Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 902: The Pros, Cons, and Complications of Data Centers

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Ep. 902: The Pros, Cons, and Complications of Data Centers · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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  Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
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  Speaker 1: T E dot com. Okay, folks, here, by popular demand
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: is our show where we dive into data centers from
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: a natural resources perspective. People are always writing in asking
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: about why don't we cover this more?
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: We should do it. Part of the.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Problems I was trying to find the perfect person to
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  Speaker 1: do it, because I just want someone that can look
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  Speaker 1: at this at the data center debate from an informed perspective,
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  Speaker 1: from an even perspective, someone that's not trying to drive
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: a particular narrative or that's in the pocket of a
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  Speaker 1: certain set of interests, like someone to take a journalistic
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  Speaker 1: look at what is going on with data centers. And
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: she's here and Davis Vaughan and was a longtime Wall
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  Speaker 1: Street journal Energy and Finance reporter. Then she became an
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: investment analyst, which is basically where you like do investigative
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: reporting on companies.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: That's right. I was like an investigative reporter for portfolio managers.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Got it so if they wanted to make an investment,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: you go dig up the dirt or they.
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: Get the best version of the truth you can find.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Best version of the truth you can find.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: And now Anne has re entered journalism and is writing
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: a book which likely likely will be called Gigawatt, and
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: it is about the AI industrial boom, how it is
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  Speaker 1: reshaping the energy industry, the industrial landscape, and the American heartland.
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  Speaker 1: She currently writes this is this is where I found Anne.
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  Speaker 1: She currently writes a column for the Information So it's
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  Speaker 1: information dot Com, the Information dot Com, the Information friends
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  Speaker 1: send me, friends would send me your columns. And she
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  Speaker 1: writes a column on AI infrastructure for the Information dot Com.
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  Speaker 1: That's a publication based out of Silicon Valley. And what
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  Speaker 1: I liked about it about your writing when I would
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  Speaker 1: read it is it was like it was very refreshing
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  Speaker 1: to hear someone looking at the issue that I felt
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  Speaker 1: hadn't already arrived at all. The answers I was just
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  Speaker 1: asking questions and also taking, as we're going to get into,
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  Speaker 1: taking a lot of measurements, measurements of water, measurements of energy,
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  Speaker 1: measurements of footprint, and putting those measurements sort of into
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  Speaker 1: context and comparing them to things that people might understand.
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  Speaker 1: So rather than hearing about some kind of wattage, comparing
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  Speaker 1: that to other industrial applications, other things that we're all
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  Speaker 1: familiar with, so you start to form a relative picture.
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  Speaker 1: So thank you for coming on, and thank you for
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  Speaker 1: sharing a bunch of your reporting, especially because you're doing
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  Speaker 1: this before your book comes out, which is which is
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  Speaker 1: good of you.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm
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  Speaker 3: excited about your podcast and having come from the Blue
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  Speaker 3: Ridge Mountains and love the outdoors. It's a big part
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  Speaker 3: of sorting through what's happening today.
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  Speaker 2: Got it right?
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  Speaker 1: Can you start out by this kind of a dumb
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  Speaker 1: question about this I want, I want to do it.
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  Speaker 1: Can you start out by like telling people in twenty
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  Speaker 1: twenty six, when they see data center in a headline
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  Speaker 1: in the newspaper, Okay, what exactly.
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  Speaker 2: Are they talking about?
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  Speaker 1: It's a dumb question of just seting what is a
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  Speaker 1: data center today.
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  Speaker 3: Well, I'll tell you what it is not. It is
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  Speaker 3: not clouds in the sky. The data center is referred
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  Speaker 3: to as the cloud. It's like the I think it's
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  Speaker 3: one of the best marketing decisions tech has ever made
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  Speaker 3: for itself is to call data centers a cloud. These
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  Speaker 3: are in the cloud. It's in the cloud, and this
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  Speaker 3: cloud is really an industrial complex and so it's an
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  Speaker 3: industrial scale facility back kind of pre AI when we
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  Speaker 3: just thought of it as the cloud that holds our
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  Speaker 3: entire digital lives, and that means everything that you know,
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  Speaker 3: we waste our time on, and everything that is vital
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  Speaker 3: to our society. So you know, how you save your pictures,
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  Speaker 3: how you strain your movies, how you listen to your podcasts,
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  Speaker 3: how you get money out of the ATM, you know
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  Speaker 3: how your payroll gets paid, how you know life saving
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  Speaker 3: machines stay on and scan your body and track data.
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  Speaker 3: It's all that and the you know, cloud. Data centers
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  Speaker 3: have been a pretty big part of the digital landscape
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  Speaker 3: since you know, kind of the mid two thousands. A
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  Speaker 3: lot of companies used to have basically their own data rooms,
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  Speaker 3: computer rooms, and they'd have servers that were in a closet,
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  Speaker 3: and eventually some of those got bigger. And of course,
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  Speaker 3: since you know, for decades we've had government supercomputers that
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  Speaker 3: were far bigger than that. But this idea of a
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  Speaker 3: data center that started to grow commercially came with the
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  Speaker 3: rise of the Internet. These these buildings, you know, would
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  Speaker 3: uh serve a variety of different customers. And the notion
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  Speaker 3: of these big tech software companies becoming cloud giants really
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  Speaker 3: meant that Google, Microsoft, Amazon began to build buildings with rows,
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  Speaker 3: hallways of chips and servers and all the equipment that
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  Speaker 3: keeps them at this goldilocks you know, environment and temperature
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  Speaker 3: and fiber would go in and out and and data
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  Speaker 3: would you know, Uh, it was very important to have
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  Speaker 3: data have what is called low latency, so they tended
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  Speaker 3: to be in urban centers and the low latency low
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  Speaker 3: latency means quick like you know, you know when you
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  Speaker 3: when you remember the days when you would try to
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  Speaker 3: watch a video and it would say buffering, buffering, Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: that's low latency. And so you need instantaneous data for
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  Speaker 3: something life saving, like you know, an emergency response system.
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  Speaker 3: Traders want instantaneous data. We get upset if we can't
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  Speaker 3: you know, if a text doesn't come through right away.
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  Speaker 3: There are certain businesses that really are mission critical and
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  Speaker 3: that need to be near a city. So a lot
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  Speaker 3: of data centers got built in smaller fashion before the
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  Speaker 3: AI age, in especially northern Virginia near Washington, d C.
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  Speaker 3: And then some big cities like Dallas, Chicago, Phoenix out
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  Speaker 3: on you know, the West coast and both the Silicon
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  Speaker 3: Valley area and then up in the Pacific Northwest near Seattle.
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  Speaker 1: Was it was it really that proximity in those days,
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  Speaker 1: which is just like yesterday. Yeah, the proximity to you
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  Speaker 1: to user groups was important, like physical proximity to big
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  Speaker 1: populations of people.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, because the there's a limit to how quickly data,
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  Speaker 3: you know, will travel on fiber. And we're talking, you know,
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  Speaker 3: just nanoseconds. We're not talking, you know, we're we're really
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  Speaker 3: unwilling to wait for a few seconds for something to
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  Speaker 3: come through. So they were built under that, you know
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  Speaker 3: premise that giant amounts of fiber got built in the
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  Speaker 3: dot com era, there was a whole bunch of it left,
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  Speaker 3: you know, didn't get used, and then we kind of
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  Speaker 3: built into that in the two thousands and in the
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  Speaker 3: twenty tents, and when COVID happened, people started using online
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  Speaker 3: digital resources like crazy, and even more continued to be built.
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  Speaker 3: And so then when chat, GPT and AI as a
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  Speaker 3: new paradigm kind of really came on the scene around
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  Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, there began to be the conception of
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  Speaker 3: a whole nother kind of scale of data center. So
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  Speaker 3: AI data centers are bigger, more power hungry, more resource hungry,
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  Speaker 3: really because AI models operate on a scaling phenomenon, and
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  Speaker 3: so the idea is that it's not just a building
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  Speaker 3: with a whole bunch of different companies siloed computing taking place,
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  Speaker 3: but instead it is one big campus where all the
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  Speaker 3: chips are connected to all the other chips and they're
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  Speaker 3: all talking to each other, and it's like one big brain.
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  Speaker 3: And the more powerful models that have been trained have
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  Speaker 3: operated on this concept, and so we're building even bigger
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  Speaker 3: ones now and that they operate all together big that
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  Speaker 3: means bigger footprint for these data centers, more industrial equipment
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  Speaker 3: to bring them the electricity and to cool them. And
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  Speaker 3: that's why they are basically factories.
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  Speaker 1: And all the time that we've been like, well, let
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  Speaker 1: me reapproach that maybe you can correct me on the timeline,
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  Speaker 1: but at what point was it a year ago?
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  Speaker 2: Was it eighteen months ago?
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  Speaker 1: At what point was it that all of a sudden
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  Speaker 1: this debate about data centers and the environmental impact of
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  Speaker 1: data centers exploded. You probably have a different view of
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  Speaker 1: it because you follow this and report on it, But
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  Speaker 1: try to, like in your mind, think of think of
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  Speaker 1: just a normal, concerned citizen who reads a few newspapers
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  Speaker 1: in the morning. Like, help me, remember when was it
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  Speaker 1: at all sudden? It was just like the issue.
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  Speaker 3: It was that issue around the end of twenty twenty
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  Speaker 3: five and early twenty twenty six.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, so it was recent, yeah, Because what struck me
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  Speaker 1: is where was the argument about data centers prior to that?
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  Speaker 2: Was there one?
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  Speaker 3: Yes, there was, And if you go back you will
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  Speaker 3: find some pushback from a few years ago. I think
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  Speaker 3: that the scale just had not hit people. And so
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  Speaker 3: this AI boom has gone through several stages, and you know,
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  Speaker 3: at first it was just like, what is this AI thing?
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  Speaker 3: What is chat GPT? It's going to change everything? And
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  Speaker 3: then there was this stage when I was actually still
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  Speaker 3: working as an investment analyst where everyone was saying how
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  Speaker 3: much power are we going to need and where is
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  Speaker 3: it going to go? And you know, the financial and
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  Speaker 3: energy and tech types were mobilizing and everyone was saying,
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  Speaker 3: can we really use this much power? Then there was,
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  Speaker 3: like maybe in the fall of last year, an absolute
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  Speaker 3: panic over whether AI was a bubble and whether we're
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  Speaker 3: spending too much because at that stage everyone was really
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  Speaker 3: focused on how much the tech guys were going to
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  Speaker 3: be spending and you know, every quarter and how they
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  Speaker 3: had gone from just being so cash rich to spending
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  Speaker 3: you know, a great deal of their cash flow. And
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  Speaker 3: so all during that time, the the the you know,
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  Speaker 3: wildcatters that were trying to put AI together and find
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  Speaker 3: places to put it were going to communities and starting
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  Speaker 3: to make plans for data centers and individual communities were
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  Speaker 3: having meetings and saying, what do we think about this?
