Some More News - Some More News: Will (And Should) The World Be Covered In Data Centers?

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Hi. In today's episode, we look at the rapid increase in the investment and construction of data centers, all to prop up an AI economy that most people don't want and have no use for. Get the world's news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link.Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by Rachel Van NesProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by Gregg MellerPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/join#somemorenews #DataCenters #ai Double up the love this Valentine's Day and buy ONE DOZEN roses and get ANOTHER DOZEN for free at http://1800Flowers.com/NEWS. Love!Clean water is one of the best investments you can make for you and your family. For a limited time go to http://CovePure.com/SMN to get $200 off your purchase.Pluto TV. Stream Now. Pay Never.Chapters:0:00 - Introduction0:49 - Data Centers: What, Like, Are They?12:10 - The Water Issue19:29 - Data Centers Are Ruining Cities39:00 - The AI BubbleSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey friends, how you doing? That's super. Listen, shut up for a second so I can tell you how I'm doing, because I'm great. I'm building all sorts of healthy habits. I'm eating way more butter and sugar, sleeping more, like 17, 18 hours a day sometimes. And I'm drinking lots of water. Lots and lots, lots of water. I'm really thirsty all the time.

So much water, in fact. You may as well call me a data center, Zing. But seriously, I'm really tired and thirsty. all the time. Hey, that reminds me of news, some of, as in, here's some news, data centers. What like, are they? Aren't you curious?

I am, I'm always curious and tired, and I want you to like and subscribe to this show and perhaps check out our Patreon. We have a Patreon, which probably exists because of a data center. Who knows? I don't. I guess that's the whole point of this episode actually. So thanks to the tech industry's weird new delight

for suicide chatbots and pedophile slop conjurers, data centers have become a hot topic of debate. Nearly 3,000 new data centers are being planned or constructed right now while we struggle to breathe. That's so many. And like, hey, why? Do we need so many? And what's in those things?

Antifa? Is it like the movie Eddington where they got Antifa? in there? What are they doing to the environment around them? Is it bad? I bet it's bad. A lot of people are saying it's bad. Are those people right? Or is it like nuclear power where everyone is a little more nervous about it than they should be? Why do I taste pennies all the time now? Did anyone see the movie Eddington? I liked it. There's a lot riding on data centers, possibly even. Spoilers, the entire gosh darn economy. So we should probably understand them a little. little bit more. So, brass tacks, hard questions first. What is a data center? Well, it's a physical building where companies store all sorts of hardware, software, networking devices, and I'm willing to bet one or two vending machines and a few toilets. From the outside, data centers look like big, boring warehouses. They vary in size from a small server closet to giant complexes, like the Citadel campus in Nevada, which covers 7.2 million square.

feet or 125 football fields or about 5,000 Hot Topic stores for my cool audience that loves Hot Topics and Hot Topics. Data centers have a couple windows if they're lucky and are protected with magnetoplastic prison levels of security. Surveillance, biometric scans, firewalls, encryption, maybe one of them resident evil laser hallways. You get it. It really does look like the kind of place Tom Cruise would break into for fun.

Just a bunch of networking cables running everywhere and rack after rack of servers. In fact, it doesn't take a lot of people to run a data center. A 40 megawatt facility only needs 45 employees, including electrical and mechanical engineers, critical environment technicians to monitor cooling and power, IT, and security guys. To keep the servers from overheating, data centers use elaborate cooling systems, including huge HVAC units, cooling towers, and thousands of founts, which create a constant loud buzzing sound. It's a super expensive white noise machine.

