Meta enters cloud wars; Rivian tops Q2 outlook
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Meta shares jumped roughly 9–10% on a Bloomberg report that the company is building a cloud business to sell excess AI compute, competing directly with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.link ›
- Rivian delivered 12,194 vehicles in Q2 2026 against its own 9,000–11,000 outlook and raised full-year guidance to 65,000–70,000.link ›
- Erin Brockovich's open-source map tallied 142 US AI datacentres as of June 24 — 33 operational, 68 under construction, 41 proposed — with two-thirds sited in drought-stricken regions and larger facilities drawing up to 5 million gallons of water daily.link ›
- Tulane's Torbjörn Törnqvist concluded New Orleans crossed a tipping point of survivability in May, predicting the Louisiana coastline could move 62 miles inland over the coming century; Governor Jeff Landry separately cancelled a $3bn coastal sediment-diversion project.link ›
- Plaswire Ltd in Lurgan, County Armagh, is recycling decommissioned wind turbine blades into fence posts, pallets, and street furniture — tackling roughly 125,000 tonnes of blade waste generated annually worldwide.link ›
- Britain is in what the Guardian called 'Europe's worst ever heatwave,' with one household recording a 17.8°C temperature drop simply by hanging a sheet outside a window.link ›
Meta is reportedly building a cloud business to sell excess AI compute, sending shares up roughly 10% and pitching the social network into direct competition with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The pivot reframes Meta's massive AI infrastructure spend as a potential revenue stream rather than a cost center — Rebecca Bellan at TechCrunch called it a SpaceX-style move to monetize spare capacity, though MarketWatch asked whether it means Meta is 'giving up' on frontier AI. Rivian topped its own Q2 outlook by delivering 12,194 vehicles against guidance of 9,000–11,000 and raised full-year 2026 guidance to 65,000–70,000.
The stories behind this week
Rivian Beats Q2 Delivery Outlook, Raises 2026 GuidanceRivian topped its own 9,000–11,000 delivery range by delivering 12,194 vehicles — a meaningful beat for an EV maker that has wrestled with execution. The raised 65,000–70,000 full-year guidance puts the H2 production ramp squarely in focus, and investors will get the full financial picture when Q2 results drop after the July 30 close.
BBC Flags Tonight's Strawberry Moon ViewingThe BBC is using a seasonal astronomical event to drive readers to its Weather vertical's explainer content, capitalizing on a widely observable natural phenomenon to funnel curious viewers toward educational material on lunar naming conventions.
Culebra Fishers Reopen Village They Rebuilt ThemselvesSmall-scale fishers could anchor food security in Puerto Rico's vulnerable island communities, where food is almost exclusively imported and poverty rates run more than double the U.S. national average — but a splintered regulatory landscape, where one agency requires what another counters, blocks the sector from scaling to meet that need.
Erin Brockovich Maps 142 US AI DatacentresLocal councils face an asymmetric fight: when they try to pause construction — as Hill County, Texas did — developers sue for $100M and the councils fold. With 142 facilities already mapped and two-thirds sited in drought-stricken regions, the bottleneck is no longer public awareness but the municipal legal capacity to resist.
Britain's left warms to air conditioningThe neighbor's 17.8°C shade experiment shows how much heat British homes bleed through bare windows — meaning AC alone fights a problem external shading and insulation could solve more cheaply. The bus-versus-taxi split (most London buses uncooled, nearly every private taxi cooled) reframes cooling as a class question, not just a comfort one, with public-transit AC positioned as the next front in the left's push to treat essentials as public infrastructure.
Meta Plans Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI ComputeMeta's reported cloud pivot reframes its massive AI infrastructure spend as a potential revenue stream rather than a cost center — the 9-10% stock jump shows investors are rewarding the monetization angle. By selling excess compute to outside customers, Meta enters the same market as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud while also hedging bets on whether its own frontier models can carry the company's AI narrative alone.
New Orleans residents split over 'point of no return' climate studyNew Orleans, which has already received $15bn in federal flood protections since Hurricane Katrina, faces a generational choice between defending a shrinking tax base and planning a managed inland shift — one without a national playbook, made harder by the Trump administration's cuts to climate-relocation programs and Landry's cancellation of a $3bn coastal restoration project.
NI Firms Recycle Wind Turbine Blades Into Reusable ProductsWith Europe's first-generation wind farms hitting the 25-year end-of-life mark, roughly 400 turbines in Northern Ireland alone and an estimated 125,000 tonnes of blades globally each year need disposal. Proving these composites can be recycled into certified, traceable products is essential to keeping the renewables industry itself green through its next major expansion phase.
Why it matters: Meta's pivot reframes hyperscaler AI capex as a sellable compute product, meaning Wall Street will now price every new datacenter the company builds as a potential revenue line rather than just a cost of staying competitive in frontier AI.