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  Speaker 3: But the populace in general is not super engaged on
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  Speaker 3: you know, their local community level. There's we've kind of
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  Speaker 3: turned polarized and less local news to consume anyway, and
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  Speaker 3: the digital age sadly, and and you know, people have,
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  Speaker 3: you know, whatever they're concerned about on the national level,
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  Speaker 3: and all of a sudden, these campuses started to get
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  Speaker 3: constructed and people started to say, wait a minute, like,
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  Speaker 3: I didn't know this was happening, and well, you know,
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  Speaker 3: some of some of this may have been done just
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  Speaker 3: like any kind of industrial real estate project might have
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  Speaker 3: been in the past, where people go to the local
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  Speaker 3: zoning authorities they say, Hey, we're with this company, we
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  Speaker 3: want to buy this land. Can we put this application in?
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  Speaker 3: You know, normally the public is not watching every move
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  Speaker 3: on that front, but all of a sudden, there was
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  Speaker 3: this collective realization that there have been a kind of
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  Speaker 3: rush out into the middle of the country because these
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  Speaker 3: data centers were on a totally different scale than the
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  Speaker 3: cloud data centers, and we're going to need to go
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  Speaker 3: places where there was enough land or where there was
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  Speaker 3: enough power, where there was some headroom in you know,
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  Speaker 3: whether it was water, the grid, and.
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  Speaker 2: That is.
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  Speaker 3: It kind of started to reach a fever pitch. I
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  Speaker 3: would say, I noticed it on a trip to Wisconsin
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  Speaker 3: in early February, where the backlash had grown just exponentially.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to do a thing where you give
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: me you can pick, or you can do neither, or
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  Speaker 1: we can play a game to figure out who does it. Like,
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  Speaker 1: I want to do the positives. Just before we get
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  Speaker 1: into some of the details. I want to do the
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  Speaker 1: positives and negatives. You can take both of them. I
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  Speaker 1: can take one, you can do both. You can sell
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  Speaker 1: me on the hysterical view. I don't want to load
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  Speaker 1: it too much. You can sell me on like why
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  Speaker 1: this is upsetting the people, and you can sell me
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: on why it's exciting to some right, or we can.
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  Speaker 2: Split the job up to you.
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  Speaker 3: Well, okay, So the worries are that data centers are
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  Speaker 3: going to destroy our environment, They're going to you know,
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: destroy our health, That they'll drain Lake Michigan, they'll you know,
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  Speaker 3: raise the temperature above the buildings and into our neighborhoods
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  Speaker 3: so poison the water supply. They'll spike our power bills,
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  Speaker 3: they'll only take subsidies and not give anything back to
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  Speaker 3: you know, local communities, and and that it's all happening
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  Speaker 3: in secret. So I think that's part of the that's the.
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  Speaker 1: That's the vibe I get. That's the vibe I get
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  Speaker 1: of the panic.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and not to even mention that
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  Speaker 3: it's existential to humanity and it could destroy humanity. Not
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  Speaker 3: a small concern either.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, because that's a certain thing, is it'd be in
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  Speaker 1: looking at water consumption, energy consumption footprint, there's also just
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  Speaker 1: it's fueled by a general apprehension.
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  Speaker 2: And it'd be like, so that it can take my job.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, right, I got to give up all that, I
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: got to give up clean water, I got to give
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  Speaker 1: up all this stuff. I got to accept this I
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  Speaker 1: sore into my community so that then this can take
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: my friend's.
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  Speaker 3: Jobs, that's right, and my future, my children's future jobs.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: And I don't think that the tech industry has done
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  Speaker 3: itself any favors by you know, carrying out a narrative
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  Speaker 3: that is you know, potentially quite exaggerated in that view,
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  Speaker 3: but you know, candidly, we all have a lot to
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: learn as time unfolds. So so yeah, I mean you
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: ask like, how do you separate or or figure out
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: what is truth and what is what is crazy? And
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: what what is rational to worry about? And I guess
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  Speaker 3: I I would start with what what is rational to
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  Speaker 3: worry about? It is very rational to worry about, you know,
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  Speaker 3: to fear change and uncertainty. And we are facing an incredible,
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: uh turning point. We're in the early days of the
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  Speaker 3: Ai Revolution, and there's incredible fear and uncertainty, and that's rational.
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  Speaker 3: And I think it's rational to love your community and
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: to love the character of your community. And you know,
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: especially if you've you know, uh, even if there's been
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: some economic decline, you've kind of made peace with that,
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: or you you kind of love where you're from and
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: you kind of enjoy a little bit of the piece
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: that has come with some of the economic decline in
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: your region and the natural beauty instead making you know,
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: like coming to grips with it looking completely different. Is
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: I think that's very rational. Like some of the scale
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: of what I'm talking about in rural communities we are
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: talking about in the end, a campus that I sometimes
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: think of it as like, you know, five pentagons, like
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: landing in the field across from your house. These are
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: huge campuses, some of them. Yeah, like uh, well, uh,
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: it's many more than Walmart super campuses. Like a Meta
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  Speaker 3: campus in Louisiana is five miles long and one mile wide,
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: are you kidding? And so I've driven the perimeters of
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: concrete not a concrete it's many buildings. So it's many
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: buildings with land in between. And when they're finished, they
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: will have some grass and they will have some parking lots,
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: and they will.
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  Speaker 1: The footprint of that thing is five miles by a mile. Yeah,
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: that particularly it's the footprint. It's it's the footprint of
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: a large municipal airport.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, it's not dissimilar from an airport. And so it
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: is rational to say, wait, this scale is truly it
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: feels nuts to me, and and and and you know
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: the truth is that the landscape has changed through many
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: years of other industrial revolutions. Railroads have you know, crisscrossed
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: and and you know, maybe maybe some thought at the
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: time scarred the landscape and we got used to those
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: we have area.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Someone n like today was proposedly the railroad infrastructure as
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: a new concept.
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  Speaker 2: You'd never get it done.
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: You'd never get it on today.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: Like, hey, I got an idea I never run.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: You know, we're going to run these continuous lines all
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: across the country and eminent domain everything.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: You'd never get it through.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: I'm going to put poles up with wires all over
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: every single street.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: Polled wires and people would be like, no, what you're
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: not doing that?
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So I mean I think it's it's it's rational
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: to you know, uh, and it's it's it's understandable too
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  Speaker 3: that people see technology and these they see data centers
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: as see embodiment of how tech has changed our lives
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: and you know, for the worse perhaps, and they sort
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: of see it for the worse, and of course tech
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: has also changed our lives for the better. And so
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  Speaker 3: I guess I would say what is not rational is
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: to not look at and do this with some common
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: sense and put context around it. So you know, one
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: piece of context, right, like, well, look we now have
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: airports that are these giant pieces of land that we
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: all depend on. The truth is we do all depend
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: on day centers every single day. Our lives are you know,
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: as dependent on energy as they are in digital and
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: now AI and energy are completely intertwined and they pull
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: in all kinds of other resources and we're grappling with
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: that and in real time in a hurry. The tech
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: industry is in a big hurry. And that's another part
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: of people's unease is how fast fast.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about some of the specifics, some of the
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: specific impacts. Is we start with water, Okay, what amount
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: of water? What amount of water are we talking about?
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: I mean, let's look at it. You know, there's another
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: question I got prior to that, because it just kind
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: of sets this whole thing up. When we talk about
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: what's going to happen, what is a comfortable timeline ten years?
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: We have no idea, right so there's sort of like
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: what's proposed right now, what's in process right now? So
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: if I say to you how much water our data
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: center is going to use? At what date are we
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: looking at?
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: Like?
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: What date is it fair to look at? Is it
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: like right now? Is it two years from now?
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: People use twenty thirty as the.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Guidepost, Okay, so when we're talking about it's just for
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: people to reminder here we're in twenty twenty six. When
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: we're talking about how much water, how much footprint, we're
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: sort of looking at reasonable projections about four years from now.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: Is that cool? Okay? So when I read articles.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Talking about data centers and resistance to data centers and things,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: one of the big issues that comes up is where
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: is all this water coming from? And that winds up
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: being like relevant. It's relevant to all Americans because we
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: all rely on abundant clean water. It's relevant to agriculture
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: obviously because food, and then in a sort of niche way,
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: it's very relevant to like me as a fisherman and
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: an outdoorsman, you know, like like the fact that our country,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: as wealthy as it is and as populous as it is,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: still has this like abundance of clean water full of
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: fish relative to other places around the world. That's like
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: a tremendous value. So when I hear something that might
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: threaten that, I get anxious. You know, how do we
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: look at the water issue here?
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think so I just a couple of
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: caveats that I'm not a water scientist, and and I'm
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: also in the process as I work on this book
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: of interrogating this topic from every angle that I can,
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: and you know, striving to figure out the best version
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: of the truth so that you know, we can all
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: talk apples to apples. And so I've attempted recently did
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: a column on water for the Information and have attempted
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: to do that for the book as well, sort of
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: saying what how much water, you know, does this industry
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: really consume? And has that changed? So it has changed.
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: Actually the data centers are getting bigger, but they're getting
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: more water efficient. So let's put kind of water broadly
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: speaking in perspective, so that this is this is kind
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: of a rough exercise. And again, like you know, there
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: are many resources that folks who have like helped me
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: think through this are drawing from. Okay, but so we
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: don't get alarmed by contextless numbers. You hear something like
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: billions of gallons of water being used a year, and
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: that sounds astonishingly large, sure, but in fact, big industries,
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: including agriculture, are using trillions of gallons a year.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: So the other thing you hear, and is kind of glib,
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: is you'll do it.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: You'll do a search, right, you do like a thing
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: on chat GPT, and then people be like, well, there
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: goes a gallon of water. Yeah, yeah, you hear it,
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: but you don't really no one knows what I should say,
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: No one.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: Most people don't really know what they're saying.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so let's start big and we kind of
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: telescope you know, out and then go go in a
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: little bit. So there's like, you know, if you maybe
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: you can keep a number in your head of like
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: fresh water consumption in the US and the like thirty
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: trillion gallons a year range, and.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: Well that's what that's what we're using.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, and and thirty gallons thirty trillion
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: gallons a year, and single crops in the United States
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: use as much as three trillion gallons a year. Okay,
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: so corn or alfalfa like for for livestock, and a
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: third of the corn, uh, you know harvest is going
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: to ethanol. So so this these are just single crops,
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: and so agriculture. Irrigation for agriculture does consume something like
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: you know, the like seventy percent of our fresh water,
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: So we're already using a lot of our fresh water
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: for irrigated crops. And so corn like three trillion gallons
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: a year California almonds one point two to one point
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: eight trillion gallons.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: Seriously, seriously see corned alfalfa.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: I get it because like.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: You're not an almond lover.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: Well no, no almond now man.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: But you know, the country's not going to without alfalfa
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: and be able to feed cattle, right, It's not going
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: to happen.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we might get along with that on.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: For ethanol and livestock feed and other things. It's not
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: going to happen. But it's like, I don't mean to
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: hack on the almond people like I like almond joy
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: as much as the next gap, and I'm just saying,
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: like the almond thing seems uh, I don't know, I
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: don't want to hack.
