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Chapter 1: What are the major issues surrounding AI data centers?
If you've been hoping to lie low while artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs and transforms the world's economy, then you need to pay very close attention to recent developments out of Lake Tahoe, California. Now, in case you're not familiar, Lake Tahoe is home to some of the richest people in the United States on both the California and Nevada sides.
It's a premier tourist destination in our most populated state. Median property values are north of $700,000. People living there as a general matter are financially secure and highly educated. Many of them work in tech. You had to think of a list of people whose lives would be upended by artificial intelligence. They would rank fairly low, you would think.
And yet because of AI, 50,000 people living on the California side of Lake Tahoe have no idea where their power supply will come from in a matter of months. Some are worried that the lights will go out indefinitely as if they'd been hit by a terrorist attack.
But what's happened is that the utility realized that it's much more lucrative to power data centers, which are used to train artificial intelligence and which consume near infinite amounts of electricity, than it is to power single family homes. After all, by some estimates, depending on the size, a single data center can consume more power than half a million homes.
I'll say that again, a single data center consumes more power than half a million homes.
Every utility is rapidly coming to the same conclusion because companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which collectively own one third of all data center capacity and which build the overwhelming majority of large data centers, are willing and able to pay enormous premiums for the electricity that they're using. When they're able to price you out of the market, you're on your own.
And when the choice is between a big tech trillion dollar company or you and your single family home, the big tech company is going to win out every single time. This is reporting from Fortune. Quote, Lake Tahoe doesn't know where its power will come from after next ski season, and it's a major problem for the 49,000 residents who call the region home.
Nevada 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 uh 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 it's like we don't exist north lake tahoe resident danielle hughes told fortune now you might be thinking well uh Okay, this is no big deal.
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Chapter 2: How are data centers impacting local communities?
That's the problem. It ends up being counterproductive. It's counterproductive because fear-mongering is the single fastest way to discredit legitimate concerns. And there are many legitimate concerns with these data centers, as we will discuss in a moment, including, yes, concerns about the water supply.
It's probably not going to be that you build a data center and then nobody has water anymore and the air is poisonous. It's not quite that, but there are legitimate concerns. Notice that in her entire diatribe, the woman actually doesn't talk about what these data centers are being used for. She doesn't mention mass surveillance or how these companies are programming robots to take human jobs.
She also doesn't talk about how the land is being obtained. Instead, she's sort of yelling and the people are applauding in the background. Now, If you remember from a few weeks ago, we talked about those high-level scientists who were strangely disappearing. And while some of those cases obviously merit more investigation, some of them clearly don't. And so this is a kind of a similar thing.
When people pretend, and in that case, people pretend otherwise, when their only motivation is to string together some kind of elaborate conspiracy that doesn't withstand scrutiny, and they throw all kinds of dubious claims into the mix, then they end up undermining all reasonable discussion about a particular topic. And in the case of data centers, that outcome works for the benefit of big tech.
What big tech wants, if you're a skeptic of these data centers or concerned about them, they want you to be as hysterical and hyperbolic as possible in your protest of the data centers. Because then they can point to that and say, well, these people are totally unreasonable and they have no idea what's going on.
You know, some have pointed out that you could go back and recall the panic in the early 20th century over power lines. Anytime somebody died as a result of a power line, it made national news for a while. Cartoons went out of their way to terrify people. You're seeing one right there. There's a skull on the power line. Everyone's running for their life.
Someone got tangled in the power line somehow. Not sure how that would happen. I mean, if you're walking on the sidewalk, there's no reason why you should end up tangled in there. I don't know what you were doing to end up... What was that guy doing to end up in that position? Was he like parachuting, skydiving right into the... But it looks like something out of a horror movie.
And during the so-called War of the Currents between Thomas Edison on the one side and George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla on the other, Edison's backers would publicly electrocute animals in order to demonstrate how dangerous alternating current supposedly was. Of course, today, alternating current powers pretty much every grid in the world.
More recently, people who opposed fracking claimed that it would cause flaming tap water. All this to say... You have to understand that some hysteria is going to result whenever there's new technology. The question you have to answer is whether there's an actual problem underlying all of this and what to do about it.
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Chapter 3: What are the concerns regarding power supply for residents?
The goal here to improve human lives. Climate is super important, but has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.
