducing emissions, bringing more clean energy to the grid, and helping achieve our goal of accessing more clean energy in Oregon.”
Experts have said the nation’s out-of-date electrical grid remains a barrier to accelerating the transition to clean energy sources. Today, over 70% of U.S. transmission lines are more than 25 years old, according to the White House. Building new transmission lines is a lengthy and arduous process, as it requires agreement from multiple stakeholders involved, from utility companies and regulators to landowners.
Data centers are extremely energy intensive. In 2014, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 70 billion kilowatt hours, or about 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption in that year, according to the Department of Energy.
Amazon relies on huge server farms to power its sprawling cloud computing service, which is the main profit engine of the company. Amazon has pledged to get all of its data centers running on renewable energy, but it has yet to divest completely from fossil fuels.
On Tuesday, Amazon announced it reached an agreement with Umatilla Electric Cooperative, the utility company serving its operations in Oregon’s Umatilla and Morrow counties, to select the energy supply that powers its data centers, including from renewable sources.
Changes to the bill did not appease Amazon, says Marsh
Amazon also argues that lawmakers didn’t engage data center operators and owners in Oregon when they crafted the bill.
But Marsh disputes that contention.
The committee removed a clause that would levy penalties against companies that couldn’t meet the clean energy targets, and added a provision that would let them opt out of the bill. Both actions were an attempt at generating goodwill, Marsh said.
“We said, ‘OK, if it gets to be 2030 and there’s been some major world disruption and you can’t meet your clean energy goals, you can submit this paperwork and you can opt out because something might have happened beyond your control,” Marsh said. “So we made good, strong changes to the bill, but it didn’t change Amazon’s opposition whatsoever.”
Marsh said she became increasingly skeptical of Amazon’s “commitment to clean energy” when it said it planned to power some of its data center operations in the state with natural gas fuel cells made by Bloom Energy.
Amazon said the fuel cells will serve a small portion of its data center operations in the state. The hope is to power the fuel cells with renewable energies like hydrogen or biogas.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of Amazon tech workers who have previously pressured the company to address its climate record, said they were disappointed the bill stalled. The group supported the measure, and Sarah Tracy, an AECJ member and former Amazon software developer, testified at a public hearing for the bill.
AECJ created a petition in 2019 to push then-CEO Jeff Bezos to rethink its environmental impact. After Bezos announced the Climate Pledge, the group still walked out because they felt the pledge wasn’t strong enough. Two employees who were heavily involved in the group, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, were fired after they repeatedly spoke out about Amazon’s climate and workplace record. Amazon later settled with Costa and Cunningham after a federal labor agency determined Amazon illegally fired them for their activism.
A spokesperson for AECJ told CNBC, “The level of hypocrisy here would be hilarious if it weren’t so disturbing — naming a sports arena after your ‘Climate Pledge’ for clout while lobbying to bypass the basic clean energy requirements that public utilities are held to. It makes me feel bad for the sustainability team here — they’re working their butts off because they know better than anyone how little time we have to switch Amazon and the rest of the economy to renewables before catastrophe hits. But then the company undercuts that mission by building new dirty energy infrastructure.”
While the bill is dead for now, Marsh said conversations continue around compelling data center and crypto facilities to comply with Oregon’s clean energy targets. The bill may come back in a different form in the future, she added.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.