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: You know, we don't need to pick on them because
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: there's there's plenty of examples of the dairy farming. Dairy
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: farming is enormously water consumpted, and about an estimated like
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: ninety three percent of the water footprint of dairy farming
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: is actually just to feed cows or you know, basic.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: Blow dairy's got to blow almonds out of the water
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: as like a not quite a pun.
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: But yeah, I you know, I think it's it's it's
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: way up there. I guess it's like the statistic that
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: I came to armed with is that a gallon of milk,
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: and this is from the US airy industry, like Sustainability reports,
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: a gallon of milk takes one hundred and forty four
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: gallons of water to produce, really, and a pound of
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: cheese takes one hundred and sixty four gallons of water.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: When you take a sip, like when I put a
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: little half and half in my coffee, no one goes like, well,
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: there goes three gallons of water.
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: I think that we have normalized We love our farms.
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: We love our food, well farm we you know, we
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: love field blowing in the breeze and we having.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: A farm field across the road. Yes, that's a selling point.
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: You know. And a lot of people will say and
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: I had a farmer say this to me who sold
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: a very large chunk of lant to Meta. You know,
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: I hear over and over nobody can eat a data center.
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: He's like, well, these are you know, his words, not mine.
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: But he's like, don't tell that to me when you
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: know we have seven million acres of sorry, when we're
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: using you know, yeah, seven million acres in just in
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: Illinois or thirty thirty million acres of corn that is
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: harvested is going to ethanol. So we're not eating ethanol.
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: We shouldn't be eating ethanol.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a miss.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Like on the land used front, I think that that's
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: a little bit of a I don't know how wide
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: spread it is, but I would say with people not
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: adjacent to agriculture, I would say, when you're driving when
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: you're in the in the Upper Midwest and you're driving
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: through corn monocultures, I think that I think that most people,
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: most urban people feel that they are in a food
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: production landscape. Yeah, and they don't view it that they
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: are in a energy they are in a fuel and
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: energy production landscape. And it'd be like, it's like, I
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: don't even want to equate it to an oil field
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: because it's it's soil. It could be repurposed for other things. Right,
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: it's not developed, it's not under concrete and use. You
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: could grow different crops there next year if you wanted to.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: But it's it's energy. Yeah, you're looking at energy production.
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: So that's some of the agg let's take like lawn
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: irrigation and golf courses. All lawn irrigation in the United
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: States also equates to about three trillion a year, and
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: golf courses use about a half a trillion gallons of
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: water a year. You get into individuals.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: That the golf course, that you take all the water
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: used by Americans to water their grass or gardens in
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: that and that that's three trillion, and that golf courses
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: are sucking up a half trillion.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So like golf courses, there's a difference between consumptive
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: water use and water that is used return to its sources.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: We can talk about that just I want to tell listeners. Yeah,
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: We'll get into this because, of course, the amount of
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: water on Earth is a constant, so we need to
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: talk about when you say that you're using water, what
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: does it mean. Yeah, Like, just to give one example,
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: at our fish shack, we pull water out of a creek.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: It runs through our fish shack, but goes back into
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: the creek. Yes, doe, I mean, so it's like we're
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: just detaining it for a minute and putting it right
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: back where it came from at the same temperature in
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: like measured in quartz. But I'm saying it's like, so
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: you'd be like, are we using water? Like when I
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: turn the hose on, am I using water? Because that
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: water's flowing right back into where I got it from.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: So we'll get into that a little bit, like like
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: when the data centers using water, how are they using it?
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: And why can't they put it back where they found it?
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: We'll talk about this.
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: Well, your fish shack, let's now zoom into a much
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: higher industrial scale, which would be a power plant is
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: doing something similar to your fish shack. It is withdrawing
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: a pretty large amount of water from water sources like
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: lakes and rivers, but approximately ninety five percent of the
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: water gets returned to its source.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: Good now way still gets counted as usage though.
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: It's counted as usage but not. But if you really
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: think of consumption, it's not all like you know, maybe
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: water is considered consumed and this is where you want
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: to go to an expert. But like generally speaking, when
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: it evaporates and it doesn't, it's not directly Okay, yeah.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: That's the number. I'm interested in where you've moved it.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: I don't want to get two in the weeds on this.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: But like, once you evaporate it and put into cloud cover,
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: you're moving it to different drainages, you're moving it to
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: different basins, and you're like you're redistributing water rather than
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: you're keeping it in a closed circuit system. That's right,
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: but it was keep hitting me with how much the
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: relative unwaters.
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: Let's look at the electric sector though, but it's still
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: it uses around forty five trillion gallons annually the power
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: generating electricity too cool thermal power, So thermal power would
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: be like coal plants, natural gas plants and nuclear plants
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: so as a posed to like solar or you know,
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: hydroelectric and the but you know, only about five percent
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: of that is fully consumed and it's returned to its source,
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: and there are regulations around this, but you know, I
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: none of us like to think of warm water going
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: into a pristine ecosystem. So there's regulation around this, and
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: there's ways that it has dealt with.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: From from a fishing perspective, yeah, which is how I
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: look at many things in life. A hot water discharge
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: is a blessing and a curse, you know, because like
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: a hot water discharge could be the best fishing place
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: in the world, it can also be what destroys a
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: body of water, Yeah, by changing the water temperature. So
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: it's like it's a it's a funny you know, like
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: many anglers, especially in the Great Lakes area, you have
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: like a complicated relationship with hot water discharges.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, fisher like the fish are just there, right, and
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: you're like it's kind of like you're cheating. They're there
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: for the hot water discharge. Then at the time other
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: times year it makes the water too dam warm, you.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: Know, right, Yeah, and it changes to fishing conditions and
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: you can't fish at all.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So people have a there's like in my world,
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: there's a there's like a complicated relationship with those things. Yeah,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: but yeah, they're putting it back, they're putting it back
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: where they got it from.
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: But it's just a lot hotter.
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. So the electric sector that this is where
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: you really want to focus when you're thinking about data centers.
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: So members of the data center industry have made significant
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: strides in changing how they do water out of necessity.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: So AI runs hotter than traditional computing. It takes a
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: lot more electricity, and it puts it into much denser
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: racks of like you know, tightly tightly networked chips and
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: servers and memory and all this stuff. And so there
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: they've now learned to do what's called closed loop cooling.
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: Literally they'll run a cooling liquid which you know can
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: include water and glycol in, you know, over chips and
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: and in these tiny tubes that get into bigger tubes
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: and you know, eventually also need to go up to
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: a or or out to a big set of equipment
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: that cools that water and then it sends it all
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: back to do it all over again. When today's really
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: advanced AI data centers get built, they get filled up
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: with a pretty small amount of water, like for example,
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: a Microsoft facility in Wisconsin was filled. I think it's
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: a handful of swimming pools worth of water. It's about
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: what a car wash would use in a year, not
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: not too much when you people have forgotten how much
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: water other industrial things, you know, factories, steel mill you know,
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: like any any industrial plant uses water. Right, so chip
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: foundries use a giant amount of water. So on a
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: relative basis, the data center guys will sometimes say we're
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: hardly using any water, but there is a trade off
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: that they you know, I think would be smart to
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: just upfront acknowledge because the closed loop cooling is using
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: a lot of new advanced equipment and existing technologies that
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: we've known about that basically are very energy intensive, and
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: so that means they draw more power to do that,
• 35:26
  Speaker 3: and that means that if they are using the output
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: of a thermal power plant that is up the road,
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: that thermal power plant is using a lot of water
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: to you know, cool as facilities and make the power.
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: And so we're kind of trading one problem for another day.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're dropping off on water used to pick but
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: then they need energy to cool the water.
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah then they Yeah, then they need energy and that
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: needs to be cool to the power plant. So the
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: much bigger offenders in the water for the digital economy
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: are electric power plants. And actually chip foundries are extremely
• 36:02
  Speaker 3: water intensive and they use ultra pure water and it
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: takes you know, a large, you know, kind of extra
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: amount of water to get it fully pure and to
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: do that, and and some of it is consumptive. And
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: so there are some water treatment and you know, technology
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: companies that have done some really interesting studies. You know,
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: Xylum's done one that I wrote about in my last column,
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: just showing Uh, it's if you kind of if you
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: can visualize like these two layers of giant mountains of
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: water use, and they are semiconductor plants and power plants,
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: and there's kind of a ribbon on the top which
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: is data centers.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: So with all those, hit a couple of those again,
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: like hit me with with the water use of agriculture. Yeah,
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: it's like the total water use. Hit me with the
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: couple and then tell me in twenty thirty where we're
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: looking at cross.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: Single crops, big big crops in the US might be
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: three trillion gallons a year.
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: Of water.
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: Direct water use of data centers has been estimated at
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: roughly eighteen billion gallons. So remember a billion is one
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: thousand less order of magnitude one thousand less than a trillion,
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: So three trillion for a single crop, US data center
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: use eighteen billion. We're talking way way smaller.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: That's project projection.
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: Like a quarter of a percent, And so it's just
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: important to kind of keep some of that in perspective
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: because if even the data center footprint of on site
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: plus the amount consumed in the electric sector, you take
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: how much power they're using, you have to haircut it
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: because not all power is thermal power. And you also
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: have to haircut it because it's not just as we said,
• 37:53
  Speaker 3: all consumed. And it's still like we're talking one percent
• 37:59
  Speaker 3: of fresh one even maybe by twenty thirty, the data
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: centers might be using in a, you know, a more
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: consumptive fashion.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Is it safe to say that it's the part of
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: the concerns. It's like it's it's it's added mortality on water.
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: Meaning we're used to we're.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: Comfortable with how much water we're using for energy, how
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: much water we're using for agriculture, and we've just become
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: numb to it.