Here's a friendly Google workspace video where the guy clearly has to yell over the sound while explaining the cooling system. So the hot air from the servers is contained in that hot aisle. It raises up, passes across those coils, where the heat from the air transfers to the water in those coils, and then that warm water is then brought outside the data center to our cooling plant.

plant where it has cooled down through our cooling towers and returned back to the data center and that process just repeats over and over again. Neat. It also takes a lot of electricity to keep a data center running 24-7. Nearly half the energy used on a data center goes to the IT equipment. The second most goes to the cooling systems that keep the servers from having a meltdown and the remaining support security systems, backup power supplies, and the pinball machines in the employee lounge. I'm sorry, correction, they have foosball. And they work very hard. So we like to provide them a fun environment where they can also play hard as well. Cool! Nothing says fun like Walmart lighting and stool chairs. Whatever, I'm sure it's fine for those 45 people who get to work there. Anyway, data centers draw most of their energy from local power grids, but they've become more reliant on fossil fuels, which globally

currently provide nearly 60% of their energy. That is of course one of the big issues. Luckily, we have a very smart president who has waged a war against wind and solar projects while also declaring an energy emergency and kidnapping another country's president in order to take their oil. Ewe. Data centers are also equipped with backup generators in case the local grid craps out. Because the most important thing is that the data centers never stop running. Because like them or not, they keep the entire internet alive, which is, you know, good. I guess, maybe. Depends on the day. Remember when Amazon Web Services went down and affected Snapchat and Ring and Roblox?

Lord knows, I was right in the middle of playing Dress to Impress when that happened. The theme was Midnight Garden. Well, that was because of a problem in their Virginia data centers. Because these buildings are the internet. Cyberspace, the Net, our World Wide Web, Tube Town, Grox House. If we want to have all of the... This... We have to have data centers.

Maybe not so many of them, but some. And they've existed in some form for a long time. A lot of companies like Facebook get their start by first renting server space until they are big enough to construct their own data centers, and in turn often rent out their space to smaller companies. And it turns out that this is sneakily a huge source of income for these companies. More than I think you realize. The aforementioned Amazon Web Services is one such example.

Currently, AWS is responsible for only about 30% of all cloud computing on the planet. Only one third of the internet? Pathetic! A paltry amount for losers! And yet, renting out those data centers is responsible for nearly three-quarters of Amazon's entire operating income. That's total revenue minus expenses. Amazon is, at the end of the end of the data centers, the day, a data center company that also likes to sell people toilet paper and make horrible War of the World's adaptations on the side. For fun, I guess. They made Merv, the film about two

honkies trying to make their dog feel better about their breakup. For fun. Who's fun? We may never know. The dogs? We may never know. But this is how they can put your local artisans out of business by selling tables that are somehow cheaper than the screws they forgot to include in the package. Data centers are huge and good for the companies and for the internet. But are they huge and good for, you know, America or people? They are if you like this, I guess. Prime Air. Right here.

It's the future of delivery. They've been training us for months. I need you to place an official order on Amazon to activate the drone. No. Thrilling stuff. So in the U.S., major data center hubs are popping up in places like Nebraska, Northern Virginia, Ohio, Arizona, and we assume Ogdenville and North Haverbrook. As of March 2025, the U.S. had nearly 5,500 data centers, and that number continues to go up,

currently fueled by the AI hype train. But as I already mentioned, these places, A, don't hire that many people, and A, part two, electric second point, they demand a turd ton of infrastructure to keep up their energy demands. And geez, I don't know if you know this. But America isn't exactly on the up and up when it comes to infrastructure. Infrastructure week. More like infrastructure week. Back in 2022, data centers consumed about 17 nuclear power plants worth of power.

By 2030, the U.S. Department of Energy predicts that number will go up to 130. nuclear plants worth, which will make up 12% of the U.S.'s annual energy demand. Where the heck will that power come from? You can't just order electricity on Amazon Prime. Well, you don't order batteries. But you get me. Power capacity takes years to build. New gas power plants won't be online until 2030 at the earliest. Renewable energy could, in theory, fill the gap. Wind, solar batteries, great options. You know, if we did have a bad president. You know, that'd be a great idea if we didn't have the really bad president. As it stands, local grids are already getting wrecked. Take PJM, which operates the largest

power grid in the country. Every year, they hold something called a capacity auction. This is where power plants sell a promise that they'll be able to produce electricity in the future, especially during heat waves and deep freezes. This is how PJM makes sure that the grid doesn't give out when everyone turns on the heat at the same time. But last year, because data centers are sucking so much power from the grid, the cost of that promise went up by more than 500%. So who's gonna pay for that extra power? Oh, you know who? It's all of us. It's all the you people, the whee's and the so on. We get to pay higher electric bills so a giant computer warehouse can let a tech company sell their child sexual abuse material

