Did some research and abused Claude on fact checking, arguments, etc. Maybe this will add some interesting information to this discussion:
Data centers don't need to keep growing as large and centralized as current plans assume. Distributed edge sites reduce grid strain and connect faster; smaller models handle most routine queries at a fraction of the energy; and renewable-powered, low-water facilities (seawater cooling, near-zero-water designs) are already running commercially, not hypothetical. Together these can meet real AI demand with far less pressure on power and water supplies than the hyperscale build-out path assumes.
That said, planners are right that some centralized, high-density capacity remains genuinely necessary for training and tightly-coupled workloads, and small models can't yet replace frontier ones for complex tasks. So this isn't an argument to halt data centers — it's an argument that growth must be bounded and sited responsibly, with distributed/efficient options used wherever they can substitute for new mega-campuses.
**The priority that should govern this trade-off:** homeowners' access to affordable, reliable electricity and water — and the public health consequences of losing either — must outrank data center revenue or speed-to-market. Concretely, that means:
- Data centers should not draw down shared water supplies or strain residential grids in water-stressed or already-constrained regions, regardless of projected financial return.
- New capacity should be required to bring its own power (on-site renewables, waste-heat recovery, closed-loop cooling) rather than compete with households for existing grid and water allocations.
- Permitting and rate structures should protect residential utility costs and supply reliability first; data center growth should absorb the cost of new generation/transmission it requires, not pass it to ratepayers.
- Health-relevant local impacts (grid instability, water table effects, noise, air quality from backup generation) should be weighed above build-out speed or corporate cost savings in siting decisions.
In short: the technology to grow AI compute sustainably already exists. Whether it gets used depends on whether policy treats homeowner power/water security and public health as the binding constraint — rather than treating them as costs to be offset once financial commitments are already made.
When China spent the decade or two massively enlarging and imcreasing their electrical genation production capacity while improving their power transmission distribution grid along with huge investments in all manner or renewable energy sources, the world, especially the US laughed and called them insane, developing such a large over capcity of electrical power generation and distribution to the point where it produced up to double or more of the capacity needed to run its homes, businesses and industry.
China remained silent and just continued on building and developing the power needed for the future. Fast forward to today, and China not only leads the world on power generation as well as the development and useage of renewables, they have the spare power capcity to actually power their huge AI development goals without adversly affecting already existing power demands from ordinary consumers and other industrial users. China saw where the future was heading and planned accordingly and the US?
It basically spent the past twenty years with its head up its eletricall power supply infrastructures arse. Those in power, both in government and in the industry have known for decades that the US electrial power generation and distribution grid as obsolete, deteriorating, falling apart and was no longer fit for purpose as it begins collapsing under its own weight and demand.
Instead of addessing these issues, all levels of US government on both sides of the aisle sat on their collective arses, pretending nothing was wrong or need to be addressed. And if someone did bring up the ongoing issues with the system and presented a plan to address it, they were quickly shut down and told it would be too expensive to impliment or execute, and thus nothing gets done.
Fast forward to today, data centres are being built in job lots across the US, sucking power off an all ready badly stressed grid while at the same sucking up much needed water to cool down their servers from a quickly diminishing reserve of potable water during a time drought. And when they return that cooling water back into the system, it is so polluted and contaminated, that is no long fit for drinking or irrigation.
To add insult to the injury of the US electrical crisis, the Trump Administration is systematically dismantling numerous renewable energy projects that could of off set some of the demand stress on the current system. This has lead many US data centres to install gas turbine generators that not add massive amounts of pollutants into the local air shed, but also run 24/7/365 distrubing the lives of those who live close by and adversly affecting their life, peace and health.
If the current power demand projections from data centres hold true, the future for US citizens is bleak, with huge increases in their power bills matched by rolling black outs, many of them on a regularly schedules basis and lasting for hours. Indeed it is not too far fetched to see a ration system for electrical power implimented where an average American household recieves on 4 to 6 hours of electricty per day.......if they are lucky and can afford it.
Meanwhile in China, new power plants go up almost daily, most of the of the renewable nature such as hydro, wind, solar etc and their AI drive grow along with it, while their households and industries chug along as normal.
The US missed the boat of power generation and it will be the American people who will ultimately pay for it, both literally and figuratively.
Turns out they are trying to get on board with AI...They state: "Due to strong research institutions and increasing tech investment, the city is creating a spot for itself in the evolving AI data center scene."