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: We we just look.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: At it like it's just like how we're to it,
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: and so when someone comes and says, I'm going to
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: draw yeah, blank billion gallons, it is an added stressor
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: for sure. But in the context of the and I
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: know you're not you know, and you know, I know
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: you're not looking at this from from an apologist perspective,
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: But it's just very interesting to hear from a relative
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: sense of other industries what we're talking about, because the
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: impression one would get, the impression one would get is
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: that we're talking about a level of water, like an
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: unprecedented level of water use.
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, then we should also talk about why people
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: are alarmed. And well, first I'll tell you something that's
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: really depressing, which is about it depends on the estimate,
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: but eighteen to thirty percent of municipal water system water
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: is getting wasted completely because of leaks, leaky pipes, old infrastructure.
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: Water utilities are typically like owned by municipalities, They are underfunded,
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: and they didn't have great technology. Today it exists to
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: kind of monitor and figure out where leaks are. And
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: so even as we use more water for industrial purposes,
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: for data centers, we're leaving so much of it, you know,
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: like where we can't access it, Like it's just fallen
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: out of our water system. So that's tough. The other
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: problem is that a lot of digital infrastructure is going
• 40:07
  Speaker 3: to water stressed places and so in individuals, it's a
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: bigger incremental stress on the system. It's a very big
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: incremental What is.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: What is the rational? Well maybe we should do that one.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: Next is the physical footprint? Well, go on on water,
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: We'll talk about physical footprint next.
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So, well, you know, the you've seen a lot
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: of chip plants locate in the Southwest, in the Phoenix area.
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: A lot of data centers are there too. And when
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: when I have been traveling the country looking at the
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: AI boom and where the next generation of digital infrastructure
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: is getting built, it's getting built in the middle of
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: the country effectively, so and some of them are in
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: water stressed areas. So we kind of think of the
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: American West and the sort of more desert landscape as
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: water stress. The Colorado River basin, for sure, is a
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: is an area of significant water stress. The Ogalala Water
• 41:08
  Speaker 3: Aquifer which goes from South Dakota down.
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: To Texas basically the American Great Plans.
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: And you know, in both cases there have been alarms
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: sounded about water before the AI boom in these regions.
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: But they're they're for a variety of different reasons, good
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: places to build AI data center campuses.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: At this point, like if if if I carry in
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: my mind from just being a concerned citizen, if I
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: carry in my mind an idea that water consumption is
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: a major implication of AI infrastructure. And then someone tells
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: me that that data centers, that people are building data
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: centers and they're they're they're tending toward the Colorado basin,
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: the Galawa aquifer, So like the American planes the Southwest,
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: and I have the water thing in my mind. I'm like,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: that seems ridiculous.
• 42:07
  Speaker 2: But is it?
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: Are are they going? Are data centers now going where
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: it makes sense to put a data center or are
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: they going where they're welcome? Like like when they look
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: at when they look at like where should we try?
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: Is it they won't put up a fuss, Let's go there,
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: water be damned or are they like no, for for
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: all these reasons of infrastructure, this is the place to be.
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So water is a factor and where they go,
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: and there are data centers being placed in areas with
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: plentiful water too.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: I just got they don't want it either them.
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: But well, you know, water is less, it's less of
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: an of a footprint than the energy that these facilities.
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: But they're going to different spots. So for example, you know,
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: they're going to the Mississippi River delta and sorry, really
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: in Mississippi and Louisiana.
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, why let's take that one for instance.
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: Okay, so water availability is a draw to go there, right,
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: And I literally was driving a week and a half
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: ago through Louisiana past you know Bayous where the tree
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: trunks are basically swimming in water. Right. There's water everywhere,
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: and and it's you know, if a farmer said to
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: me that you know, this water, this aquifer will not
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: you know, it does not have a drain drain the
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: you know, the water supply risk. Now, that does not
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: mean that water is not precious everywhere, right, And so
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: Texas is getting an enormous number of these new data centers,
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: and water scarcity is a big issue in Texas. And
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: you know, in like there's a new study out of
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: the University of Texas that looks at both the direct
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: water use, which as I've said, is getting better data centers,
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: and the indirect water use from power, which is getting
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: worse in some ways. It depends on what what we
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: end up putting in as the power source. Right, if
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: we don't build coal plants, you know, that's a whole
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: lot better for the water supply. But the Texas could
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: end up having you know, right now it's only data
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: centers are only point four percent of water use, but
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: growing water needs for a I could bump up just
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: in Texas the water used directly and indirectly from AI
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: to as much as five percent, and that would be
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: you know, that would exceed that of livestock and mining.
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: It would still be well short of irrigated farming. But
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: there are places that are water stressed where you know,
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: it is not trivial that the build up of what
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: we're trying to what the tech industry is intending.
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then their thing in Texas is you have
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: you have an exploding human population. So when when when
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: urban planners are thinking about water consumption into the future,
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: and you're talking about an industry going from point four
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: to five percent, that's like meaningful water. But like, but
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: to that question of when when these entities that build
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: data centers survey the country, why are they picking where
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: they pick.
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: Why are they picking it? The very biggest factor is power.
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: So we have an aging power grid. And while we
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: have lost some power users because we have de industrialized,
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: we have a grid that it has not kept up
• 46:01
  Speaker 3: with with the progress of the economy and and now
• 46:06
  Speaker 3: needs both because of extreme weather and uh just general
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: you know, age needs a lot of investment and the
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: you know, power grid just cannot handle gigawatt scale, uh
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: power just anywhere. So what is a gigawatt? Gigawatt is
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: as much power as the whole city of San Francisco
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: or Denver consumes.
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: In how much time.
• 46:35
  Speaker 3: It's a capacity figure. You can also look at at
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: energy as like you need plants capable of producing this
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: much a gigawatt.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: So so a plant would you're saying, like an AI
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: data center and AI campus data center campus would feasibly
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: use the same amount of power that is being used
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: in Denver.
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: Correct or more.
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: There are multis and that's like the residents, the businesses,
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: the manufacturing, yeah, the.
• 47:11
  Speaker 3: Whole community, and as going to this concentrated place. Yeah,
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: it's a big land mask, but we're talking a few
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: thousand acres where that much power could be going into
• 47:22
  Speaker 3: a single place. So it's it's the scale.
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: Of it is selecting areas where there's where there's the
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: possibility of getting and moving that amount of power.
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and that has It's not like, you know, just
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: because there are power lines going through a property or
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: just because there's a power plant, a nuclear power plant
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: in the vicinity that is available. So then you get
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: to things like power congestion and the ability to pull
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: a large amount of power to a single location. And
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: so it becomes this really complicated matrix of factors that
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: are bringing people places. So it's you know, can the
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: power are there? Are there pockets of power that are accessible?
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: Does the the community or the state make it easy
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: to build? Is there water? This is not the very
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: first concern though, Is there fiber? Fiber is easier to lay,
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: but you know, we also had a glot of fiber
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: that was laid in the you know, in the dot
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: com days, So you know there these are some of
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: the concerns. You know, others are our land value and
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: so you will now see data center developments going up.
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: It's in you know, virtually everywhere, and.
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: Like when you factor all this in, they are are
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: they actually looking for land deals like the costs of
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: the land matter to them.
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the cost of the land matters. Places where data
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: centers are quite saturated, like northern Virginia, the you know,
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: the land values have approached, you know, the millions of
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: per acre and you can't really even get a campus
• 49:19
  Speaker 3: that's that big. And so you know, AI starts with
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: these big training campuses that are big. But eventually, and
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: not too long from now, where you're going to hear
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: a lot more about how do you fill in the
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: smaller but you know, state of the art data centers
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: to do what is called inference, which is basically the
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: thing that makes money, which is finding the answers to
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: your questions, querrying the model and getting back the answer
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: like which could be, you know, driving your autonomous car
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: through a town. A data center is going to do
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: that for you. It could be you know, figuring out
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: the cure for you know, a rare disease. The data
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: center we'll do that for you.
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: Do you have little kids?
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: I have three older kids. There are teenagers and once
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: inn or twenty.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: And it weird that you run around yelling at them
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: about leaving the lights on. Yeah, well you should do
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: you should yell at them about not looking stuff up
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: on the internet. Yeah, you should be like, don't look
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: pancake recipes up on the internet. You can look it
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: up in a cookbook. Well, I did also leaveing the
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: lights on in your room. It's inconsequential. It's just it's insane.
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: There are calculators that show you asked about, like, just
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: to go back to the water thing for a minute,
• 50:34
  Speaker 3: does a chat stoopetee query really use a bottle of water?
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't even know. I hear all the numbers,
• 50:40
  Speaker 2: but I don't know what.
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: There was a study that said so there are also
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: data points that indicate a far smaller amount, like a
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: teaspoon two teaspoons. And I'm not the expert to fully,
• 50:56
  Speaker 3: you know, parse that out. But the one thing that
• 51:00
  Speaker 3: I could, I could say with some confidence is that
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: computing is getting more efficient, even AI computing every day.
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: It's this, you know, it's this quandary that the industry has.
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: They can't find enough power, water, land, they can't you know,
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: get enough of their computing end at these places. So
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: everybody in the whole value chain is like innovating trying
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: to do it with less, and so I wouldn't be
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: surprised if you know they're there are big advances and
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: and and perhaps these newer estimates of what a chat
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: gypt search does use and water are taking into account
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: some of that efficiency. But you're going to have the
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: problem right now is that there are wildly different estimates
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: and plenty of them are scary numbers that have no
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: context around them. They haven't been compared to anything else.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's the that's the problem you run into.
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: Before we started record, we were having we were talking
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: and you had mentioned you'd mentioned that there's become like
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: a sort of red state blue state divide on data
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: center placement.
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, except this now become bipartisan against.
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: It's become bipartisan against.
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Like like, let's talk a little bit about because
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: just on this, on this idea of physical placement, right,
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: there's a there's a big I think that there's generally
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: like a nimby, a not in my backyard component to this,
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: where most of the fights you see about data centers
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: from my perspective, you might have a different perspective. Most
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: of the fights you see about data centers are localized,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: meaning one's going in near you one's going near you
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: in Wisconsin, one's going in near you in Michigan, one's
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: going in near you in Montana. And all of a
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: sudden it gets real right, and and then you want
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: to talk about what does this mean? Water use is here?
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: What does this mean? Energy use here? What does it
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: mean for just the visual quality of the landscape here.
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: I'm sure there are crusaders on a national sense, but
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: I'm more familiar with the localized fights. Right as you've
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: looked at this, what have you found about the mentalities
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: or like the communities that are wanted the communities that
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: don't like? What sort of differentiates them? Is it? Is
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: it ideology like political ideology?
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: What is it?
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: You know, a friendly town versus an antagonistic town.
