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Stocks @ Night is a daily newsletter delivered after hours, giving you a first look at tomorrow and last look at today. Sign up for free to receive it directly in your inbox. Here’s what CNBC TV’s producers were watching on Tuesday and what’s on the radar for Wednesday’s session. Data, data, data!!! ADP’s jobs report comes out at 8:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday. The expectation is for plus 40,000. Industrial production will come out at 9:15 a.m. At 10 a.m., we get ISM non-manufacturing PMI numbers. Going into Wednesday, the 10-year is yielding 4.09%. The 2-year is at 3.51%. The 3-month is at 3.79%. The 1-month is yielding 3.85%. The dividend yield on the SPDR Bloomberg High Yield Bond ETF (JNK) is 6.58%. The SPDR Bloomberg Short Term High Yield Bond ETF (SJNK) has a dividend yield of 7.18%. Macy’s reports in the morning Macy’s stock is up almost 70% in three months. Shares hit a new 52-week high on Tuesday, but ultimately closed down less than 1%. “Squawk Box” will have the numbers and stock reaction. It all starts at 6 a.m. ET with Becky Quick, Joe Kernen and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Dollar Tree earnings ahead The discount retailer also releases numbers on “Squawk Box” Wednesday morning. Dollar Tree’s stock is down 2% in the last three months since it last reported. Shares are 7.7% from an Aug. 8 high. DLTR YTD mountain Dollar Tree stock year to date Salesforce reports after the bell The stock is nearly 30% lower than it this time last year. Salesforce shares are down 7% since last reporting three months ago. CRM YTD mountain Salesforce stock year to date The AI war of the mid-2020s “Mad Money” with Jim Cramer did a great run-through of the fight Tuesday night. Since the Code Red came in from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, warning employees Google’s Gemini was catching up, the stock has been “meh” as the kids would say. Shares of parent company Alphabet were up 0.29% on Tuesday. So far this week, it is down 1.4%. Alphabet is up 12% in the last month and up 67% year to date, which far outpaces the other members of the “Magnificant Seven.” The group includes Amazon , up nearly 7% this year. Tesla is up 6.3% year to date, while Microsoft is up 16% so far this year. It’s a 14% gain for Apple and a more than 10% jump for Meta during the same period. In the last month, of these stocks, only Alphabet and Apple are positive. It’s a 12% gain for Alphabet, and 6% for Apple. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to hit the Hill to meet with Senate Republicans in our nation’s capital. CNBC’s Emily Wilkins will cover the event. One topic likely to come up is Nvidia’s bid to sell more chips to China, and Washington’s worry over what that could mean for national security. Nvidia is 14.5% from its Oct. 29 high. The stock is up 35% so far this year. In the first two days of this week, Nvidia is up 2.5%. The stock has more than doubled since its April 7 low. The chips The iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) is up almost 7% in the last week. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) is up nearly 6% in a week. Intel is the top chip in the last week, up 21% in five days, and hitting a 52-week high on Tuesday. NXP Semiconductors is up about 13% in a week. Synopsys , which inked a big deal with Nvidia Monday, is up almost 12% in a week. SNPS 3M mountain Synopsys shares over the past three months
Russia’s ISS Progress 77 cargo spacecraft docks to the Pirs docking compartment on the International Space Station’s Russian segment in an undated photo. For the first time in its 25-year history, all docking ports on the space station are…
Datacentre power demand in Australia could triple in five years and is forecast to exceed by 2030 the energy used by electric vehicles.
Datacentres now draw about 2% of electricity from the National Grid, about 4 terawatt hours of power. The Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo) expects that share to rise rapidly – growing 25% year-on-year – to reach 12TWh, or 6% of grid demand, by 2030, and 12% by 2050.
Rapid growth of the industry will drive “substantial increases in electricity consumption, for Sydney and Melbourne, in particular”, Aemo forecasts.
In New South Wales and Victoria, where most are located, datacentres could comprise 11% and 8% of each state’s electricity demand, respectively, by 2030.
Technology companies including OpenAI and SunCable are pushing for Australia to become a hub for data processing and storage. Last month the Victorian state government announced a “$5.5m investment to become Australia’s datacentre capital”.
But with 260 centres operating nationally, and dozens more in the offing, experts are flagging concerns about what the industry’s unfettered growth could mean for the energy transition and climate targets.
