the no data center movement

i think this is a pretty big deal and has a good chance of significantly changing how people vote, especially older people. i also feel like it has a chance of building local radical energy. it has pretty quickly appeared as a powerful venn diagram center of groups with not-completely-congruent values. residents pack town halls, yell and scream, get ignored, the righteous anger builds. many similar stories happening all the time everywhere right now in the u.s.

to start i've got to link this brutal takedown of clown billionaire investor kevin o'leary from two young women in utah regarding the hyperscale stratos data center currently looming over 65 square miles of high desert north of the great salt lake in box elder county.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOVaBDzEAN/

The remote chance of getting a data center in my drought-stricken North Central Florida county is currently being used as an excuse to ignore burn bans and water restrictions by chuds.

Map, this is crazeeee..! the most blatantly anti-democratic thing I've seen in ages

Last week, there was a further twist when the developers withdrew their application to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from ranching to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application set to be lodged with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project

what's interesting about it is how political support for data centers is bi-partisan, even though absolutely everyone hates this shit. "political support" as in the elected and unelected officials (often appointed by municipal leaders) who actually vote on these things and "listen" to the public feedback.

it's a wedge issue among the left, i think, and democrats, very different from israel's genocide in gaza, but a similar effect in that if you oppose data centers, you have little representation at a national level. the "we hate data centers" voice is drowned out by neoliberal technocrat bullshit, looking the other way, passing through data centers and failing upward to the next level of life success

That Utah one is fucking insane. This is where it really starts to feel like the tech oligarchs really do run everything, unchecked (bi-partisan support, as z_tbd notes!) and we are all just fodder in the making.

there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way. It's certainly going to help shareholders and CEOs but I've yet to be convinced, but I am convinced that these data centers are fucked. The Utah thing will use more electricity than the entire state of Utah is currently using

btw fuck Kevin O'Leary and that stupid fucking show that made him a recognizable name

yeah I read the Guardian piece on the Utah center and holy crap the energy and water math on that one is on another plane. O'Leary was quoted in it blahblahing about competing with China, and to state the tediously obvious: why aren't we compelled to compete with China on education funding, transition to renewables, electric vehicles, etc.

Kevin O’Leary had a role in Marty Supreme as well.

cool another reason not to see that shit

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

xp yeah he's also doing that 'paid protesters' bs schtick w/o providing a shred of evidence... that's the new line with these fucks, if there's a mass protest they must be on the Soros econazi payroll because who would *not* want this massive destruction of the natural world for a handful of jobs and some tax incentives?

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

milo clearly getting paid by the post

Also if we want to do something before China, how about green energy?

And yes, people absolutely hate these data centers, with every good reason imaginable. I agree there's the makings of an anti-billionaire populist political coalition there, if only we had a major party interested in such a thing.

yeah I just said the same thing about China and I mean if we're really worried about them beating us, perhaps we should try communism??? O'Leary can contribute to the glorious cause by digging a lithium mine

in stl, one of the many proposed data centers at "the armory" was approved after a last minute voting session (announced 24 hours before the meeting, the bare minimum required) which was switched to a zoom call rather than their regular meeting spot, and passed unanimously. i saw friends scramble to try to get to the physical meeting spot, get to the meeting (at 2pm or something, during workhours), only to show up at the spot and find that it was on zoom. and then of course, very few of the zoom attendees were allowed to speak.

the mayor, on this same day, meanwhile, no joke, was in england at a small dinner party with the billionaire who proposed the data center. on the same day it was being voted on.

later that day the mayor seemed to realize that some people were disappointed in her, so she released a clip where she defended the data center, and with not a small amount of barely concealed resentment against her own constituency, mentioned the conditions the city had boldly placed on the data center to "address community concerns".

but what are the conditions? on energy use:

The Developer must use reasonable efforts to source at least 50% of
the data center’s energy load from renewable sources (wind, solar,
geothermal, etc.) within five years of commencing operations. If the
renewable goal is not met, the Developer must endeavor to purchase
localized renewable energy credits. The Developer must also recycle
e-waste. The Developer must annually report electricity usage, waste
heat, and water usage, which may be made public.

yeah, GREAT

even better, all those jobs!