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: Well, I it's a combination of how they feel they
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: were treated from the beginning and how you know, their
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: their ability to imagine what the future could be hold
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: for them, possibly economically. So, the northern Virginia has a
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: very heavy concentration of data centers today and it takes
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: twenty five percent of power use in Virginia now goes
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: to data centers, and it's mostly the whole state, and
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: people in northern Virginia have have benefited economically from the
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: tax revenue. Okay, so, uh, data centers don't employ as
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: many people, especially the older data centers. They therefore don't
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: bring a big burden on hospitals, schools, roads, ambulance all
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: that stuff.
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: Town once they're built like ghost towns.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: Right the cloud data centers employed, you know, it could
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: be like twenty people, although the bigger AI data centers
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: are going to employ hundreds of people, some of them
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: even say in the four figures. But but the so
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: some of these places have have had a huge influx
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: of tax revenue, they've improved their schools. Northern Virginia fits
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: that even so, so it gets to a certain point
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: where people you know, are living with with these developments
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: right up in their backyard in some cases nice homes
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: and a big data center right behind and and they're
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: starting to say no more. They're starting to worry about backup.
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: Power doesn't run all the time, but it has to
• 55:21
  Speaker 3: test and then if there's a power outage, that's going
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: to burn diesel. Diesel is one of the worst things
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: that you can burn for air pollution and health.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: And so.
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: Northern Virginia is an example of a community that welcomed
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: data centers, you know, kind of prospered with them, and
• 55:39
  Speaker 3: is starting to hit a breaking point of.
• 55:42
  Speaker 2: The moods starting to sour.
• 55:44
  Speaker 3: The mood has started to get much tougher, and there's
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: going to have to be a conversation. Even so, even
• 55:53
  Speaker 3: in northern Virginia, the actual land use of data centers,
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: by just square footage is the campuses themselves are still
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: less than three percent of the land and loud In County,
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: the most data center populated county. And if you and
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: if you just looked at the buildings, it's less than
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: you know, one percent of the land and not a
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: data center capital. But it's like, but that's it's not
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: nothing because we I.
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: Know, but that's a weird way to think about landscape.
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: That you're saying a percent of a county, yeah, is
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: under a data center. I think I would want to
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: know what percent of the county is under a house, because.
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, like, I don't even know what to make
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: of that, you know.
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: I mean it's like it's like the point you made
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: about that you hear these numbers, but without context, it's
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: hard to understand. Like I don't think that I don't
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: hear that a percent of a county sits underneath the
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: data center.
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: I don't hear that and think that's not much.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but I don't know.
• 56:57
  Speaker 2: But again I don't know what percents under.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: Schools.
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: I don't know what percent is under homes, you.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: Know, right right, But it feels to me like a ton.
• 57:06
  Speaker 3: There are you know, certainly denser urban environments. This becomes
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: a real concern with with you know, so many resources
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: and waterflow and everything, so that the communities that, you know,
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: some communities that have welcome data centers are still experiencing backlash.
• 57:24
  Speaker 3: And I think it's because it's just such a profound change.
• 57:28
  Speaker 3: But there are parts of the country that also have
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: economic synergies. I guess you could say with with this
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: type of an industry, they have factories that can and
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: are producing the equipment that goes inside. They've got a
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: workforce of electrical and mechanical and trades craft workers who
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: have been underemployed for a long time, and and that's
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: our to kind of work together. Like there are there
• 58:02
  Speaker 3: are some several areas in the rost belt that the
• 58:07
  Speaker 3: economic development authorities have you know, either recruited data centers
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: or we're open to data centers coming the workforce, especially
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: like organized unions are very in favor of it. And
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: then other residents who live in the midst of farmland
• 58:28
  Speaker 3: are not in favor of it and don't want it.
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: And so there are some really hard trade offs, you know,
• 58:37
  Speaker 3: because we all need jobs and economic activity in our
• 58:40
  Speaker 3: community and that is actually what ends up funding all
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: of the infrastructure that makes the city livable.
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to hate you two ideas.
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: One is, you had mentioned that it used to be
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: that like blue states or left leaning states or antagonistic
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: data sent just speaking very generally right leaning states were
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: more welcoming to data centers. But you had said that
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: it is it is becoming that that you're finding resistance
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: in right leaning states. We always thought about this state.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: You familided this like horseshoe deal. We're like the right
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: and left kind of come together, the radical right and
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: the radical left come together at.
• 59:21
  Speaker 3: The bottom of them. Yeah, it's these two different sides.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but they like they almost meet, they almost Is
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: that what is the sort of what is the right
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: leaning what is the emerging right leaning argument against data centers?
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: Is it like antagonism to big tech.
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: It's partially antagonism to big tech. You know, they're spying
• 59:46
  Speaker 3: on my life. They you know, are driving our young people,
• 59:53
  Speaker 3: you know, the wrong direction. It's partially property rights. I
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: will not have my property, you know, seized for a
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: transmission line that you know sends power to you know,
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: Eline Musk's you know, or Sam Altman's data center, and
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: so they can.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: Get rich off my land or that's.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: Right and it's their way of life. I will tell
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: you that when you go to some of those communities, though,
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: people will acknowledge a mixed feeling because some of them
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 3: have sold there. You don't even have to have sold
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: a big piece of property inside the data center to
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: possibly have your property value, you know, a potential potential gain,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: like maybe they want to lay down equipment in a
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: in a yard and you've got a few acres where
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: you could do that that's nearby. Or you decided that
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: you want to run a food truck and you know,
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: go sell to the workers, or you know, there's uh,
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: there're a variety of maybe your your land was used
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: to build worker housing like a man camp.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: So is it generally are data centers generally raising property levels?
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: The inverse there's such a land rush right now and once,
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: and these are such big construction projects that I think
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: in many cases the properties near these projects do experience
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: you know, rising property value.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because picture we're talking about that they're putting in
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: a municipal wastewater treatment plant.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah okay, compared that to like a landfill coming to town.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe that's going to be like good for some,
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: but the people around that are going to be like,
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: that's going to tank my home value right right. So
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: with in the data center landscape, when it comes to
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: land ownership and land use in the data center landscape,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: I could see if they're coming in, they're going to
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: they need this, you know whatever many you know that
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: they need five square miles ten square miles of land.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: That the impact that the people that own those properties
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: are going to see perhaps a little gold rush. Yeah,
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: But what is the conversation about people that are outside
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: of the footprint.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's tough.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 2: I mean what are they seeing?
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 3: They hate the well, everybody hates traffic, artisan rage against
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: the traffic, and that lasts for several years in these big,
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: big projects, Like people bring that up way before global warming,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: They bring it up way before traffic, you know, traffic, traffic,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 3: dust traffic, you know. So, you know, they were giving
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: free car washes out in Wisconsin near the Port Washington
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 3: data center. No, maybe people appreciated it. It's a it's
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 3: a pretty small you know, uh, it's a small token
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: of something, but you know, seriously, oh yeah, oh yeah,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: because it was it's going to be dusty and dirty
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: for a really long time.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: There had been a lot of people that just did
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: not want to accept that free car yeah car wash,
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: my god man.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: But you do go to places where this has been
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: underway for at least a year, and there are hotels
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: being redone, there are new restaurants that have come in,
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: there are and you know, like that's the case in Louisiana,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: and that's thirty minutes away from the data center site.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: So some revitalization, some investment that's not totally tied to
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: the data center.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: That's right, and the you know, like these are they're
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: criticized as temporary jobs, but often these projects last for
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 3: a few years, longer than many people hold jobs. And
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: then there they they tend to cluster, like you know,
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 3: a good you know environment where people think they can
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: get business done, they can build more come. So then
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 3: it turns out that there are a lot of projects
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 3: and a lot of people kind of moving from one
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: to the other, and they're supervisors and they're you know,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: will rent apartments in a lot.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: Of this is just like ephemeral activity. It generates general
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: economic activity.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know that there's but I've also knocked
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: on the door of houses that like the guy wasn't home,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 3: but he was. He was sitting across from a new
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: RV camp that was gonna and he just had a
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 3: little ranch house and flat as far as I could
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: see in Texas grappling, and across the street was being
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: placed a three thousand RV camp, you know, with telephone
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: not telephone of contractors poles. They were basically putting in
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 3: water and power poles on an expansive land that was
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 3: extremely flat, broad huge imagine three thousand recreational vehicles. So
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 3: this is where the workers would come. And so all
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 3: of a sudden, what was in an empty field in
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: front of him was almost looked like, you know, a
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 3: future airport or something. He wasn't there that day when
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: I knocked on a store, but I'm telling you might
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: have had a really different view and so like, there
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 3: are some growing pains and some real, real concerns about growth.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: On the power front. Can you tell me again in
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: Northern Virginia that the power increase for data centers.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: Again, well, it's twenty five percent of power in the
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: state those to data centers and probably growing.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: So however they're generating electricity. However they're generating power. It's
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: not like, I mean, to a point you probably go
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: and just turn the dial up right and make more. Yeah,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: but I imagine when you're talking about a twenty five percent
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: increase in power, you need to start looking at make
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: like it's more than just cranking up what you got
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: going on. Meaning, if you're running hydro electric, you know
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: you got turbines one through thirteen running and you just
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: kick fourteen and fifteen and sixteen on to make up.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: For the heavy use.
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: There's a point at which that doesn't work anymore and
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: you need new ways. Yes, you need new power that
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: new power production.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: But I mean one thing that is, you know, a
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: very hot topic of conversation that would be good for
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 3: everybody is something called grid utilization, which we all as
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 3: a as a society contribute to shared resources and the
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: power grid is one of those, and we are not
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: utilizing the grid that we've already paid for to the
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 3: extent that we could be. But technology is only now
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: helping us understand how far up that level of headroom
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: you could really go safely. And so there's all these
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: new technologies and utilities are starting to be open to
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: it to say, hey, yes, we do need to build
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: more power. But turns out the grid is only you know,
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 3: actually we're only using thirty to fifty percent of the
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 3: power that we've already built on a given day because
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: we overbuilt it for those days of peak power demands
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 3: and our ability as a human mind to do the
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: simulations to figure out how far you could push it
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: just didn't go that far. So we just built a lot.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: We bought a lot of extra.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: Understand Like, let's say you're in a Let's say you're
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: in a town. You live in a coastal community that's
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: a very popular summer destination.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and when it's awful, you.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: Know, I was recently on really hot Yeah, I was
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: recently on an island and there's this little community on
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: this island and someone told me, you know, we people
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: live here here around because there's ten residents year round.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, in the summer there are four hundred residents. Yeah.
