CAN WE REALLY AFFORD THOSE DATA CENTERS?

You may have noticed something lately. Or rather, you may have noticed the distinct lack of something lately, namely, the lack of screaming (and now completely irrelevant) Swedish girls bellering and hollering about climate change. You may also have noticed the distinct lack of media attention to sky-rocketing electric bills and energy costs, particularly in connection to those big A.I. data centers that are opening in various places around the USSA. But if you have noticed the lack of people noticing the lack of notice of these sky-rocketing energy costs (sorry folks, but the tangled diction is necessary to mimic the complete collapse of rationality in the USSA and to mirror adequately its confusion of mind), then the following article noticed and shared by V.T. is for you:

Stargate: OpenAI, Oracle, And Nvidia Announce Creation Of 5 New Datacenters As Meta Builds One The Size Of Manhattan, While Energy Bills Skyrocket

The article is helpful in that it lays out the origins of this mess, but toward the end, it also lays out what the agenda is, and in no uncertain terms:

But Stargate’s expansion is certain to draw criticism on multiple fronts. In Abilene and other communities hosting mega AI data centers, residents and activists worry about the trade-offs: billions in tax abatements, the risk of gas-fired generation worsening local air quality, and the likelihood that permanent jobs will number far fewer than the headlines suggest. National energy analysts, meanwhile, warn that multi-gigawatt campuses could strain fragile power grids and lock in huge new demands for water and fossil fuels at a time when utilities are already struggling to keep up with AI’s growth.

For example, the planned Stargate site in Dona Ana County, New Mexico has garnered mixed reactions, with opponents raising concerns about water usage and pollution, arguing these issues outweigh the economic benefits. According to a county presentation, the project will bring 800 permanent jobs and 2,500 construction jobs over three years.

This issue, coupled with continually rising energy bills, was covered by The WinePress earlier this year. With the expansion of more datacenters and battery plants, this problem will surely exist.

OpenAI, Oracle, Softbank and Nvidia’s ventures are not the only firms building datacenters. Fortune noted:

The buildout attests to the towering expectations surrounding AI, as tech companies like OpenAI, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta race to put in place the infrastructure necessary to power their latest large language models. In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would spend hundreds of billions of dollars building a network of data centers with names like Prometheus and Hyperion to create “superintelligence.”

In July, Meta announced the creation of the Prometheus datacenter in Louisiana, which will be the size of Manhattan. (Boldface emphasis added)

And what's the human cost of all this "development" and "progress"?

Who cares if the water is contaminated and the water tables are drained? These are poor people problems. But just wait, I’m sure we’ll be directed to buy the MAHA-approved patriot water with no microplastics in it (because Bobby and Oz told me it’s safe). Who cares if this pushes the grid to the breaking point?

Last month, as Americans began to notice their bills going to the moon, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and Trump were given their marching orders and attempted to gaslight the country into believing that wind turbines and solar panels are what’s straining the grid and driving energy costs higher, as the administration announced an end to subsidies for those related projects. She said in a statement:

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels. It has been disheartening to see our beautiful farmland displaced by solar projects, especially in rural areas that have strong agricultural heritage. One of the largest barriers of entry for new and young farmers is access to land. Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available.”

This is a load of nonsense. This techno-fascist-feudalist government has no problem sequestering hundreds, nay, thousands of acres of land for datacenters, battery plants and automated distribution centers - the One, Big, Beautiful Bill allows for eminent domain of private lands, and the AI Action Plan strips away the state’s ability to regulate AI. Oh, but solar panels and wind turbines are the new problem. Right…

Proverbs 19:1 Better is the poor that walketh in his integrity, than he that is perverse in his lips, and is a fool. [2] Also, that the soul be without knowledge, it is not good; and he that hasteth with his feet sinneth.

The end result? WinePress, which sponsored and authored the article, makes a stunning prediction, one with which I am in some argreement, and one which provokes today's high octane speculation:

Meanwhile, a massive AI bubble that eclipses the Dot Com bust is brewing. The Ponzi is getting more and more stupid. OpenAI invests in Oracle, Oracle invests in Nvidia, Nvidia invests in OpenAI. What a nice little scam they've got running. They’ll cash out before rubber meets the road. (Italicized emphasis added)

I strongly suspect that WinePress is on to something here, and perhaps something the full extent of which even its author may be unaware. To understand this point, upon which our daily dose of high octane speculation is developed, look at what is being implied by the remarks "OpenAI invests in Oracle, Oracle invests in Nvidia, Nvidia invests in OpenAI. What a nice little scam they've got running." In other words, what you're looking at is a kind of circular Ponzi scheme, where one system of algorithmic trading buys another system, and it in turn buys yet another, until the circle is completed, and a massive (and electronically-fast) bubble develops.  Notice that everything is "fine" just so long as the trading mechanism can keep going, ad infinitum, without interruption. But to keep the bubble growing, I submit that more and more power will be needed to propel it, until the whole energy output is consumed to maintain the fiction.

But why would one create such a monstrosity? What is its purpose?

I strongly suspect that this carousel of casuistry is needed simply to provide a new front, a new mask, a new cover, behind which that hidden system of finance I've spoken of for many years can continue to operate, and to gobble up ever more hard assets. In short, you're looking at a game of three-card monte, only the cards are being shuffled by AIs, and the queen is thus always moving faster than its human places can spot; indeed, she is probably not even in the deck at all. It is the ultimate development of a market system that is completely devoid of and divorced from human market realities. Or to put it differently, this circular Ponzi scheme, this game of AI three card monte, is the one-way mirror that Catherine Austin Fitts has spoken of so many times in her analyses of the emerging "financial" "system".

And that means it is probably the wiser and better course of wisdom to allow China to develop and contend with this dragon, which could easily end up consuming the entire electrical output of the Three Gorges Dam, and then some.

It takes a lot of energy to run high speed rails, to farm, to move production and enable supply lines, and it takes a lot of energy to chase the tail of the dragon in a circular Ponzi scheme in "data centers".

But in the latter case, the only thing needed to bring the whole thing down is someone pulling the plug, or a nice electro-magnetic pulse, or a massive solar flare.

With that in mind, it's best to remember, steam locomotives will still work long after diesel-electric locomotives have stopped dead in their (pun intended) tracks after a pulse. The analogy to trade? Well, stock markets and commodities markets worked just fine before there were telephones and computers and stock tickers, and only people waving papers and hollering frantically at each other on the trading floors. It's worth recalling, too, that those bearer bonds scandals proved one thing:  someone was willing to go to a lot of expense and trouble to create physical "securities" and move massive amounts of money that way, and avoid the wonders of "progress" and "digital technology."

A.I.'s time may indeed have come... but its life, I think, will be characterized by its shortness, brutality, and by its inhumanity and anti-humanity.

See you on the flip side...

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