Now, a few years ago, we were so desperate that we needed to find a way to stop the cows from farting. No sacrifice is too small. And now, you know, climate change is important, but it's not a big deal. Now, what makes this even weirder is that Gates is denying that he's changed his position, but he clearly has. That clip was not a one-off.
In a speech at Harvard University four years ago, Gates said that climate change would make life, quote, essentially unlivable at the equator by the end of the century, leading to the instability of hundreds of millions of people trying to get out of those regions where a lot of the world's population is, and particularly the poorest in the world.
Avoiding a climate disaster will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on, he said. Meanwhile, current Bill Gates talks like this, quote, there's a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this. In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.
Although climate change will have serious consequences, particularly for people in the poorest countries, it will not lead to humanity's demise. Our climate strategies need to prioritize human welfare. This may seem obvious. Who could be against improving people's lives? But sometimes human welfare takes a backseat to lowering emissions with bad consequences.
We should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature. Wow. It's like he's a completely different person. Think about how important the climate change agenda used to be. like 10 seconds ago. It was the central plank of the WEF globalist utopia in which the peasants don't own any property and we have to rent everything from BlackRock.
He told us again and again that our most important overriding objective as a species was to reduce carbon emissions. And now one of the WEF's most prominent ambassadors has issued brand new marching orders We're suddenly obligated to pursue human welfare, and even things like reducing carbon emissions shouldn't happen if it has a negative impact on human welfare.
I mean, this version of Bill Gates, if he was around in 2012, he would have been stoned to death as a climate denier. And by the way, you'll often hear people say that if you criticize AI data centers, then you're falling for a Chinese PSYOP.
The idea is that China wants the United States to sabotage its progress with artificial intelligence, so they're encouraging useful idiots to attack data centers. But if that were the case, it wouldn't explain why Bill Gates, who's been a useful idiot for China his entire life, is supporting an approach that will lead to more data centers in the United States.
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Chapter 4: How do data centers affect water resources?
Generally speaking, they said eminent domain cases are settled three to five times the initial offer, but in this area, because of the high solar stakes with data centers, that could easily be 10 to 15 times what they offered, according to Lacks. Now, what this farmer doesn't realize is that he's actually pretty fortunate in this scenario. He knows the identity of the organization.
in this case, an energy company that's trying to seize his property. That's a major advantage because very often large corporations will use shell companies in order to trick landowners into selling their property at bargain rates. Disney pioneered this tactic in the 1960s.
They realized that they wanted a lot of land in central Florida, south of Orlando to create a new mini city, which ultimately became Walt Disney World Resort. But if the landowners knew that Disney was the buyer, they'd immediately raise their prices. So Disney established shell companies with names like Empty Lot Real Estate Investments. Empty Lot. Get it?
They hired fake executives and lawyers, and as a result, they were able to get some of the land for as low as $100 an acre. And by the time Disney was revealed as the buyer, the price went as high as $80,000 an acre, but it was too late at that point for most of the sellers. Now today, big tech is running a very similar strategy.
This is from an investigative report that Business Insider recently posted. Watch.
Giant warehouses are popping up across the U.S. more than two every week. They feed AI algorithms store photos and answer our questions. Hey, Google. A data center campus like this can consume as much power and water as an entire city. And many of the biggest server farms are emerging from the desert.
But there's no official record of how many of these are being built, where they are, or even who owns them. To be honest, I've never really run into so much resistance for records than this project. Big tech companies often go to great lengths to hide the details.
So, you know, it's been really tricky to kind of get these records because the companies don't want to disclose all of that information. By tricky, we mean redacted records and requests denied on the grounds of trade secrets. It turns out there is one thing that most data centers need, backup generators, in case the grid fails.
And anyone who wants to install a generator needs to apply for an air quality permit. So what we set out to do was request all of the permits that are issued to data centers for those backup generators. That meant filing public record requests for air permits in every state. They list the capacity of the generator, so we can extrapolate the power needs of the data center.
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Chapter 5: What are the economic implications of data centers on local residents?
It's quiet. You won't find much quiet in certain parts of the parish anymore. Entergy Louisiana is now speeding toward a deadline. The power plant will be online at the end of 2028. Troy Hightons is Entergy Louisiana's vice president of hyperscale execution. That title requires him to oversee massive jobs. Hightons says this one dwarfs any he's ever seen.