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Energy use equivalent to 100,000 households
Banks of servers running 24/7 in a confined space generate massive amounts of heat and require electricity to run and cool them.
Datacentre demand globally is growing four times faster than all other sectors, according to the International Energy Agency. Centres are multiplying and are increasing in size, with hyperscale facilities becoming more common.
According to the IEA: “A hyperscale, AI-focused datacentre can have a capacity of 100MW or more, consuming as much electricity annually as 100,000 households.”
The consumption of electricity and water is largely related to cooling, as servers, like other computing devices, convert electrical energy into heat, according to Prof Michael Brear, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Net Zero Australia project at the University of Melbourne.
“When you have a very large number of computers in a confined space, you need to air condition the space to maintain these devices at a safe and efficient working temperature,” he says.
Most digital infrastructure is cooled using air conditioning or water.
Ketan Joshi, an Oslo-based climate analyst associated with the Australia Institute, says many technology companies are now reporting accelerating power consumption year-on-year. The intensity of energy use is also rising against multiple metrics – energy per active user, per unit of revenue – compared with five years ago, he says.
“They’re not using more energy to serve more people or to make more money,” he says. “The question that everybody should be asking is why are you consuming more energy?”
In the absence of concrete data, Joshi says the most reasonable assumption is that the uptick in demand is being fuelled by the widespread adoption of energy-hungry generative AI systems.
‘Running harder to stay in the same spot’
Joshi, who has been tracking the issue globally, says datacentres are large, inflexible loads on the power grid which have two clear impacts: they increase reliance on coal and gas generation, and they siphon resources away from the energy transition.
Datacentre companies often claim they run on clean energy by investing in solar or windfarms, but Joshi says there is often a mismatch between their near-constant draw on the grid and the generation profile of renewable energy.
“What is the net effect on the power grid?” he asks. “Well, sometimes you’re going to have a surplus of energy, and sometimes you’re going to have not enough.
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“So, even though on paper it all kind of works out, there are some times when that datacentre is actually helping fossil fuels to be dispatched.”
And, instead of the new renewables eating into the share of coal and gas, these generators are serving the growing needs of datacentres, Joshi says: “It’s like running harder just to stay in the same spot because the treadmill is getting quicker.”
The electricity demands are so great that some companies have paid to restart mothballed US nuclear power stations, and demand for gas turbines has increased. Some developers in Australia have proposed installing new gas generators to service their needs.
According to Aemo’s forecasts, by 2035 datacentres could consume 21.4TWh, an amount just shy of the annual consumption of Australia’s four aluminium smelters.
It is still early days in the uptake of AI, Brear says, and at this stage the outlook is uncertain, reflected in Aemo’s scenarios for energy consumption in 2035 ranging from 12TWh to 24TWh. “It may not be that these grow as large as some people are predicting,” he says.
In its national AI plan, released on Tuesday, the federal government acknowledged the need to expand new energy and cooling technologies for AI systems. The minister for industry, Tim Ayres, said the government would set out data centre principles in early 2026, pledging that “key co-requisites for data centre investment will include additional investment in renewable energy generation and water sustainability”.
‘An undeniable impact’ on power prices
Dr Dylan McConnell, an energy systems researcher at the University of New South Wales, says renewable energy is growing in Australia but not yet at the rate required to meet renewable energy and emissions targets. Datacentre growth would add to the challenge.
“If we are in a situation where demand is growing much faster than anticipated and renewables don’t keep up, then actually what we end up doing is just powering that new demand and not displacing coal,” he says.
Unlike electric vehicles, which create additional demands on the grid while reducing petrol and diesel consumption, datacentres will not reduce fossil fuel use in other parts of the economy, according to McConnell.
“If this demand eventuates, it will make our emissions objective – and our ability to close coal on schedules that align with the emissions targets – very difficult, if not impossible,” he says.
The Climate Change Authority, in its advice on climate targets, says: “Datacentres will also be built at increasingly large scales and capacity, compounding pressure on regional power sources and placing additional pressure on the renewables buildout.”
There will be an undeniable impact on the overall cost of energy, which will flow through to power prices, McConnell says.
“You need to build a bigger system to serve this load, and that will mean more expensive resources are used.”
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