simulating chatbots. That's a sentence, I just said, that it's truer than it should be. This isn't just PJM, it's happening all over the country. In Florida, residential electric rates increased by 13% in just the last year, with Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio seeing similar spikes. This push for new energy infrastructure will cost over a trillion dollars in the next five years, and no one seems to know who is going to pay for it. Common sense says the tech companies using all the power should pay for it. And to be F and B, our very good president is on it. Or rather, Trump has promised that he'd make the companies pay for it.

He hasn't demanded any laws about it or made an executive order or anything, but that guy always keeps his promises. And a lot of lawmakers are sort of pushing back in other ways, including known idiot Greg Abbott. He recently signed a law that would allow the state's grid operator to flip a kill switch that cuts off data centers when the grid is maxed out. Which is something, like bare minimum, but cool. I mean, who doesn't fantasize about killing Grok

with their bare hands? So thanks to Greg Abbott for confirming that keeping people alive is better than keeping the meme train running in theory. But of course, electricity is not the only thing these data centers consume. There's also the big scary W word. Wario?

Close! It's Warmbo. Just kidding. Can you imagine? No, it's water. Because what of all the water? Do you remember the water? I barely do.

I should really drink some water. I'm so... So thirsty. Data centers use water in two main ways. The obvious one is for cooling. Electricity, which is computer blood, is like... Hot. And to make the bloods less hot,

data centers have liquid cooling systems that require water. The most efficient ones have a closed-loop system that reuses that water. But not every data center has that. But the real water hog of data centers isn't the cooling system at all, it's electricity generation. Most of the power feeding data centers comes from plants

that boil water into steam to spin turbines, whether that's coal, gas, or nuclear. Even hydroelectric dams, the water version of clean energy, lose absurd amounts of water to, evaporation from their giant reservoirs. The point is, yes, data centers use water, and a lot of people are pretty upset about the water usage while other people act like it's overblown. This is often framed in terms of AI specifically, which is somewhat hard to quantify

considering that these data centers do more than one thing, and generally speaking, you can kind of make the argument either way. And because there is so much varied data about water usage, you can back up either argument with sources. And what I mean is that, as I already said, data centers use different sources for cooling and power, and a data center in the desert has more strain on water than a data center somewhere else, and so on.

Most likely, water usage isn't as big of a problem as we assume. But a lot of that information comes from questionable sources. Google claims one AI query uses five drops of water. However, that claim is being disputed by smart people who point out that they are ignorant, indirect water usage related to electricity consumption, which as I pointed out is the main way they use water. And also, that's Google saying that.

You can't even do a Google search these days, let alone ask them the company a question and have them answer it accurately. Anyway, what it comes down to is this. Things take water to make. Blue jeans, almonds, cocaine, babies, hamburgers, data centers. The question is how much water and whether or not these things are not these things are are worth the water, right? So, for example, training OpenAI's GPT3 large language learning model evaporated nearly

185,000 gallons of clean fresh water, at least according to this one study. And that's not that much if you think it's worth using that water so OpenAI can, you know, make images of muscular Donald Trump saving Jesus Christ from a house fire. Me? Cody? I think that's too much water.

I think even five drops of water isn't worth the luxury of asking a robot for dating advice. You know, you get it. Everyone gets it. Water is sort of important. We need it. And right now, two-thirds of the data centers in the U.S. are located in places with high levels of water stress. Some facilities have begun draining local aquifers. And the construction process alone can contaminate water supplies.

In Mansfield, Georgia, after construction of a new data center began, one resident saw murky sediment in her tap water. She has to buy bottled water now, which means the data center didn't just take her water, it also forced her to drink Arrowhead, gross! So data centers take our water and power, but at least they also suck in other ways, ways that we will get into after our first break. Because I also need water and more butter and shes. sugar and naps. Oh, just a... Just a little nap for Cody. Everyone, listen up!

