Has this ever happened to you?

You wake up, look at your phone, scroll through the news for a minute or two, and then think, wow, how did we get here?

Well, that's the question we tackle every week on NPR's ThruLine podcast.

We tell you the surprising stories of the people who made our history.

Carl Sagan was in people's living rooms talking about the wonders of the universe, making

science feel personal and important to an everyday person.

Listen to Thuringland from NPR, wherever you get your podcasts.

Music A giant AI data center in the United Arab Emirates.

That's the plan, assuming just a few things fall into place.

An intense amount of money, a lot of luck, a lot of grid infrastructure

that we're still waiting on the supply chain to catch up on and many millions of GPUs.

I'm Carol Hills. And I'm Carolyn Beeler. Also today, recycling is down for the eighth straight

year. And a song contest known for Campy Entertainment was once used

by Spain's Francisco Franco as propaganda, the story of a singer who stood up to him.

People remember her as a rebel, a freedom fighter, plus the music of street vendors in Mexico

City.

That's all ahead today on the world.

This is the world. I'm Carolyn Beeler.

And I'm Carol Hills. Thanks for joining us this Friday. President Trump has been in the Persian Gulf this week, cutting a lot of deals in the desert.

Yesterday, a big project was announced coming out of Trump's meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayyad al-Nahyhan and the United Arab Emirates, a deal to build the biggest AI data center outside of the U.S. in Abu Dhabi.

And this deal in particular is raising eyebrows.

The amount of energy required to power the data centers is enormous. Sebastian Moss knows

...