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, so picture a town like that, and then picture
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: the hottest day in the summer, everyone's electric turning on
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: a c I see your point where it's capable of that, yes,
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: but then come here in February winters right, nobody here.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: So yeah, presumably there's infrastructure that's not completely utilized. I
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: hadn't really, I never thought.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: Of that before.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and like that, the utility industry really needed somebody
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 3: to wake it. So wake it up, you know, or
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: to push it, because they are not incentivized to. Utilities
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 3: have this perverse way of getting paid. It's just it's
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 3: an incentive that got put in when we created monopoly
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 3: utilities in the dawn of the electric age, and they
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 3: make more money by spending more money. Basically, they go
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 3: to a utility commission and say we need power for
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 3: reliability purposes. I want to build a new thing, a
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 3: new power plant, a new line, a new and they
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: get a guaranteed rate of return if it is approved
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 3: to compensate them for you know, the capital that is
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 3: needed for that. And so we we all pay that.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: We all pay the cost of what it was to
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 3: build plus an added rate of return. And sometimes you
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 3: could argue that they didn't need to build that brand
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 3: new thing. They should learn how to use what we've got.
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 3: And so the tech industry is looking at they're in
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 3: such a hurry, and they've they've realized there are certain
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 3: inefficiencies in the way the system is built, and they
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 3: have the money and the motivation to shake up the
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 3: system and say, well, hang on, yes, I you know
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 3: I will if I don't offer to pay my full
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 3: share on all this new infrastructure. I know I will
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 3: not have the social license to build and I will
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 3: be vilified. But at the same time this let me
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 3: fund you know, these pilot projects, or let me add
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 3: these sensors to lines, because we could we could be
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: determining how far we could push this. And I'm also
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: willing to spend my own money to put batteries behind
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 3: the meter and other systems. So when everybody is at
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: that four hundred person seaside resort and that state is,
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: you know, hurting for electricity, I disappear from the grid.
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 3: So much of this is happening.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's interesting.
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: People don't but why are you seeing art like not
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: you like, why do you see articles where it's that
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: they're going to be building like you know, nuclear plants
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: to power the base of the scale of what.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 3: We're doing requires all of it, literally.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: So you do expect, like even though you could find
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: there's efficiencies to be found in energy production and we're
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: generating electricity and running it through the grid and it's
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: not being tapped and it just you know, isn't being
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: stored in batteries. Whatever there is going to be in
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: our twenty thirty outlook, there will need to be like
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: net new.
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: There will generation.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: And you can ask like, can we stop this from half?
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 3: And I I'm not sure that we can. I think
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 3: money finds a way when it's trying to you know,
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 3: get to a goal. So I think we will uh
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 3: build quite a bit of additional generation. Utilizing the grid
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 3: we have right now is just a faster way to
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 3: do it.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: It's really built.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 3: So we're we are revitalizing old nuclear plants that have
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 3: you know, we're built fifty years ago. We are putting
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 3: in newer, more efficient forms of power generation both you know,
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 3: solar and batteries as well as you know, newer generations
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 3: of gas plants, which is uh not necessarily a popular thing,
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 3: but is uh going to happen. And there's all kinds
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 3: of other really interesting things happening in the energy industry.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: We are applying a set of pioneers that came from
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 3: the oil and gas industry in fracking, are using those
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 3: techniques to reimagine geothermal power so that you can you
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 3: don't have to go where there are pockets of steam
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 3: already in the earth. You can go to a location
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 3: and inject water, create steam, create the steam that spins
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 3: the turbine, send that water back down in a closed loop,
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 3: and again like more water efficient, huh. And the better
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: you get at it, the more you do it, the
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 3: lower your costs. Aren't There's a company called Fervo that
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 3: is kind of the darling of new geothermal.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 2: That's incredible.
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: It's it's like that I'm not familiar with that concept,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: but it's basically you're making a steam engine, but you're
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: using instead of burning coal to heat the water, you're
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: you're using the Earth's thermal.
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 3: That's exactly right, really, and you're using techniques and workers
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 3: who came from an industry that you know either you
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 3: know needs the worker needs to be transitioned into a
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 3: cleaner form, but have the skills, and so that's been
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: a popular thing. And that's you know, here we are
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 3: in Montana. Some of the interesting projects on that are
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 3: near you. There's work being done in Utah and in
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 3: Nevada and I and there's work on this you know,
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 3: enhanced geo thermal in Texas. There's there's a lot going
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 3: on in that. So you have to get the cost down.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 3: But they're actually making great progress getting the cost down.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: Wouldn't it be interesting if it'd be interesting if unexpected
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: upside amid all the downsides, an unexpected upside is just
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: like this this sort of like American ideal that you
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: know need driving innovation.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean that's a big theme in the book.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: That you're going to get these certain like you're gonna
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: like for a while you had this certain these certain
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: types of brain chasing renewables, right, but now you have
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: like a whole different class and category of.
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 2: Humans, right that are like looking at energy.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: Right, Just like it'd be kind of an it'd be
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: like a weird irony if if that sector, if that
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: sector figured out maximizing renewables.
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 3: That's right, And I think we'll end up. So not
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 3: to scare you were your viewers here, but I think we're,
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 3: like I said earlier, we're at the beginning of this
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 3: more of an industrial revolution that is catalyzed by AI.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: We think today of energy demand for things like chatbot prompts,
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 3: but we're going into an era of physical AI where
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 3: all of this high performance computing is going to be
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 3: used to guide cars, guide robots in factories, make uh
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: you know, whether you like it or not, weaponry autonomous uh,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 3: you know, change the way industrial automation makes things so
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 3: that we possibly can make factories viable again. A lot
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 3: of that demand and a lot of that uh you know,
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 3: just activity to make that happen is just barely beginning.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 3: And so we may end up just creating more energy
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 3: generation to feed more applications of AI than we can
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 3: imagine today. And so that's where it gets a little scary.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 3: You think about the ramp up and how you know,
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 3: this could change everything. It can bring positives and it
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 3: can bring negatives. And I think, you know, one of
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 3: the things that I'm trying to do is look at
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 3: what each side wishes the other would acknowledge about both
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 3: the promise and the and the peril of what is
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 3: facing us?
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: How would you put that? Like, like, how would you
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: put those two questions if you had to answer them?
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: You know, if if you imagine the brightest minds, like
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: the brightest most rational minds in the in the anti
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: data center movement, and you say that I and they're
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: saying to the and they're saying to the industry, I
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: wish you would acknowledge, right, And and on the flip side,
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: what is the what is the thing you found?
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah? Well I would say what uh, the energy industry
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 3: would say, I wish we would all acknowledge is that
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 3: the modern world runs on energy. And you can draw
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 3: an uppard line of uh, you know, press arity and
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 3: energy that that's pretty much aligned. The more energy society consumes,
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 3: the higher it's quality of life and replacing what we
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 3: Modern life has become really convenient. So you don't even
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 3: really see the power plant. You just plug your phone in.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 3: Modern life has become so convenient. You don't really understand
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 3: how we get water. You just turn the faucet on.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 3: You just order, you know, stuff from Amazon. You just
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 3: assume that you know, steel is coming from somewhere to
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 3: build your buildings. Yeah, you know, it's all industrial. It's
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 3: it's and we assume these days that solar is just
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 3: really cheap and batteries are just getting better. They are
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 3: they and they're improving, but they too have an environmental
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 3: and industrial footprint. I mean, you've got to you know,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 3: you've got to convert raw material to make the products.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 3: They need to be recycled eventually too. Modern life is
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 3: is industrial and so I think that that is what
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 3: you know, in some ways, the the you know, guys
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 3: who have been in industry building physical things want everyone
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 3: to understand and they want people to understand that what
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 3: we've done so far has made a dent in you
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 3: to make a greener world and planet has improved. You know,
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 3: we we've we've improved emissions by introducing green energy, and
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 3: we need to do a lot more of it. But
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: we also you know, we have a long way to
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 3: go to uh decarbonize the world, and it's going to
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 3: take a lot of new technology, new new thinking, some
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 3: adapt and so I would say that, you know, on
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 3: the on the energy side, they're saying like the world
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 3: needs more energy because we prosper with more energy. More energy,
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 3: you know, is part of just progressive civilization. But we
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 3: need we need lower emissions, we need cleaner water, we
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: need all those things.
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: You feel the industry is asking for lower emissions and
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: cleaner water. I mean, I feel like the industry is
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: largely I mean, you know, I mean right, I mean,
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: the industry is largely given up on the green energy conversation.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, like the dry like the main driving factors,
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: like the administer, the administration, big tech. I mean, this
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: isn't a concern of theirs anymore. It's so twenty twenty three.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: It is so twenty twenty three. I think that, uh,
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: it's it could come full circle again with some of
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 3: the innovation that we're seeing. The the tech companies are
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 3: still still standing by goals that now look increasingly impossible
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 3: to meet in terms of zero by twenty thirty. And
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 3: look at the direction that they're going.
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, whenever you see like a like a twenty thirty year,
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: everyone come on.
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 3: And so then you know, on the other side, that's
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 3: where the you know, advocates for climate action, for the environment,
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 3: for health are saying, you know, you need to acknowledge
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 3: your full life cycle footprint and communities need to uh
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 3: hear everything transparently that you are are coming into a
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 3: community and going to do and there's a lot that
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 3: there's a lot of dialogue that you know, it's kind
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 3: of hard to have when the two sides are at odds.
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 3: But I would say, you know, the environmental groups are saying,
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 3: look like, don't don't de emphasize, like you know, the
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: truth is, you know, if you're backing up your data
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: center with diesel, you know that creates air pollution for
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 3: the community. If we're all using shared water and you
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 3: are adding incremental water demand, this is an issue for
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 3: the community. If you are removing virgin land and wild places,
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 3: you know, we ought to have a say on it.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 3: And so it is a natural kind of back and
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 3: forth that is happening right now. And it is concerning that.
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 3: You know, there's there's a lot of money on the
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 3: pro development side, and so you know, that's where I'm
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 3: trying to kind of watch and see, you know, how
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 3: is this happening. There's a you know, maybe it's a
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 3: it's a the voice is not as loud, but there
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 3: are voices within tech companies, within even guys who who
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 3: have been in the field developing data centers, who say, look,
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 3: we need to get to a place. Communities have a
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 3: lot of leverage now to ask for more. They've now
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 3: realized like, hey, we're you know, we're kind of a
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: unicorn here. We've got a big pot of you know, uh,
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 3: available power or water or what have you. And maybe
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 3: our community is open to doing business with you, but
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 3: you know, we we don't want to give you know,
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: tax incentives that we used to.
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 2: They realized they might have more leverage and more leverage.
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, we used to give these certain breaks
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 3: to low margin industrial users that you know, we're trying
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 3: to afford to build a big car plan. It's a
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 3: really different community, you know, of potential users of the
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 3: land that are coming in now. And not only that,
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 3: they do have technologies that can actually improve the community.