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I love news. Nailed it! I'm talking, of course, about ground news. A website and app we specifically wanted to sponsor us. They gather news from hundreds of sources and compare coverage. I've been working with ground news for a long time, and that is for a reason. I think they're one of the most powerful solutions for getting to the truth of a story. Given all the spin you'll see on the news bus, the wheels of which go round and round. so I am told. With Ground News, I can see the top headlines alongside the political bias of the

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grass grows all around. Like the wheels. The, bus the bus wheels they go around. Old McDonald. We're back. We're Cody and we're still tired. I keep shivering for some reason. We talked about how data centers eat up our power and our water, but good news. There's an upside to living near a data center. Jobs? No, not jobs, you fool. New roads?

No, not those either. No, along with having your water contaminated and power bill raised, data centers, also come with a cool, non-stop buzzing sound. Like you're in a giant angry bumblebee. Listen to this, the ambient sound of Dulles Town Center in Northern Virginia recorded on a phone. About 20 miles south in Manassas, Virginia, Carlos Yanis measures the noise from his local Amazon data centers.

Again, it's pretty much while we were experiencing. And that's just from your deck out there? That's from the deck. You hear that shit? That's what the internet sounds like, apparently. This is happening everywhere. Countless news stories about residents complaining about the unending humming that scared away birds and local wildlife. Not to mention driving everyone out of their minds.

Once you hear it, your ears just lock on to it and you just hear it over TV, music, everything. She says it's worst in the early mornings and in the evenings. Sometimes the constant overbearing sound makes it hard for her family to sleep. Hey, that sucks. Like, we already have a lot of noise and light pollution. We don't need to feel like we're living our entire lives Standing directly next to an old refrigerator Other communities say the diesel fumes make their towns smell like industrial-scale gas stations There's also growing evidence that data centers are straight up making people sick

The power plants and backup generators that keep data centers running Create pollutants like fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides Both of which are linked to asthma symptoms heart issues and cognitive decline as if Chad GPT wasn't doing enough for a cognitive decline already. We're seeing this in Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk's XAI data center is the country's largest producer of smog thanks to a few dozen temporary gas generator turbines that do not have permits, not that anyone's checked. Predictably, this is impacting a predominantly low-income black community. I'm sure Elon will be right on that as soon as he finishes tweeting about

how white people are going extinct, or how due to wokeness, he's going to sue for custody of a kid he denied the existence of just a year ago. Well, I'm saving the world. I reinvented the electric car. And by the way, I'm the country's largest producer of smog and maybe eventually child sexual abuse material. In fact, you know what?

This episode isn't about Elon, but fuck that guy. Roll the clip. Normal gesture. In fact, let's show a different angle. Piece of shit. Anyway, UC Riverside and Caltech researchers found that by 2030, data centers could contribute to 600,000 asthma-related symptoms with the overall public health costs exceeding $20 billion, about the same impact of all of California's vehicle emissions. But, you know, cars actually do stuff? A big driver of this pollution is that many backup generators run on diesel, with one generator releasing 200 to 600 times more nitrogen

oxide than a natural gas power plant producing the same amount of electricity. In 2023, a single generative AI model like Meta's Lama 3.1 produced as much fine particulate matter as 10,000 road trips between L.A. and New York City and none of the memories. And because nitrogen oxide travels by air, pollution created in Virginia can travel all the way down to Florida. I hope those little pollution particles pack their tiny swimsuits, a Adorable. Anyway, seems like one of those Aaron Brockovich situations, you know? Like, best case scenario, there are a bunch of class action lawsuits from this.

But look, on one hand, it's like any factory, right? It requires power and puts out noise and pollution, and we can have a conversation about the best way to do that. On the other hand, it's a factory that makes nothing. Like yeah, we need some data centers for the internet, but right now, they are primed to double their energy usage specifically for AI. This huge boom resulting in power bill spikes and noise pollution and water and air pollution and all this stress on people. And the infrastructure is ultimately so companies like Coca-Cola don't have to pay animators to make their ads. And also, I guess, so Brock can abuse women and children and make fascist propaganda. It's a win-win if you're a Nazi pedophile who hates everything.