The Developer must meet escalating, median-wage "Job" minimums for 20 years (starting at 25 in year 1, 50 in year 2, and 100 thereafter) and pay $2,000 in liquidated damages for each job short of the required total.

something tells me that 100 people are not going to be working at this data center. and what is this incentive? if they don't meet 100 workers, and they're deciding what to do, they can either add another worker (ballpark, paying them $50K), or they can pay a $2K penalty. i wonder what the billionare will do?

the other thing that occurs to me: Iran has shown that data centers (specifically Amazon or AWS sites) are legitimate targets for attack... something to think about, it wouldn't have to be a foreign power, it could be a target for domestic terrorists or space lasers

xp the good news is data centers are not going to be built

I don’t know how reliable Ed Zitron is but he’s penciling out that data centers take forever to build and very few have actually been completed and are up and running

Don’t theae data centers become outdated in a matter of years and need to be completely upgraded?

I don't know about AI specifically but there are plenty of Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers up & running all over the place

New data suggests that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is operating out of more than 900 data centers, far greater than previous estimates.

As reported by SourceMaterial, citing "leaked" data seen by the publication, in 2023, the cloud giant was operating from some 914 data centers in more than 50 countries.

Right, but AI dedicated ones need far more power and water and cooling space so are far bigger than regular ones

i hope ed zitron is right! the part where it gets way over my head is about how the debt holders of the ai data centers are these shitty ai startups built on a bubble that are likely to disappear. i can see how that would be a problem! however, when it comes to billions of dollars, for some reason it always seems like another group of really rich people always manage to step in just in time to make sure that the environmental destruction of our only home in exchange for short-term private gain continues as long as possible

yeah cloud servers and AI computing centers have very different demands xp

ultimately its all just computers in a room thing thats really different about the current ai boom is scale

i do agree that most of them will prob never be built

yeah I don't know the technical requirements but the Guardian article says that the one planned in Utah will be as large as Manhattan if completed, which is fucking nuts

Musk wants to build them in space which is fine I guess but you would have to have staff living up there and what if the AI goes crazy and locks them out

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/

not sure you could come up with a better bubble indicator than someone trying to build a facility bigger than manhattan

im going to build a tulip greenhouse bigger than manhattan

could be a rad indoor skate part after the bubble bursts

def a cool place for teens to hang out and throw rocks at things

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

2x the size of Manhattan apparently? Two Manhattans. That's too much even for a single lunch date.

speaking of manhattan one aspect of new york city living that bodes well for the future is that i assume building an AI data center here is cost prohibitive (not that i don't think someone will try)

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

What can I say, the people yearn for mysticism. Maybe try to get him to just join a nice cult instead? The Jehovah's Witnesses will take anyone.

I've read some of these fools talking about 'Oh yeah, Claude likes to write poetry in his free time' and I'm just thinking 'you fucking suckers really believe this shit don't you?'

a lot of companies that sounds like fly-by-night operators are proposing a lot of stuff right now but I wonder how much is going to make it past the "we rented a building" phase because the hardware to fill all these places is nonexistent or already spoken for

the thing with these giant wealth funds and venture capital expenditures is that they can bet a ton of money every time with the assumption that one of every five, ten, etc. things they throw money at will show a profit after five years because the profits will make up for the rest of them being failures and it's a matter of keeping the money rolling

yeah I guess part of the worry is when they start building the Manhattan-size building and then run out of money and there's just these giant concrete pads in the desert or prairies or whatever... even an unfinished one can still cause a lot of damage, and declaring bankruptcy can help you avoid cleanup and remediation. Look at all the abandoned oil wells all over the place

I have a free Claude account that I've used very rarely, I mainly set it up to poke and prod at it, and I set my username as "Human." So when I log in it says, "Hello Human." I think it's good to keep those boundaries clear.

does he ever write you poems in his spare time?

