Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University held its first meeting with U.S. Space Command Monday as it plans its headquarters at Redstone Arsenal.
The session highlighted AAMU’s research, workforce development, and programs tied to national defense and space.
University leaders emphasized AAMU’s status as a historically Black university and its key role in space awareness, missile defense, and advanced technology innovation, reflecting its expanding support for defense and space efforts.
Also Monday, NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy announced an agreement to merge in an all-stock transaction, creating the world's largest regulated electric utility.
The combined company will be over 80% regulated, serve about 10 million customer accounts across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and own 110 gigawatts of generation from diverse energy sources.
According to the press release, the combined company aims to improve long-term affordability by leveraging scale and operational efficiencies to meet rising power demand.
It also proposes $2.25 billion in bill credits for Dominion Energy customers in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina over two years following the merger.
With growth balanced between regulated and long-term contracted businesses, and over 130 gigawatts of large-load opportunities in its pipeline, the combined company will have expanded growth prospects.
Its scale, financial strength, and operational capabilities will support investments in generation, transmission, and grid infrastructure to meet rising demand, support economic growth, and maintain affordable rates.
Hand-out NextEra Energy, Inc. and Dominio
Dominion Energy Logo
Dominion Energy
On social media, Raj B., founder of Argus AI Labs, stated that the deal is not driven by traditional utility consolidation.
He noted that Northern Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers globally, with major hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta operating critical AI infrastructure within Dominion's service area.
AI data centers require continuous, uninterruptible power at a scale beyond the original grid design.
Electricity demand from data centers is expected to increase by 300% over the next decade. Securing generation and transmission capacity in key regions means controlling not only the utility but also the underlying energy supply chain for the AI era.
NextEra operates the world’s largest renewable energy portfolio and plans to add 15 gigawatts of new generation capacity. Combined with Dominion's nuclear assets and Virginia grid access, the merged company would control both generation and delivery for AI infrastructure.
While the AI infrastructure race focused on chips in 2024 and capital expenditures in 2025, by 2026, it will center on energy. The company that controls the grid will shape the future, Raj. B. wrote.
Tyrone Taborn, Career Communications Group CEO, remarked in his latest commentary "The State of Artificial Intelgence" that the true price of AI is measured in energy, water, and minerals.
The modern AI revolution is built on enormous computational power. Every large language model, autonomous system, and predictive algorithm requires massive data centers operating around the clock. These systems consume staggering amounts of electricity.
Training a single advanced AI model can require more energy than entire communities use in months or even years. Behind every AI-generated sentence, image, or prediction lies an invisible infrastructure of servers, cooling systems, semiconductor manufacturing plants, and electrical grids pushed to their limits.
This raises a difficult question: where will the energy come from? The answer increasingly points toward the extraction of natural resources on a scale humanity has never witnessed.
AI depends on rare-earth minerals, lithium, cobalt, and copper, as well as enormous quantities of water for cooling systems. Ironically, the more advanced AI becomes, the more expensive it is to sustain.
Human beings remain remarkably energy efficient. A worker can think, adapt, create, and problem-solve using roughly 20 watts of power generated by the human brain. By contrast, advanced AI systems consume megawatts of power.
The dream of replacing humanity with machines may ultimately collide with the reality that human intelligence is still one of the most efficient systems ever created. But the economic and environmental concerns are only the beginning.