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 3: So not only can they give money for a new
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 3: firehouse or fix the you know, give money for schools,
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 3: they could use high performance computing and help the community
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 3: figure out, you know, and they are doing this there.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 3: You know, there are good partnerships happening with with water
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 3: where they're saying, if we come in, let us spend
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 3: tens of millions of dollars in your community to help
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 3: shore up your leaky water system and in exchange, you know,
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 3: that will help us replenish more water than we're actually
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 3: using at our data center. So there there are things
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 3: like that. There's a there's a guy who was kind
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 3: of known as the sort of conscience of the data
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 3: center industry, Christian Ballotti, and I've gotten to know him.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 3: He was at Microsoft. He he's basically coined some metrics
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 3: about how efficient a data center could be. And then
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 3: the the latter part of his career Microsoft, he did
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 3: a lot of R and D into community positive data centers.
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 3: And he's now independent on working, you know, as an
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 3: advisor in a lot of ways. And you know, he
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 3: says that his industry needs to think about what would
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 3: make a community want the data center, he said, and
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 3: tells and tells his peers. Until you're willing to live
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 3: next to that data center, then you haven't finished doing
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 3: your job and you wanted to be like please in
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 3: my backyard. And there are some some really interesting ways
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 3: that he's seen infrastructure get developed. Like he he often
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 3: will cite a like a a plant, a water desalination plant,
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 3: the difference between one that was done in Australia and
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 3: one was done in Singapore and the one that was done,
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 3: you know, more community positive way. You know, it's got
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 3: like a roof of grass and has you know, all
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 3: these different ways that it recycles the water that flows
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 3: in the community. He's gone to places that you know,
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 3: are farming communities and small simple things like we will
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 3: plant trees that improve the pollination in your community for
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 3: your agriculture. Okay, Like this industry is willing to do
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 3: some of those things if you ask for them. But
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 3: you know, there's a big difference between a large company
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 3: that's coming in trying to get permission social license to operate,
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 3: and then there's a lot of other you know, just
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 3: private developers that are looking for, you know, something to
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 3: develop fast and flip quick.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: And yeah, I feel like they've done a poor job
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: like well, I mean it's kind of university, except that
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: they've done a very poor job of, uh, their social.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 2: Management of the issue, for sure.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: And I think it's because on one hand of like
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: pushing the radical amount of change and then also thinking
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: that they were going to do the data center move
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: in a lot of communities quietly. Yeah, you know, and
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: I understand the approach you're making because I think that
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: a lot of times people. There's an expectation that towns, villages, communities,
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: whatever are gonna sort of like bait the hook to
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: bring them in, and if the tide turns enough, it's
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: going to flip that right. And rather than saying, oh,
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: we'll give you these tax breaks, we'll give you this land,
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: we'll give you all these incentives that you that you'd
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: play that political game enough to the point where it's like, well, why.
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 2: Don't you tell me what you're going to do for me?
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: And maybe and maybe that switch will you know, maybe
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: that switch will happen and there's so much there's so
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: much need that it'll it'll push, it'll push that negotiating
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: process in a totally different direction.
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 3: I think that that's happening now. I think that there's uh,
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 3: you know, communities are understanding that the ones like ironically
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 3: that you know, got started first and are probably going
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 3: to be the most economically viable because they got started first,
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 3: you know, they they kind of came into being in
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 3: a little earlier place where there is real competition between
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 3: states for big economic projects. And so I've been traveling
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 3: all over the country a lot of places like literally
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 3: for a decade, they were looking for a car manufacturing
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 3: plant and and had assembled a big megaproject site and couldn't.
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 3: They were like second and third and more than the West,
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 3: and they lost it again and again and again. And
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 3: when data centers came along, you know, there's a rival,
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 3: and they know who their rivals are, and they know,
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 3: you know, maybe it's Wisconsin versus Indiana, maybe it's Louisiana
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 3: versus Mississippi, and so they didn't want to lose it,
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 3: and they they offered incentives which in retrospect maybe they
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 3: needed them at the time or they certainly, you know,
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 3: were intending to bring business economic prosperity to their state.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 3: But there's a lot of things when we look with
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 3: hindsight later at this year, maybe we should have done
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: it this way instead.
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: Are you seeing that when you talk to people.
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I I've talked with with mayors who say, boy,
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 3: I would have asked for even more had I realized
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 3: how much leverage I have and the you know, and
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 3: some things are getting retraded. You know. Microsoft came to
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 3: a community in Indiana and said, we'd actually like to
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 3: give you a better financial deal. And it has to
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 3: do with the way that they've structured taxes, and it
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 3: gave a lot more money to the school system right away,
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 3: and they just came back and said, this is more
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 3: in keeping with what we're doing now. So it's kind
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 3: of a given and take. But what we're going up
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 3: to is data center backlash has gotten worse. I think
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 3: part of it is, you know, people have facts about
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 3: their town and fears that it's just really hard to
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 3: separate the truth from the noise. And and sometimes the
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 3: truth is not good either. And so we're going to
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 3: have an election cycle where is I just wrote a
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 3: column about this where you know, I was talking about
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 3: the political consultant who said, you know, if you are
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 3: running a governor's race, he was speaking of a specific state,
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 3: but I think it's broader than that. And you're a
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 3: Republican or a Democrat, you have to be you can't
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 3: really be for AI data centers, or you have to
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 3: be demanding you know, a new uh, a new policy
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 3: on how how the power gets done or how you
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 3: know it works.
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: Man, that's funny you mentioned that for me, for me
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: to get behind a politician, state level politician, if their
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: if their deal was, if they're sort of if their
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: take on it was I'm going to do everything in
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: my power to bring data centers to our state.
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 2: In my mind, they're out.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn't need to be that they're going to
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: do everything in their power to prevent it. But they
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: would have to like articulate late a level of skepticism
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: and a level of negotiating prowess about how this was
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: going to go down, and then if it happens, it's
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: going to be good for us, Like I would have
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: to hear it, so it doesn't surprise me to hear
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: that just across the country. You have to be like
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: a I don't know what the best word for it.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: You have to be like maybe at least a data
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: center skeptic, you know, because really the thing that like
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: the thing that makes me pay attention is is And
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: it sounds trite, like I don't want to look at it.
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to look at it. You know.
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 2: When I look out, I like to see things.
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: Like like green, how God made it, wildlife, habitat you
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like like I don't like to
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: I don't want to look out and see it.
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 2: And so it would take a lot and there's a
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 2: sense that like.
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: There's a sense that even if there's tons of resistance,
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to see it in my laptop. Yeah,
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: do you follow me? Like there could be like it's
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: never gonna be like I'm gonna I'm never gonna try
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: to use Google, you know, drive right and realize, ah,
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: there's no I just know it'll resolve itself, right. And
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: so the resistance part of it, like the resistance the
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: data center part of it, never feels real to me, like.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 2: It's going to cost me.
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And so maybe that's a paradigm shift that will
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: need to happen where people start seeing like some way
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: that like if we resist this all the time, we're
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: going to lose out on a global scale, or we're
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: gonna lose out on some geopolitical scale. But I think
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: that people would have to see it first, because there's
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: plenty of people that hate data centers that are probably
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: organizing their anti data center activities with cloud computing and.
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 3: Using social media algorithms to elevate I.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: Mean not probably, they definitionally are the anti data center
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: movement is driven by data centers. So, but Americans are
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: comfortable with that kind of Americans are comfortable with that
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: kind of hypocrisy.
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 3: They are, and we we do face you know, some
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 3: some risks you know, in the as we think about
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 3: where the world could go. Uh, you know, we're it
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 3: has become very difficult to build infrastructure in this country,
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 3: and we're in desperate need of a better power grid.
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 3: We're depending on which side of the you know, political
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 3: al you walk down, we're in desperate need of more
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 3: transmission and we're in desperate need of more natural gas pipelines,
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 3: both of which are considered quote linear infrastructure. You know,
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 3: they go through people's land. One is buried, so maybe
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 3: neither one are easy to get through, okay, And and
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 3: so we're at a moment where there's maybe some bipartisan
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 3: discussion about whether we make that easier. Uh. From what
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 3: I've seen of some polls like it, people do find
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 3: like the threat of China and h Ai enabled warfare
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 3: to still be abstract. And you know, if they're like
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 3: in a community where it was pastoral, maybe it was
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 3: pastoral because the factories closed and they you know, just
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 3: became cornfields again. But the if it but they see
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 3: their community first and don't want it to change with
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 3: so much else changing. And so the truth is that
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 3: China has built a grid that's you know, triple our
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 3: size that they've been powering manufacturing all this time that
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 3: we've been doing less manufacturing. Right, So their grid is
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 3: super modern. It is capable of ramping up for whatever
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 3: it may be economic wartime. They've got a grid that
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 3: is quite capable, and they've got a burgeon advanced manufacturing sector.
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 3: You know, we're not talking cheap toys and furniture. We're talking,
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 3: you know, batteries, automated factories. We're talking you know, all
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 3: the different elements of green energy that you know require
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 3: solar panels, but robotics, all of this advanced manufacturing. Now
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 3: there's an effort to bring it back here. Guess what
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 3: that uses more energy and that you know, we'll have
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 3: an additional industrial footprint besides data centers, and they will
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 3: use data centers to run them.
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 2: That's man.
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: That's the thing I always think about is I used
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: to work on this theory and I never got it
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: worked out good. It was kind of like an environmental nationalism,
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: and it's it's full of holes. But this environmental nationalism
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: I envisioned would be that it's as immature as it
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: might sound, would be this idea that our play. Our
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: play would be to harness resources like environmental degradation that
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: other nations are comfortable doing, and that we would reap
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: the benefits of that, but leave our stuff clean in pristine.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: I never got all the details worked out.
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 2: But I was trying to do that.
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: We do do that, we do do that, and it
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: would we do that to quite a degree, and it
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: would be the thing that was brought up all the
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: time when people were I was talking about your heart
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: burning on your kids to turn the lights off and
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: be like all these things in the US around being
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: efficient with energy and clean coal and all this, and
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: you look, but you're like, but there's still India, still China,
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: and be like you can do all this stuff. It
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: doesn't matter because there's these things you can't control that
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: are out there, and so in some way we benefit
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: from it. But I think that if you look at
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: and said, like, sure, man, maybe in China they don't
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: have a movement of people that has the freedom and
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: liberty and autonomy to resist the government, right to resist industry.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: Industry is king, The government is king. Human like citizens
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: have no voice. They get steamrolled, their stuff all gets
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: turned into data centers right up until the point when
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: you were, like up until the point where we're fighting
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: a war with China, and if we're fighting a war
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: with China, even if it's a proxy war through Taiwan
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: or whatever, we're fighting a war with China. And then
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: we say to ourselves, man, we shouldn't have just let
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: it be that they were doing it all we weren't
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: doing it, because now we're at odds, you know, and
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: it's it's a like, I don't know, it's a tricky one.