I’m not going to make myself popular but…

Hi, I’m building a datacentre and they don’t have to be terrible. My one is going to be water positive, they’ll be a net increase in water in the aquifer under us, renewable powered because that’s the cheapest and quickest way to do it. The waste heat is a resource we’re going to use for horticulture and growing algae for fertilizer, animal feed and aviation fuel.

In Europe there’s plenty of DCs heating neighborhoods with district heating, heating greenhouses etc.

Data centres aren’t the problem, it’s how they are built and the insane amount of money sloshing around AI. A DC will pay upwards of US$50,000/MWh for energy for AI. At this moment in Australia the spot price is AUD103 and it’s a still morning and the sun hasn’t come up yet. The ceiling price in the market is AUD26k. So DCs are massive distortions.

Trump fucked the US by putting tariffs in Chinese solar and batteries - that’s the easiest and quickest way to power anything particularly in the American West. Of course by design that pushes everyone to the next cheapest thing gas, which is terrible, and there’s a global shortage of gas turbine components because the latest generation jet engines break all the time and the turbine manufacturers all have uptime contracts with the airlines and so all parts go to planes.

This means that even worse choices get made; and of course like everything that’s gone before DC operators are not being held accountable for their externalities. The Investor owned utility, I.e. one without a market mechanism is a particularly bad fit for this (not that open markets like Texas are much better) - the incentives are there to fuck one’s neighbors as with Lake Tahoe above.

Of course whilst DCs will pay 50k/MWh they don’t want to and energy = water so will do cooling in the worst possible way and just vent heat and vapour to the atmosphere.

TLDR; datacentres are terrible due to lack of regulation, tech bro god delusions about what AI is and will be and capitalism. They deserve to be fought, they are bad news till proven otherwise.

Well right, I mean we've had big data centers for years — it's "the cloud" — and while there were concerns raised about their energy draw even before the big AI boom, they weren't at this monstrous everywhere scale that is being attempted now. I agree that not all of the centers being planned are going to be built, we're obviously in a gold-rush mentality right now and that can't last.

And yeah the problem is regulation, and that the regulation in the U.S. is being done at local and state levels that are just utterly unequipped to deal with any of it. These local mayors and commissions and state legislators get stars in their eyes when these big tech lobbyists show up and do big power point presentations on "the future" and everything, they actually think this is exciting stuff.

I should try and find an actual source for it but a DC nearly blacked out Southern Company and/or Duke last year. That’s most of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas IIRC.

They switched over to their internal diesel gensets without telling the grid and grids don’t do well when 3GW of Load just disappears like that.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves on XAI's big (polluting) data center in Southaven: "This is the largest economic development project in Mississippi’s history. It sets the pace for continued high-tech investments across our state and strengthens Mississippi’s position as a leader in this exciting tech revolution."

This shit makes me want to go all Ricky Roma — "Who ever told you you could work with men? You fucking child."

THANK YOU ED

"We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way.

meanwhile China is so far ahead of us in renewables, the US is gonna be like colonial Williamsburg for fossil fuels (analogy c/o Daniel Bachman)

china selling shovels to the ai gold rush

From what I gather, a lot of the boosters are focusing on the people throwing around a lot of dissent at city council meetings, zoning meetings, etc. and pointing out that people haven’t actually read the plans or what regulations will be enforced, and so on. Which is fair, the number of people raising the noise level in the last decade in local politics has been high and it doesn’t help anyone.

I think what they’re missing is that this is the tip of the iceberg of people who have vague suspicions or are finally noticing that the world has changed in the last few *decades* and there is a lot of vague, in-articulated dissent going on because the public at large has become uncomfortable.

The existing outliers that have been poor stewards of land, energy, and labor are in the spotlight and we’re getting a systematic reevaluation of what exactly we’re doing here.

The counter-example of a good site was provided when I questioned someone boosting expansion was a Colorado Springs industrial site that’s had the sort of incoherent pushback I mentioned. I agree it’d be a good site! Abandoned Intel manufacturing plant that was slated to be a solar cell manufacturing plant until the subsidizes dried up and that company pulled out. The issue there in my eyes is that there’s a pre-existing empty building, there’s no guarantee this will work out any better than the solar cell plant, and even if it does it opens the door to more expansion and industrial park crowding.

