Karen Hao

It's just like, there's such a crazy, yeah.

So that's why I think it's ultimately...

And it's not just about corporate powers, because the way that these companies actually talk about the stakes, how it's going to be civilization ending if we don't allow them to do this is just of a completely different kind of rhetoric than typical companies.

energy in the way that we think about it but water and so on and some of the examples that you talk about which might be worth just describing in terms of how this can literally destroy communities without anybody ever asking or everyone really even noticing yeah i mean i'll give you an even more updated example which is that meta you know is i think a lot of people think oh ai needs data centers but we've had data centers for a while what's the big deal

AI data centers are just fundamentally different to other types of data centers.

Meta, which was a social media company and now an AI company, the kind of AI data center that it's constructing now in Louisiana is nearly 400 times the size and footprint of the first data center that it built to support Facebook, its social media platform.

And that data center is on track to be one fifth the size of Mannheim, and it is on track to use around five gigawatts of power, which is nearly the average power demand of London.

It's one facility that would use the average power demand

of a city like London.

And that's, you know, Meta wants to build more than one of these facilities.

And of course, every single one of its competitors.

It's just one facility for Meta, right?

So this is what we're talking about, which is it's unbelievably extraordinary amounts of resource consumption and

Where are these facilities being placed?

They're being placed in communities where real people live.

And one of the most infamous cases of this is Elon Musk building a series of supercomputers called Colossus 1, 2, and 3.

in this town near Memphis, Tennessee, called Box Town, predominantly black and brown community, working class community.

And they discovered this facility popped up after they started smelling what seemed like a gas leak in their homes.

And it turned out it was because Musk didn't want to wait for a grid connection.

He didn't want to wait around to have the data centers plugged into the actual grid.