I admit to being utterly confused...I find AI to be the stuff of Ray Bradbury every fool in this country seems to be trending towards...How does AI help humanity? It doesn't. Why are so many attracted to it?
Ray Bradbury is turning over in his grave...
Thank you, as always, for your insightful and plain English writing.
Thanks Mitch for keeping us informed on these crazy huge AI CENTERS. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm old- fashioned, but doesn't anyone think we have enough technology?? We have everything at our fingertips right now, on our cell phones and computers, and we've been using new AI programs for a while now, ChatGTP, Gemini, Google AI, without huge AI CENTERS. AND, what is this crazy idea that we have to beat China in this race??? Race for what??? More land development, more energy resources needed, potentially high usage and pollution of water resources???? Globally, energy resources, land resources for cropland, wildlife habitat, saving some areas as pristine for their beauty, diversity, and that some are huge carbon sinks are already strained. Globally, our soils are becoming infertile and polluted with horrible chemicals and synthetic fertilizers, while human population growth continues.....8 billion mouths to feed, shelter, cloth, use of resources. .. at the expense of more and more pollution of land, air, and water, both fresh and oceans. Once pollution is made, it basically cannot be cleaned. Making more is straining the only 3 places pollution can go on Earth, land, air, or water. "Clean" one area means that the removed pollution just gets put in one of the other 2 areas. Pollution basically gets pushed around if you really follow how we "clean" water, or air from smoke stacks....you end up with toxic sludge, where is that put????
AND, IMHO, on site at these AI CENTERS, small modular nuclear power should never be an option. Nuclear power is dangerous, creates toxic radioactive waste, that's toxic for 10,000 years. Currently, our radioactive waste is stored on site at decommissioned nuclear power plants bc we have no safe place to store it. For all of you that think we can recycle the decommissioned nuclear power plants radioactive waste, its true, uranium and plutonium can be extracted from waste. But at what costs, the technology is complicated, specially designed facilities need to be built to recycle this radioactive waste. No matter what we do, there will be ecological ramifications. They need to be thought through thoroughly by experts in Ecology, Physics, Chemistry, many fields. But, I am from the mindset of, let's try not to make more pollution than we're already dealing with. We are on the verge of ecosystem collapse globally, Climate Change, Biodiversity Crisis, global soil collapse/infertility. Human Population Growth and the economy cannot continue to grow exponentially. Not one species ever grows exponentially without ecosystem checks and balances, humans have managed to manipulate these natural checks and balances.......to the detriment of all other living things. Our global economies run on trading commodities, what are these commodities?? Natural resources!! Everything we use, eat, make, sell, trade comes from the Earth's finite resources. They are getting depleted at record breaking rates. AND, while we're using these natural resources to make things, we make more and more pollution. So, more huge developments like AI CENTERS on an already strained Earth???? At what point do we realize what we're doing 🤔??? AND for what??? What is more important than keeping our Earth alive and thriving??? Is our only home 🏡 🌎 worth saving?? Worth more than a technological race????? I'm hoping clean fresh water, food, Biodiversity, healthy ecosystems are more important to most of us. The billionaires, instead of using their money for more technology, resource use, more pollution, maybe they can use their wealth to figure out the most natural, less polluting methods to fix our infertile soil (with composted biomass), clean our water and oceans, maybe build a few more recycling ♻️ plants to recycle more of our plastic use??? I could go on, but, this is just off of the top of my head. Things I'm worried about daily, my mind literally races at 1000 mph, hard to sleep with a racey mind!!!
The wind power industry has to be the biggest question facing this energy need. As Trump is paying wind turbine companies to take their turbines out or not build them at all, China is building giant turbines with new methods of installing and anchoring them. The only thing missing is for the Trump bros to invest in a wind turbine company. The seventy six percent jump in utility bills is still what I’m thinking about as much as anything.
REMEMBER ... the ENORMOUS "contributions" and what industries "contributed" them to support orange clown's election ..... AND suddenly there is NO SUPPORT for wind methods.
Did some research and abused Claude on fact checking, arguments, etc. Maybe this will add some interesting information to this discussion:
Data centers don't need to keep growing as large and centralized as current plans assume. Distributed edge sites reduce grid strain and connect faster; smaller models handle most routine queries at a fraction of the energy; and renewable-powered, low-water facilities (seawater cooling, near-zero-water designs) are already running commercially, not hypothetical. Together these can meet real AI demand with far less pressure on power and water supplies than the hyperscale build-out path assumes.