Some of the more remote locations that are proposed might be fine from nearly every aspect but again, there’s no guarantee that this is long term and creating another rural or semi-rural vacant building is just more rural blight. There are entire empty small towns that are mostly nuisance properties at this point.

data centers becoming a symbol for capitalist fascism is fine imho good even i dont care if people get the technical details wrong its ok if a few innocent data centers get swept up in the hysteria theyre just rooms with a bunch of computers in them anyway

I'm trying to figure the politics of Ron DeSantis signing legislation calling for more transparency about them.

They're unpopular and DeSantis wants to run for president, probably as simple as that. Wants to look like he's doing something without probably actually doing much.

He’s probably the leading Republican opponent of AI across the board. Ostensibly very concerned about job losses.

I posted it because Tampa-St. Petersburg have resisted a massive AI facility and he's actually...listened to them?

china selling shovels to the ai gold rush

shovel your way out of the slop! and into the truth

before we start talking about China as some kind of eco-state, they still burn a staggering amount of coal.. 'developing economy' and all of that

oh for sure, my point was that they are way ahead of us in tech/infrastructure

absolutely, and they're doing for electric cars what VW did in the 60s.. smart, affordable and reliable. That movie 'Who Killed the Electric Car' is already obsolete

China hit peak coal a couple of years ago and it’s not going to go up again. Coal consumption is not coming down fast but so much of it comes from overseas, China doesn’t want to be dependent on imported energy.

More importantly though China sees agentic tools a lot differently. If anyone has AGI delusions it’s not in the discourse, but synthetic agency is being put to work a lot. It’s seen as a tool. There’s was just a law instituted on not fucking over works on AI (that floated by on a podcast and I need to dig into that more).

The other thing about China is that, by denying access to the latest and most power hungry, chips China has been forced into making their models a lot more efficient; there’s probably also pressure from the top because they don’t want the massive expansion in energy consumption.

A lot of Chinese agentic tools are run on small local boxes (there’s a privacy anchor to that, less government snooping and I’m interested how that’s going to play out). The reason you can’t buy a Mac mini with a decent amount of RAM right now is Chinese people bought them all to run OpenClaw. It’s staggering how good (and how efficient) the Mseries apple chips are at running small models and you can train these to do specific tasks. You also find all kinds of widgets and boxes on Alibaba.

This means Chinese AI is a hell of a lot more distributed and yes there’s increased energy demand but way more distributed.

Hyperscalers are a very American solution to the problem. We just had a renewables developer partner with a DC company to do 5MW single container DCs down here in Australia - these take advantage of the fact that a feature of a renewables dominated energy system spills a lot of energy. Last year 28TWH of renewable energy go spilled in eastern Australia because it couldn’t get from rural areas to urban loads. That’s about 15% of total demand stuck small DCs on solar/wind farms and Hoover up the excess demand. (AI inference and GP compute are pretty well solar aligned).

Another concept I have knocking around is stick containerized DCs in swimming pool carparks. Dump the heat off the pool and cut off the gas. You needed the energy to heat the water in the first place, you might as well do something useful with it before hand.

mh, I think the Colorado Springs one is the ones my old battery colleagues are going to put in 100hr iron air batteries and use them to harvest excess front range wind. That is/was going to be one of the good ones.