This is the biggest customer project that Entergy Louisiana has ever undertaken. The only thing that is a similar scale that we've done in the past is building brand new nuclear power plants.
All of this is to support what's happening just down the road on Highway 183, where Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, says it's building a $27 billion data center to advance its ambitions in artificial intelligence. In a parish of about 20,000, Brown says there are now at least 4,000 extra people living and working here. That kind of growth can come with pains like rising rents.
There's bumps and bruises, and we're feeling them. You know, a rental that might have been $600, $700 a month is now $2,500 a month. So it's not affordable for the people that were here. And I hate that. It hurts my heart. When META come in, they move some of the folks out and put in the trailer park. Well, they had to find a place to go. And some of them couldn't afford that.
So I don't know what happened to them. 81-year-old Joyce Piercy feels the changes are coming too fast.
Now, normally I don't have any issue with tax credits that encourage massive new businesses to come into town. Taxes in general are bad. The government takes your money and wastes it very often. Therefore, tax credits are good. The problem is that if you're going to offer tax credits to major corporations, the community needs to benefit in some way.
If you simply give the corporation a discount that it doesn't need, and in turn you disrupt the lives of innocent people without benefiting anybody in any way outside of that corporation, then the tax credit has backfired. It is not advancing what was Bill Gates' phrase, human welfare. And that appears to be what's happening with these data centers.
Yes, they create construction jobs, but once those jobs are gone, which doesn't take long, you've mostly got an empty warehouse with a couple of security guards. The data center churns along without many employees. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Quote, in Abilene, Texas, some 1,500 people are building the first data center for the Stargate artificial intelligence venture led by OpenAI.
Once it's completed, a lot fewer people will work there. The facility will have about 100 full-time employees, according to the city's economic development agency. That totals a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same 1 million square feet if it were an office park. or a factory or warehouse.
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Chapter 6: How does the construction of data centers influence property values?
You've got this big, creepy, empty warehouse. box-like massive building towering over these single-family homes and this creepy buzz, high-pitched buzz sound just emanating from it. It's like something out of a dystopian fiction, but it's real. Here's another one. This is time from Minnesota.
So this is comparable to the data center that is going to be built over in the Bertram chain of lakes. The guy from Scannell Properties told me to come and check out this data center. I'm hoping that my phone is capturing that noise. It is actually significantly loud.
Now, in fairness, as I said, we're trying to analyze this issue objectively with no hysteria. In some of these videos, they're recording the sound of the on-site generators, which, as you might imagine, are very loud. And those generators don't run all the time. But all the same, They're obviously very annoying, to put it mildly, for anybody who lives nearby. And that's not a small thing.
Having a massive building that's, by the way, also just ugly to look at. It makes an ugly sound. It actually reduces your quality of life in measurable and significant ways. It's not a small thing. And they also lower property values. More serious problems, like the ones that the woman mentioned in the city council meeting, Are generally related to the construction of the data centers.
This is one of the prominent case, one of the more prominent cases from Georgia. Watch.
This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen. This is where I fill up water for storage. Those are the things we have to fill up to flush the toilets. So you can see the sediment from the data center. Wow, and that's just from the water coming out of your faucet? Yeah, and this is what's in all the pipes. Just the well itself is probably 20,000 and that's not counting any of the faucets.
All the replacement of the fixtures and faucets and toilets and the lines that come underneath the house. It's overwhelming because you really feel like you are up against this huge wall that you can't penetrate. There's nothing that you can do, and they don't care. The light pollution is... We don't have to have a nightlight in the house.
You can walk around the house at night and see everything. It's that bright. This is a video of the dust from Facebook where the construction was. This is what it looks like right now out my front door. The wind blowing in all of this stuff from across the construction, across the road. This is all from Meadow. Yeah, I was standing on my front porch.
I think eventually that affected our well water. We're on a well here and we started having issues with our well in 2018. I have to replace the hot water heater. I've replaced two washing machines and a dishwasher because of the sediment that's coming in.
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Chapter 7: What are the environmental impacts of data centers?
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You think for a second that big tech would hesitate to share all this information with her administration? That's not fear-mongering. Democrats have already done this without the benefit of AI. They already rounded up conservatives and thrown them in jail. They did it to the president of the United States. The last thing we need to hand these people is a powerful AI to do that for them.
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