That said, planners are right that some centralized, high-density capacity remains genuinely necessary for training and tightly-coupled workloads, and small models can't yet replace frontier ones for complex tasks. So this isn't an argument to halt data centers — it's an argument that growth must be bounded and sited responsibly, with distributed/efficient options used wherever they can substitute for new mega-campuses.
**The priority that should govern this trade-off:** homeowners' access to affordable, reliable electricity and water — and the public health consequences of losing either — must outrank data center revenue or speed-to-market. Concretely, that means:
- Data centers should not draw down shared water supplies or strain residential grids in water-stressed or already-constrained regions, regardless of projected financial return.
- New capacity should be required to bring its own power (on-site renewables, waste-heat recovery, closed-loop cooling) rather than compete with households for existing grid and water allocations.
- Permitting and rate structures should protect residential utility costs and supply reliability first; data center growth should absorb the cost of new generation/transmission it requires, not pass it to ratepayers.
- Health-relevant local impacts (grid instability, water table effects, noise, air quality from backup generation) should be weighed above build-out speed or corporate cost savings in siting decisions.
In short: the technology to grow AI compute sustainably already exists. Whether it gets used depends on whether policy treats homeowner power/water security and public health as the binding constraint — rather than treating them as costs to be offset once financial commitments are already made.
When China spent the decade or two massively enlarging and imcreasing their electrical genation production capacity while improving their power transmission distribution grid along with huge investments in all manner or renewable energy sources, the world, especially the US laughed and called them insane, developing such a large over capcity of electrical power generation and distribution to the point where it produced up to double or more of the capacity needed to run its homes, businesses and industry.
China remained silent and just continued on building and developing the power needed for the future. Fast forward to today, and China not only leads the world on power generation as well as the development and useage of renewables, they have the spare power capcity to actually power their huge AI development goals without adversly affecting already existing power demands from ordinary consumers and other industrial users. China saw where the future was heading and planned accordingly and the US?
It basically spent the past twenty years with its head up its eletricall power supply infrastructures arse. Those in power, both in government and in the industry have known for decades that the US electrial power generation and distribution grid as obsolete, deteriorating, falling apart and was no longer fit for purpose as it begins collapsing under its own weight and demand.
Instead of addessing these issues, all levels of US government on both sides of the aisle sat on their collective arses, pretending nothing was wrong or need to be addressed. And if someone did bring up the ongoing issues with the system and presented a plan to address it, they were quickly shut down and told it would be too expensive to impliment or execute, and thus nothing gets done.
Fast forward to today, data centres are being built in job lots across the US, sucking power off an all ready badly stressed grid while at the same sucking up much needed water to cool down their servers from a quickly diminishing reserve of potable water during a time drought. And when they return that cooling water back into the system, it is so polluted and contaminated, that is no long fit for drinking or irrigation.
To add insult to the injury of the US electrical crisis, the Trump Administration is systematically dismantling numerous renewable energy projects that could of off set some of the demand stress on the current system. This has lead many US data centres to install gas turbine generators that not add massive amounts of pollutants into the local air shed, but also run 24/7/365 distrubing the lives of those who live close by and adversly affecting their life, peace and health.
If the current power demand projections from data centres hold true, the future for US citizens is bleak, with huge increases in their power bills matched by rolling black outs, many of them on a regularly schedules basis and lasting for hours. Indeed it is not too far fetched to see a ration system for electrical power implimented where an average American household recieves on 4 to 6 hours of electricty per day.......if they are lucky and can afford it.
Meanwhile in China, new power plants go up almost daily, most of the of the renewable nature such as hydro, wind, solar etc and their AI drive grow along with it, while their households and industries chug along as normal.
The US missed the boat of power generation and it will be the American people who will ultimately pay for it, both literally and figuratively.
I just looked up the closest city to me, Boulder, Colorado:
https://bouldereconomiccouncil.org/news/ai-data-centers-expansion-trends-and-whats-next-for-boulder/
Turns out they are trying to get on board with AI...They state: "Due to strong research institutions and increasing tech investment, the city is creating a spot for itself in the evolving AI data center scene."