I like hearing about the sand battery in Finland but I have no idea how it works

you just whisper whatever data you want to store at the beach

I don’t know how reliable Ed Zitron is

unfortunately not very, he's a committed hater but is maximally sceptical in a way that's increasingly detached from reality

oh wait! jfc! god this is proof to me, i have brain fog. from covid. :( i can’t believe i forgot who he is.

but yeah, i read this entire thing about him just last year

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI

i guess it’s because i wasn’t immersed in the online discussion then, or now, so a lot of these people are just in the same general pile of “acting for personal gain rather than for truth” that is pretty much the entire entertainment + news + infotainment industries, but i have trouble telling a lot of these assholes apart, it’s just an onslaught

if you believe zitron then the ai industry is completely doomed because the tech doesn't work at all, none of the finances add up and can never add up, etc. which all implies that actually the problem will eventually go away on its own because there's no money and no tech.

that hyper-scepticism was generally the correct approach to take to a lot of other recent tech nonsense hype like the metaverse, nfts, etc. but ai does have more substance to it (not as much as the craziest boosters say, but certainly non-zero) and so its impacts, both good and bad (especially the bad), need to be taken seriously and reckoned with in a grounded way

i dont follow zitron closely but i basically agree with that conclusion not that ai tech wont be around but but the current general sitch that we call ai is the biggest speculative bubble ever and is just by basic math doomed to pop unless you do believe what its craziest boosters say because in order to justify the investment it has to turn into the biggest industry the world has ever seen

its like teslas stock price but many times larger

zitron’s pretty one-note in that the last time I checked, he hadn’t varied much from a boring central thesis that AI has some uses, it’s a bubble, the rapid expansion is going to blow up in everyone’s faces, etc

I get the money flow diagrams between hardware companies, so-called hyperscalers, and the big AI companies highlight some suspect things but throwing up a new diagram every so often isn’t that intriguing unless his real market is people playing the market

I’ve heard him guest on podcasts and it’s the same old crap, but the one episode of his I listened to had Shingy as a guest. He made no inroads, because Shingy kept to the “I am familiar with these tools because I have used them in advertising, marketing, and production planning such as story boarding)” and anything beyond that, the Shingster responded with “yeah that seems less than optimal, it’ll die off in a few years if it’s not useful in the market”

behind all the image and marketing whatever, Shingy is actually good at business as business

also, zitron’s show is on iheartradio or whatever clearchannel is calling itself now and the ads are terrible

This is pretty funny, and good for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDy6UrHittQ

i dont follow zitron closely but i basically agree with that conclusion not that ai tech wont be around but but the current general sitch that we call ai is the biggest speculative bubble ever and is just by basic math doomed to pop unless you do believe what its craziest boosters say because in order to justify the investment it has to turn into the biggest industry the world has ever seen

― lag∞n, Wednesday, May 13, 2026 5:57 PM (yesterday)

i'm going quietly mad over here because all of the people in power seem to be pretending that everything is going fine and ignoring the fact that, like, nothing fucking works. i feel like god, they're lying to themselves, and as long as all they listen to comes from the internet, which they effectively have complete control over, that lie is going to be effective. the problem is that, like, corporeal existence is a thing, the internet is not in fact reality. it's not even a matter of them lying - nobody's going to tell them the truth, because why bother? they're not listening. i have to use the internet and i am, like, deficient in skills when it comes to navigating life outside the internet, but damn if i'm not trying, because the internet is just so much more fucking miserable than anywhere else. i mean, given a choice between corporeality and corporate reality...

the gen z kids, i feel some kinship with them because like them, i _did_ have a covid puberty. and it fucked me up. i just don't know what kind of future anybody who's not a billionaire has if this shit doesn't end.

i'm going quietly mad over here because all of the people in power seem to be pretending that everything is going fine and ignoring the fact that, like, nothing fucking works.

yeah its not great

There was something about Stratos in The Register today:
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/05/13/utah-mega-datacenter-could-dump-23-atomic-bombs-worth-of-energy-per-day/5239670

"A proposed mega-scale datacenter in the US state of Utah has caused controversy after a physics professor estimated that the facility and its associated power generation could dump 23 atomic bombs' worth of energy per day". Apparently the data centre will require 9gw of power per day, which is roughly the same as the entire city of New York, despite being around one-quarter the size. Which immediately made me think of TRON. On the one side, New York, a city in which people and cars whizz around delivering bagels, and on the other side Stratos, a collection of servers that move electrons from one circuit board to the same circuit board.

