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The legislature in Maine has voted to ban new hypers scale data centers. In Utah, residents have holding a referendum over a big data center project. In Memphis, there's been a big fuss over XAI's Colossus data center, which has used a whole load of gas turbines and whether that's allowed or not. In Ireland, this is an amazing number. Uh data centers are now accounting for 30% of all electricity use, up from 5% in 2015. So, unsurprisingly, that is causing concern. Alex, why has this come up the agenda in recent months? A big part of the reason is that it's getting bigger. That Utah data center you described as a great example, although it's a little sketchy as plans go. Uh the top level figure is this
is a portion of land split over three chunks of Utah. The size of the country of Andor. And Pandora is a small country, but that's a big data center. I don't know how big Andor is, but 61 square miles. I've also heard this described as twice as big as Manhattan. And Manhattan is quite big. Manhattan is pretty big. This is a this is a massive project and now this isn't to be clear a building that size is no this is three chunks of land each of them containing everything you need to do hypers scale AI training the eventual plan is for 9 gawatt of
electricity more than the rest of the state of Utah uses to be plowed into these data centers and what that means is that we're seeing data centers move from being a local story to a regional or national one right these are things that are on 24/7 they require cooling which implies fans, which implies noise, but ultimately they are that class of infrastructure that most people agree ought to go somewhere and isn't very nice to live next to. And so you, you know, try and put them in industrial areas away from residential homes and all of that works fairly well until they get so big that their electricity draw affects the national conversation or that there are, you know, no space left
in the industrial zones to place them in. So you start edging ever closer to residents or busting out onto you know agricultural or green belt land that people feel oughtn't be the how the home of a data center. Okay Archie you've just moved back from the US. Um aside from national security what are the other justifications that people who politicians who are in favor are using to defend these sorts of projects? Yeah it's it's a microcosm for the eye debate. So you have the national security side in the war against China and the race and so on. As you were saying, in local politics, it usually gets a lot more ground level very quickly. So, people talk about the
property tax revenue. These companies pay a lot of money and these are buildings you can stick somewhere that just spit out money for local schools. To a degree, they talk about jobs, which is often quite helpful. Uh, to a degree, they talk about kind of the broader economic growth benefits across the country. And of course, the final bit is that AI is a product that a lot of people hate as we can see there, but also a lot of people use. I mean, the adoption numbers, as you know, are pretty staggering and a lot of people find very helpful. So if you can connect the helpful chat GBT query to the worring warehouse of servers then that can be somewhat persuasive but as we've seen not many voters.
We've heard from some prominent Democrats who are opposed to data centers and think they can you know make hay from this. Why and in what areas do they think they can benefit from this? There's three big reasons why all of this is so unpopular. I think you can basically point to the labor impact, you can point to the climate impact and you can point to the vibes. The labor impacts are fairly obvious. For a lot of the economic benefits of AI to come, you're talking about some form of, at least in the short term, disemployment. AI can do the jobs that people can. And a lot of people like that because it means they can save money on their wage
bills or they can grow their company without hiring as fast. Most economists would say even if that does happen and it doesn't shake out in the sense that it augments labor and means that any given person becomes more productive and there is no disemployment in the long term that's great anyway. Growth leads to more jobs in the community, more jobs in society in general. If you couldn't afford to pay someone to uh do something then once there's been lots more economic growth you can. Marvelous. that is undercut by the fact that the AI bigwigs themselves love talking about how there's not going to be any jobs in the future. You know, Sam Alman has spent years hopping on about how if AI takes
off, we're going to need universal basic income to cover the fact that there'll be no jobs for people. Climate is the next one. And you know, in the US in particular, this is a left aligned issue. And it is absolutely true that AI data centers in particular appear to be marginal extra use. This is not like an electric car which you know turns uh fossil fuel use into electricity use. This is something that a use of electricity that wouldn't have been there were it not for AI. And it's somewhat tricky to connect it to other uses that are declining. You can perhaps argue that you know if I use chat GPT to
generate an image then an illustrator somewhere doesn't have to have their computer on for six hours to do the same thing. But a that doesn't sound great. that takes it back to that labor argument. And B, you do sort of end up arguing that the electricity that people use to survive is in some way offset by their AI skills instead. And that doesn't work either. And what about the vibes? The vibes are rancid. I think it's fair to say again particularly in the US uh AI's vibes have been co-opted by a sort of right-wing Silicon Valley tech class who pal around with the president who are reflected you know Alexander
Kaziocortez gave the list Sam Alman Elon Musk Peters heel two of those people are extremely aligned not just with the US right but with a pretty extreme wing of the US right and Sam Alman while he has historically been aligned with the American center or center left has himself been pinging up to the President Trump. So all of those things combined to mean that opposing AI and AI data centers is a very obvious thing to do if you're on the American left.