Yeah, Elon Musk is a winner. My point here is that there probably, eventually, hopefully, will be solutions to the energy and pollution issues of data centers. But also, maybe let's just not have all these data centers. I don't know. Maybe eventually there will be an actual useful reason to have this many, so it's still good to figure out how to sustainably run them.

Like, while America is a big dumb fart about it, China has built wind and solar so fast and at such a scale that they actually have too much clean energy, though they do still rely heavily on coal. They're also working on an underwater data center, so that's cool and I'm sure won't be really fucked up for whales or anything. Or we can put them in space, I guess.

There are no whales up there that we know of. Space is cold and big, like my heart, which will reduce cooling needs. The EU is super excited about this, and at least one company has already successfully tested a launch. They say a large-scale operation could be a go as early as 2037. So that's neat, in theory, in 10 years from now, as a potential sci-fi-seeming solution to a problem they created.

And by then we'll be dead, so. And again, here, in America the Fart, we're not innovating these problems. We're just flooding the country with data centers and hoping it'll pay off somehow. giving millions in tax breaks to lure these power leeches to our towns and states, bending over backwards because of the vague promise that having one in your town will create jobs and build infrastructure. Despite the jobs being for like 50 people and the infrastructure being whatever new power is required to run the data center. In Indiana, for example, they've allowed Amazon to build 30 data centers on 1200 acres of farmland on top of a 50-year tax break. That's right. Five zero. This deal alone will save Amazon $4 billion. But it's unclear what Indiana gets.

One thing is for sure, they get less water. See, because Amazon needed to bury fiber optic cables for these data centers, they decided to pump a ton of water out of the ground. In one permit, they actually had the audacity to ask if they could pump out 2.2 million gallons of water per hour for 730 days. Now a bunch of the locals' wells are completely dry. But hey, at least, you know, at least they got this. Oh yeah, who needs water when you have a droning industrial wasteland? Oh my!

It's like larping the apocalypse, you know, until the real one a few years from now, caused in part by the larping. I feel like I haven't stressed this enough. So I'll try now. These neighboring towns get nothing. Like if a tire factory opened near your town, you'd at least get a place to buy tires, I guess. But data centers don't create a product

for the immediate area. So what is the goddamn deal we're making here? Right now, 42 states offer sales tax exemptions to data centers or don't have sales tax at all, and 16 of those states gave $6 billion in exemptions in the last five years. And these numbers are incomplete because the other states don't report

how much they're giving away, probably because they're deeply ashamed. I'd sure be, the amount of these corporations are saving is ridiculous, especially given how few jobs data centers actually create. One Microsoft Data Center in Illinois got $38 million in sales tax exemptions in exchange for a grand total of 20 permanent jobs. What?

That's 10 twice. See, you probably assume there's like an economic benefit that states are getting for selling out their residents. But even that is questionable. According to the executive director of an Economic Development Transparency Group, states like Virginia are heading toward billion dollar losses because of their data centers.

Also, their residents don't hear birds anymore and pay more to keep the AC on. Now, to be FB, et cetera, there are some cases, where these data centers will give back economically. Even when taking all the tax breaks into account, Apple, Google, and Vantage will pay nearly half a billion dollars in tax revenue to Nevada over the life of their agreements that will, in theory, go toward the public good. But that's also assuming these places will stay in business, which we will talk about later.

But hint, hint, maybe that's an issue, actually. So to recap, the benefit of having a data center come to your town, is some temporary construction jobs, a handful of permanent jobs, and whatever scraps of tax revenue are left after giant corporate giveaways. The downsides, well, that's stress on the power grid, rising electricity costs, weird humming noises, and toxic air. Hmm, seems like they suck and are bad. For what it's worth, locals agree. Across the U.S., a frenzy of development to support the artificial intelligence boom prompts pushback from communities. who say they don't want data centers in their backyards.