This raises the question of which of those two things - New York, or Stratos - will generate the most useful work. Bagels, or data? Presumably if Stratos generates more useful work than New York the logical solution would be to decommission New York's existing infrastructure, e.g. the touristy stuff, the restaurants, parks and so forth, and repurpose the entire city as a data centre. Imagine New York in the year 2035, with empty streets, empty intersections, and every building is just a huge, featureless black rectangle, like in TRON or Escape From New York. I can smell it. An air conditioning duct on a metal moon.

"Davies’ preliminary analysis said this could raise daytime temperatures by 2°F to 5°F (1°C to 3°C) and nighttime temperatures by 8°F to 12°F (4°C to 6°C), potentially causing serious ecological impacts in the high-desert valley." To which the obvious counter-argument is that if New York *is* turned into an enormous data centre, then flooding it would actually help with cooling. Checkmate, liberals!

ut governor cox and a bunch of stratos-related assholes are having a https://www.gigawattsummit.com/ in deer valley this weekend. i hope they get some hecklers!

the onion weighs in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDKmSMvfmk

all of the people in power seem to be pretending that everything is going fine and ignoring the fact that, like, nothing fucking works.

It's like the cartoon figures who've run past the edge of the cliff and their legs keep moving while they hover over the abyss.

just heard a funny/sad comparison of AI to The Thneed from Dr. Seuss's The Lorax... an all purpose tool that didn't anything particularly well, but did incredible damage to the environment to help the Onceler become a billionaire

apparently ohio got enough signatures to put a state constitutional amendment banning data centers on the ballot for november.

ope my bad, they don't have enough yet.

https://myfox28columbus.com/news/local/this-ohio-group-wants-a-constitutional-amendment-banning-data-centers-on-november-ballot-politics-policy-tech-enviornment

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:qqx7bauacsfwi7yufzfqio32/bafkreihhsbihi32ipy7g4mytseeyovlwxgm2jrt2sgwtvujsyl4blbr4fi

https://bsky.app/profile/jael.bsky.social/post/3mm5uqnnhlc2u

hayley williams seems like a pretty high-profile artist to do a local issue statement like that, good for her! i like to imagine that video from elevate utah came across hayley's feed or something.

i drove past the hansel valley the other weekend by the way. that area is farm and ranch land and has been since the mormons routed out the natives with the help of the u.s. government 175 years ago. it doesn't support a lot of people - it didn't when the shoshone were there, it doesn't now. people who are still farming the area are very proud of that fact - farming is really hard and has faced its own history of predatory investment over the years. right now is another dark time for farms. anyway i don't think investment billionaires understand generational meaning and what it does for people. you're talking about confronting a community of people with an existential sort of axe. ironic that that's what the u.s. did to natives 175 years ago and now that we're facing the same sort of thing maybe we finally understand it. anyway good to see it gaining traction at the music fest and in people's hearts and minds. unfortunately i also see a lot of rhetorical prep work going into 'create cushion for rich man to slam his machines into so the rape looks less egregious.'

meanwhile native youth are literally occupying drilling sites on their land in the midwest... let's just say they're a little more advanced in this kind of thing, how it goes and what it takes to win.

as a huge hater I have to say I am kind of delighted that O'Leary decided to make himself the public face of this

here's a close look at the situation in Northern VA: https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/your-ai-chatbot-is-polluting-my-backyard/

reposted from the ai thread:

https://jodi7768.substack.com/p/ai-is-capital

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zbgog5eztv35jjfykehxd7a4/bafkreihuwkvmzszorim2lr46kyfe7evmjm6wfewbsqg4la3xzcf6lpdzg4

otmmmmmm

that's in Vancouver!