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: It's a tricky one when I imagine a you know,
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: a natural, beautiful landscape with clean air, clean water and
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: like healthy wildlife populations and like, you know, just a
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: place you love to be and love to look out.
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 2: Verse is this distant threat.
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: That that we're going to get bested by another country
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: in a way that is going to ultimately impede our freedom.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: And I think that you have to you know, and
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: looking at all this, it's like a it's a really
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: complicated gamble everybody.
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 2: Has to make.
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and you ask, well, can you know, is there
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 3: a way to do that and have fewer regrets? And so,
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 3: you know, I just wrote about this event I attended
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 3: where a bunch of Silicon Valley founders had had rushed
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 3: to Detroit for you know, the sole purpose of discussing
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 3: and showing how we can reindustrialize America using their technology
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 3: right making factories, uh, you know, an industrial basis work
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 3: differently using technology to make critical medical processing cleaner and
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 3: bringing it here. Because if we're a society that no
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 3: longer makes things and just a certain of this economy
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 3: and we're dependent on the powers that do make things,
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 3: that doesn't leave us in a very good position. And
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 3: but what you love and what we all love wild
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 3: America and the the you know scenery just outside of
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 3: this podcast studio is you know, it is what our
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 3: country makes. Is what makes our country so majestic. And
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 3: so what are some attempts to have industry and progress
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 3: and think more about the natural landscape. And there there
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 3: are models that are starting to emerge that you know,
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 3: make better choices. There are AI data centers that are
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 3: being built in you know, desert prairie and Texas that
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 3: will primarily be run off the grid on solar and
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 3: batteries with some natural gas power to kind of firm
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 3: it when it's not sunny or windy. If there's wind
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 3: and some of you know, it's using some kind of
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 3: flexible gas power that uses less water. Does that mean
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 3: that that's you know, the way you can do it everywhere? No,
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 3: like you need certain certain regions allow you to reimagine
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 3: an industrial factory, like a data center, which really is
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 3: an industrial factory. Other places, you know, you might have water,
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 3: but you know, don't have the power and maybe people
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 3: and to build it. You know, you can't put a
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 3: burden on people. What I found so interesting is like
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 3: we've got the richest industry in the world trying to
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 3: take from the power system. And it's also the case
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 3: that there are people living in dire conditions who can't
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 3: run their dialysis machine or their asthma machine, and how
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 3: they can't afford their power bill. Like we're sharing that
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 3: same you know, uh, Mark Zuckerberg is sharing that system
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 3: with that human being who who needs you know, very
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 3: whose very subsistence depends on being able to afford their
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 3: power bill. So are there some some ways that we
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 3: can all fit ourselves onto the planet together, like you
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 3: you would like to hope so, and you know that
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 3: there will be mistakes along the way. But back to
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 3: your point about the way the country allows us to
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 3: be messy and free and you know, do what we
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 3: want with our property rights. It is a different way
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 3: to arrive at the answer than to have it be
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 3: centrally planned from the Chinese Communist Party and so uh
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 3: and it's the way our countries. This is how it's unfolding.
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 3: It's it's where we have opposition, we have proponents. They're
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 3: both trying to make each other more honest. Hopefully they will.
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 3: That's America, I guess.
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, if you had to crystal ball it when
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 1: you look at it's kind of a closing question for
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: you if you have to crystal ball when we first
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: started time we talk about that twenty thirty projection. Yeah, right,
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: will opposition if you crystal ball that will opposition two
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: data centers block that projection? Or do you think that
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: it's like it's like where there's a will, there's a way,
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 1: Like it'll happen. It'll happen, and it might move. But
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: but that's going to happen.
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 3: I think it's going to happen more in certain regions
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 3: of the country than others.
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: So we'll shift where it happens, but it will happen.
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 3: We'll shift where it's allowed to happen. There will be
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 3: some of these projects built where people weren't aren't happy
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 3: with it, and I think that could make it a
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 3: less happy outcome. But uh so, I think, you know,
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 3: for example, you'll end up seeing more of it come
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 3: to Texas. You're you're already seeing that now, not because
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 3: Texas is rolling over. Actually Texas is an interesting case
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 3: because they are they have their own grid, their own grid, sheriffs.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 3: You know, they've been very strict saying here's how we
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 3: want it to happen. And but they've always been more
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 3: of a pro development state. But I think it's going
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 3: to take a few years for the mess and the
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 3: dust of building to clear. And some some places may
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 3: seem like white elephants, and others we may just get
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 3: used to them and then start to take them for granted,
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 3: like we have other aspects of our trial and digital
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 3: life already or our energy supply already, and it's up
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 3: to you know, all the innovators to try to do
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 3: it with a better footprints.
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: I oftentimes try to explain to my kids the Y
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: two K phenomenon, the panic that wasn't meaning there's things
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: that like history is full of this American history stols this.
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: There's things like this that come and it's like so shocking. Yeah,
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: and then later people look and later generations in the
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: previous generations have to explain like, no, you don't understand, man,
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: this was like when this happened, this.
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 2: Was a big deal.
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: It was a big deal, and they're just say huh right,
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: like all the like picture picture what we're going through
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: in the forties and fifties with nuclear energy, yeah, and
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: nuclear armament.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm building the plants in the seventies.
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: My kids will like, they will never understand the amount
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: of soul searching and the amount of public debate, right
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: the careers that were won and lost, the books that
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: were written about is this is this the right move?
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: Should we go down this path? They would it'll just
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: be that that's what That's how the world is.
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah. There were debates like that about you know, coal
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 3: mining and you know the early oil boom. A lot
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 3: of it was up in Pennsylvania and it definitely changed
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 3: the landscape and to some degree benefited the cities closer
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 3: to the coast, but it also you know, created communities
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 3: that of laborers and points of pride that led to
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 3: the steel age.
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: And I mentioned that that it's a nimbi fight. It
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: almost like accentuates it almost it almost makes it. Why
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: it needs to be a nimbi fight would be that
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: a citizen says, I accept that it's coming. This is
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: all inevitable. The only thing I can really do here
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: as I can make it that it's not right there,
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: Like that's the only you know, If I can do that,
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: if I can make it not across the road from
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: my house, I accept the rest, and that'll be my fight, yeah,
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: you know, and then it'll probably be how this continues
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: to play out.
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 2: So like, I get it, you're all gonna do it,
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 2: don't do it right there? Right?
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 3: And who will be happier? It's an interesting question. The
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 3: ones that don't get any of it, the ones that
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 3: get way too much of it.
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 3: It's uh, it comes with trade offs.
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was the thing I was gonna ask you about,
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: but then I thought it'd just be such wild speculation.
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: Is I was going to ask you about do you
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: think that some of these cities, states, whatever that make
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: it prohibitive to build data centers that in ten years,
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: twenty years, they're going to look at it like how
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: Portland when Portland made hard drugs legal and then a
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: while later they were like, my god, can you believe
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: that's the dumbest thing.
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 2: We've ever done?
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: Right that down the road, States cities will be like, dude,
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: we shouldn't have driven those people away. Now look at
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: all the prosperity these other these other cities are have
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: and and we like screwed ourselves and now you know,
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 3: I think it could be a big contrast between the
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 3: communities that did and the communities that didn't. And I
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 3: think you're gonna have different people either feeling regret or satisfaction.
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 3: Like anyone whose job it is to figure out how
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 3: you're going to you know, fund a municipal budget, it's
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 3: going to say, wow, I really could use that tax revenue.
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you know, it kicks in. You know, there
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 3: have been tax breaks, don't get me wrong, but you know,
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 3: some of those start to uh, you know, expire, and
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 3: then the property value of these data centers could be enormous.
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 3: If you listen to tech and what they think they
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 3: can make off of them, then you realize that the
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 3: tax based of some of these communities could go up
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 3: hundreds of percent, you know, by multiples, and that pays
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 3: for a lot, including helping communities that are struggling.
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the human mind doesn't really work that way though.
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: If down the road they're like you're closing a school,
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: no one's gonna say like, damn it, we should have
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: let the data center come.
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: People's heads don't.
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 2: Work that way.
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 2: Well uh And Davis Vaughan, thanks for coming on the show.
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: People that want to follow this as it plays out,
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: and it's happening so fast, there's so much going on
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: all the time. And does a column at the Information
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: dot Com every two weeks.
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 3: You have a column every two weeks. It's behind a paywall,
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 3: but it's worth it.
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 2: Yep. I and have really enjoyed your reporting on it.
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 2: I appreciate you coming down.
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 3: And I posted on LinkedIn so you can always get
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 3: the gist of what I'm writing.
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: Oh perfect, okay, So Ann Davis Vaughan, last name v
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: A U g h N and look forward to.
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 3: Vi A U g h a N.
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: What did I just say? Yeah, Oh, I spelled it wrong.
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry. Spelled again.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 3: It's v A U g h a N.
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 2: Oh, I'm sorry. V A U g h a n.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: This is pronounce vaughn though, Okay, I did't screw that
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: up right and looked for the uh look for the
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: book which will hopefully probably be titled Gigawatt and Against,
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: the book about the AI industrial boom and how it
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: is reshaping the energy industry, the industrial landscape in the
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: American heartland.
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 2: Thanks for coming on.
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: Stephen Oh Nate Mason's back there flagging me the TRCP deal.
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 2: Just hang titament. This has nothing to do with ai. H.
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: Every year we do we do our TRCP O, our
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: tr CP Turkey Hunt giveaway where we raise money for
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Jannis, We've been doing this
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: many years now. Jannis and I take a it's a raffle.
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: We take the winner and a guest and we take
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: them on a turkey hunt. We cover airfare, lodging. Last
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: year we brought in a buddy mine who's a professional
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: chef to cook. We cover all expenses, turkey tag everything.
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: We take you turkey hunt in two days, three nights.
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: We have a great time. We got a super good
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: spot lined up for next spring. We took our guys
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: there this spring. Everybody got their turkeys the first day.
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: It's a great time. If you want to do it,
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: go to trcp dot org look for the summer fundraiser,
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: and again all the expenses are covered, so when you
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: buy raffle tickets, every dime of that raffle ticket goes
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: to t RCP and trcp's slogan is guaranteeing Americans quality
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: places to hunt and fish.
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 2: So support TRCP.
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: Enter the raffle for the Turkey Hunt giveaway hosted by
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: me and Janice Putilus the Lavin Eagle.
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 2: Thanks everyone,