I admit to being utterly confused...I find AI to be the stuff of Ray Bradbury every fool in this country seems to be trending towards...How does AI help humanity? It doesn't. Why are so many attracted to it?
Ray Bradbury is turning over in his grave...
Thank you, as always, for your insightful and plain English writing.
Namaste,
I read your posts regularly, but screen time is hard on my eyes. Can you condider an audio version?
Thanks Mitch for keeping us informed on these crazy huge AI CENTERS. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm old- fashioned, but doesn't anyone think we have enough technology?? We have everything at our fingertips right now, on our cell phones and computers, and we've been using new AI programs for a while now, ChatGTP, Gemini, Google AI, without huge AI CENTERS. AND, what is this crazy idea that we have to beat China in this race??? Race for what??? More land development, more energy resources needed, potentially high usage and pollution of water resources???? Globally, energy resources, land resources for cropland, wildlife habitat, saving some areas as pristine for their beauty, diversity, and that some are huge carbon sinks are already strained. Globally, our soils are becoming infertile and polluted with horrible chemicals and synthetic fertilizers, while human population growth continues.....8 billion mouths to feed, shelter, cloth, use of resources. .. at the expense of more and more pollution of land, air, and water, both fresh and oceans. Once pollution is made, it basically cannot be cleaned. Making more is straining the only 3 places pollution can go on Earth, land, air, or water. "Clean" one area means that the removed pollution just gets put in one of the other 2 areas. Pollution basically gets pushed around if you really follow how we "clean" water, or air from smoke stacks....you end up with toxic sludge, where is that put????
AND, IMHO, on site at these AI CENTERS, small modular nuclear power should never be an option. Nuclear power is dangerous, creates toxic radioactive waste, that's toxic for 10,000 years. Currently, our radioactive waste is stored on site at decommissioned nuclear power plants bc we have no safe place to store it. For all of you that think we can recycle the decommissioned nuclear power plants radioactive waste, its true, uranium and plutonium can be extracted from waste. But at what costs, the technology is complicated, specially designed facilities need to be built to recycle this radioactive waste. No matter what we do, there will be ecological ramifications. They need to be thought through thoroughly by experts in Ecology, Physics, Chemistry, many fields. But, I am from the mindset of, let's try not to make more pollution than we're already dealing with. We are on the verge of ecosystem collapse globally, Climate Change, Biodiversity Crisis, global soil collapse/infertility. Human Population Growth and the economy cannot continue to grow exponentially. Not one species ever grows exponentially without ecosystem checks and balances, humans have managed to manipulate these natural checks and balances.......to the detriment of all other living things. Our global economies run on trading commodities, what are these commodities?? Natural resources!! Everything we use, eat, make, sell, trade comes from the Earth's finite resources. They are getting depleted at record breaking rates. AND, while we're using these natural resources to make things, we make more and more pollution. So, more huge developments like AI CENTERS on an already strained Earth???? At what point do we realize what we're doing 🤔??? AND for what??? What is more important than keeping our Earth alive and thriving??? Is our only home 🏡 🌎 worth saving?? Worth more than a technological race????? I'm hoping clean fresh water, food, Biodiversity, healthy ecosystems are more important to most of us. The billionaires, instead of using their money for more technology, resource use, more pollution, maybe they can use their wealth to figure out the most natural, less polluting methods to fix our infertile soil (with composted biomass), clean our water and oceans, maybe build a few more recycling ♻️ plants to recycle more of our plastic use??? I could go on, but, this is just off of the top of my head. Things I'm worried about daily, my mind literally races at 1000 mph, hard to sleep with a racey mind!!!
Judith Chupasko
😊❤️🐾🌿🌎☀️
The wind power industry has to be the biggest question facing this energy need. As Trump is paying wind turbine companies to take their turbines out or not build them at all, China is building giant turbines with new methods of installing and anchoring them. The only thing missing is for the Trump bros to invest in a wind turbine company. The seventy six percent jump in utility bills is still what I’m thinking about as much as anything.
REMEMBER ... the ENORMOUS "contributions" and what industries "contributed" them to support orange clown's election ..... AND suddenly there is NO SUPPORT for wind methods.
Also see my article with maps, links and more data: "They're Building Data Centers Across America to Feed the AI Machine. Nobody Asked You First." https://mitchthelawyer.substack.com/p/theyre-building-data-centers-across?r=2fe7t3&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web