Thank you for starting this thread 👍🏽

eddington palme d’or

the first regional straight-up denial i've seen i think.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/pocatello-ai-data-center-denied/

Another Stratos related water application has been withdrawn.
I'm still trying to understand exactly why.
The first time we speculated it had to do with changes under HB60, but this application was already filed under HB60, so I'm left wondering if this is strategic, an attempt to wear us out, whether there are issues with the application itself, or if the several hundred protests raised significant enough concerns.
I'm hoping to learn more later today.

eddington palme d’or

― ||||||||, Sunday, May 24, 2026 7:26 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'll bite. i have no idea what this post is supposed to mean. i haven't seen the film - looks like exploitation trash tbh.

i've noticed there is a little bit of coast resident sneering going on from people who think they're smarter than they are. to be expected regarding a genuinely spontaneous movement from people who largely do not live in desirable areas of the u.s.

we're literally going to run out of water where i live this summer. cities are going to be fined for overuse. kitchen sink taps going dry is a real fucking possibility. honestly fuck anyone who doesn't care about this tbrr.

the water thing is a huge concern... it's already getting scare in the West, snow pack is diminished, and there's just this mindset that 'if they build it, it will come' which is not how precipitation works. We grow a lot of food out this way that actually feeds the country

yeah. running out of water is a much bigger issue than data centers of course. data centers are just a piece of tinder that caught on fire under a lot of dead wood related to 'using every available resource so capitalists can get richer,' to force an obvious metaphor. there's this sense i get that people are standing down capital whether they realize it or not. of course they've spent their whole lives otherwise being flexible when it comes to capital so they're stalling - making sure all of the review steps are taken - that there are 'safeguards', etc. i'm not sure how radicalizing this is going to be - probably not much - but i'm already seeing new data center proposals being flat-out denied, so at least there's that.

drives me crazy when the government puts out water use guidelines like take short showers dont water your lawn when there would be plenty of water for normal people to use if absurd wasteful industries fracking farming in the desert manhattan sized ai data centers were just cut off

saw this thing about farming in arizona theyre out there growing lettuce canals that lose half their volume to evaporation bring the water to them cmon man be serious find a more reasonable place to grow lettuce

xp yeah a typical poultry processing plant uses more water in a day than many municipalities

drives me crazy when the government puts out water use guidelines like take short showers dont water your lawn when there would be plenty of water for normal people to use if absurd wasteful industries fracking farming in the desert manhattan sized ai data centers were just cut off

― lag∞n, Thursday, May 28, 2026 1:55 AM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

saw this thing about farming in arizona theyre out there growing lettuce canals that lose half their volume to evaporation bring the water to them cmon man be serious find a more reasonable place to grow lettuce

― lag∞n, Thursday, May 28, 2026 1:59 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

utah governor spencer cox issued a 'drought emergency' two days before his 'gigawatt summit' at deer valley last weekend. these people really are that drained of conscience. we get the added insult of religious platitudes here too. time and time again i see a comment along the lines of 'i prayed for rain and all i got was this water-hogging data center'.

weird state government agency that develops land for 'military use', MIDA, is a big part of the stratos push in utah. they got all the land lined up in 3 fucking months and kept it all under wraps. take a look at this beautiful array of shining white man faces https://www.midaut.org/board-members.

re the lettuce, yeah... everything has already been industrialized. the west has been pillaging its resources in the name of capital since the u.s. acquired it. sustainable farming is still pretty rare in spite of the best efforts of people to educate. when you see it in action it's truly amazing how much healthier it is. you can feel it. profit margins aren't maxed though and maybe even more importantly the people who do it aren't totally value-less drones. of course it's not like the land that they want to build the data centers on is pristine. but data centers are a huuuuge jump in resource use from cattle herds and even alfalfa farms (the alfalfa farms here use a lot of water and get a lot of flak because they sell most of it to rich horse owners in china). and we're finally at the point where the 'amount of water' vs. 'use of water' lines are crossing.

