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Data States

Just returned from a sojourn to Silicon Valley where you can be party to many conversations about or tangential to Artificial Everything, or you can just party. Both of these I will mark as complete.

The biggest flaw thus far in the advent of AE is not chat-bot psychosis, though sufferers should seek medical attention (this is not investment advice), but local resistance to data center construction. Although, it seems that Utah did not receive the memo:

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

Pretty sure that on my way out to SV, we flew over this area or nearish-by. I can attest that from my window seat (not engineering advice) there is sufficient spatial accommodation for this project. But as the fine people of the area point out with their signs and yelling, there does not seem to be sufficient anything else.

Sacrificing water and energy that a state does not have at a scale that it does, will not a data center make. You can siphon a watershed for ‘other purposes’ but not without hastening a collapse of the ecosystem and all that it temporarily supports.

The numbers of people who pushed back on this plan to no avail is at least worth noting.

Image: Cumberland Island, for context of scale, about the same size as Manhattan but with 6 million less people.

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America: Too American?

If there are two consecutive sentences in this long article one of which does not smack of the utter idiocy of our present epoch, I can’t find them. The whole thing is summed up in this one sentence:

So thousands of companies here remain stubbornly small — all of which means Italy is a haven for artisans but is in a lousy position to play the global domination game.

Game. Set. Match. Because if you’re not trying to do that, why do anything? Positively everything that is wrong with our present trajectory is contained in that one little nugget. Delusions of scale? Check. Outright antagonism toward localized ventures? Got it. Condescension toward quality as value? In spades.

The thing is, this is also perfectly indicative of the tone of all business reporting; anything that can be interpreted as gains for workers is seen as negative, as is anything which diverts revenue from shareholders. It’s all of an anti-human, anti-person scale piece. As if it is inevitable that the high-quality fabric in question would give way to lower-priced faire from elsewhere because, well, that’s how we define things: down.

But it is rich how Italy is castigated for its lack of competition, as if the U.S. was some kind of hot bed. It is true that companies do most anything to drive others out of business, though in the sense freedom is just another word for a race to the bottom. Even the article sites the thousands of small bakeries in Italy vs. Quiznos here. Enough said. I guess the entire meaning of cheap never occurs to anybody.