"As data centers boom, Virginians breathe the exhaust of 10,000 diesel generators"-- The Washington Post

https://wapo.st/4v9G4N6 (gift link)

drives me crazy when the government puts out water use guidelines like take short showers dont water your lawn when there would be plenty of water for normal people to use if absurd wasteful industries fracking farming in the desert manhattan sized ai data centers were just cut off

e.g. Austin is currently under water restrictions because it's in stage 3 drought (can only water lawns twice a week on specific days, restaurants aren't supposed to serve water unless/until customers request), but in the meantime Elon's Tesla plant there is now the city's 3rd-largest water user, and he's planning to build a new semiconductor plant next to it that will use even more. These aren't data centers per se, but same basic deal — huge tech operations sweeping in to use an ungodly amount of scarce resources.

https://austincurrent.org/2026/04/10/tesla-austin-water-drought-gigafactory-musk/

restaurants aren't supposed to serve water unless/until customers request

this is so dumb its not even a meaningful amount of water pure theater

"If it's yellow, let it mellow" would probably be more effective in terms of volume. But that restaurant rule is a pretty standard drought restriction.

I'm ready for the "no lawn movement" as well.

Yeah that's a whole other issue. There are obviously whole parts of the country that shouldn't have lawns at all.

idk the amount of ice water you're constantly plied with in american restaurants could probably sustain a mid-sized nuclear reactor

i have these flashes of memory where i'm sitting at the booth of a vast, dark yet overlit american restaurant where the tables have tablecloths but also tempered glass on top of the tablecloths, and in front of me is an enormous fluted plastic drinks glass absolutely overloaded with ice. condensation is rolling down the sides and pooling at the bottom on the glass tabletop. the restaurant is bustling with patrons and cheerful servers armed with ice-water jugs roam the premises with hawk-like vision, able to spy a half-inch gap of air at the top of any cup at a distance of 50 paces. when they do, they descend, your cup is filled, a smile is granted, they wheel away, the dance begins again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6ck7O6BBU

I'm ready for the "no lawn movement" as well.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Thursday, May 28, 2026 8:46 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah that's a whole other issue. There are obviously whole parts of the country that shouldn't have lawns at all.

― paper plans (tipsy mothra), Thursday, May 28, 2026 9:23 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

idk the amount of ice water you're constantly plied with in american restaurants could probably sustain a mid-sized nuclear reactor

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, May 28, 2026 9:38 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is what they want you to think

Look, not everybody has a lagoon.

...that is infinite.

see these guys know how to make the desert bloom.. by using 'clean power' and 'specialized nonprofits'

Meta is boosting its spending commitment on a forthcoming AI data center in West Texas by more than sixfold to $10 billion, with an aim to reach 1 gigawatt of capacity by the time the facility comes online in 2028, the company said on Thursday... The company also said it’s committed to adding over 5,000 megawatts of clean power to the grid, and will ease the water burden by working with specialized nonprofits to bring fresh water to the area.

you just put some h next to some 20 and you got water, easy peasy especially for specialized nonprofits

I just saw a video of some guy walking through a dry riverbed right by an existing Meta data center, it was just red dust... no water at all

#dustbowl

clean power as in "clean empty"

clean fossil fuel

The nearly $500 million, 366-megawatt facility would rely on 813 small gas-fired generators that don’t require water but would emit pollutants such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides.

Real heads (readers of Eddie Z) know that the announcements of center construction far outpace actual data center “completion” and “actually filled with chips and not sailboat fuel” and this is all kayfabe to keep the money, now increasingly coming from public pension funds invested in PE, flowing.

in other words, I’m never retiring and my diet will consist of never used Blackwell chips.

yeah, I agree with that... but in the case of Meta, they're actually building them, not just talking about it like Warren Beatty pulling up to a little crossroads town called "Las Vegas."

this is good but I imagine it only covers actual city limits? still, sends a message

In first, California city overwhelmingly votes to permanently ban datacenters

Residents in Monterey Park, California, became the first in the US to vote on a permanent ban on datacenters on Tuesday, and early results indicate a resounding victory for the prohibition.

While many cities and counties have already passed temporary or indefinite moratoriums via their local governments, Monterey Park would be the first to do so through a ballot initiative.

reno too. i'm seeing more flat-out cancellations. i don't think stratos in utah is going anywhere.

reno isn't permanent iirc

oh i missed the last sentence.

While many cities and counties have already passed temporary or indefinite moratoriums via their local governments

this seems to be the main thing happening.