In Michigan, residents today gathered outside the state capital to protest a string of recent data center proposals. Residents and politicians have also pushed back against projects in Arizona, Missouri, Indiana, and more. Indeed. Turns out that nobody likes things that suck. There's a pretty bipartisan pushback against data centers going on everywhere. Farmers, environmentalists, homeowners, everyone has a custom-built reason to hate these things. And in some places, this is actually working.

After a 2000 signature petition, Microsoft abandoned a 244-acre data center project in Wisconsin. There have been 16 data center projects blocked so far, nine in Virginia, the world's unofficial data center capital. Red or red-ish states like Georgia and Indiana, where data centers are more heavily concentrated, are also leading the charge. Ronda Santis is also leading the charge. And Bernie Sanders, it's a bipartisan, because they suck and it's popular to say that they suck. That's why both Steve Bannon and Elizabeth Warren have been critical of the Trump administration's AI regulation policy.

Because it sucks. It sucks the farts we keep mentioning. Specifically, Trump signed an executive order to try to block states from making their own AI regulations. You know how Republicans famously hate states rights? To quote him on truth social, investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. economy the hottest in the world. But over-regulation by the states is threatening to undermine this growth engine. And that's kind of the name of the game. Not growth engine, I'd play that. Like, it's nice to know that everyone hates this obviously stupid and bad thing, but there seems to be this bigger, more powerful effort to cram AI and by extension these data centers down our throats. It's cool that

these towns drove some out, but those will just go to other towns and have fewer resources to defend themselves. Because ultimately, the people at the top want this. The Trump administration seems to see AI as the space race of our time. But instead of Russia, it's China. And instead of going to the moon, I guess we're competing to build the best virtual girlfriend. Currently, only 32 countries have data centers. The U.S. and China have 90% of them and plan to build more than anyone else by a long shot. Ultimately, the idea here is that other countries will need to use these, and so whoever controls the data centers will have a lot of say in international affairs. They're like Beanie Babies. We're just assuming they will have value to the rest of the world and

getting ahead now. If we're right, it'll kind of be like digital colonialism, where countries will have to suck up to us and these corporations for the right to use our stuff. It's not unfounded. Look at Elon Musk and his Starlink. So Trump really wants to get ahead, which is why his administration basically handed tech companies a blank check with the American AI Action Plan, which pushes for more federal agencies to use AI and strips away environmental regulations so data centers can be built faster and on federal lands. This is along with $500 billion dollars toward AI infrastructure. Boy, it would be cool to use that on roads and bridges, but sure. Amazon, Google, Google, meta and Microsoft spent an estimated $373 billion in capital expenditure in 2025, most of it on AI

data centers. Meanwhile, the real estate market is blowing up as well, because everyone is trying to find space to build these new data centers, all to expand AI for the purposes of what? Because everyone hates it, right? Everyone, everyone hates AI? Or rather, everyone hates the sheer volume of useless slop AI that companies are trying to make us eat. Like sure, AI will exist in some form in lots of industries and will eventually help bring us Avatar 7, Snowboys. But people have been largely rejecting this current push to inject it into every aspect of our lives.

Because that sucks. Companies are beginning to realize this and pivot. So people hate AI and also hate data centers, which are the the buildings that make AI possible. It's like if a factory produced nothing but lumps of poop filled with needles and did so by using a bunch of our water and perpetually blasting the sounds of babies crying. No one likes any aspect of this process,

but we're betting trillions of dollars and it will somehow pay out. It kind of reminds me of something, like a, like a round shape, like a round thing with a membrane that I can't remember. The name of, you know what? Let's go to some ads, and when we come back, I bet I can think of a word for that round shape. Oh, gosh, the holidays sure were draining, weren't they? Families, parties, all the food.

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Homes.com. We've done your homework. Hey, sorry about that break, but I needed it. I'm a little baby who needs his blakes. We were talking about how everyone hates AI and hates data centers, and yet at the same time, the country is pouring billions and billions and billions of dollars into them, and an entire industry is booming around them, all for no specific reason beyond the vague hope that they will pay off. And it's like, I don't know, it's like a sphere or orb. I still can't think of the

word. And it just keeps expanding outward more and more until, I mean, something. I feel like a second thing would then happen to this sphere. Here we have, it's a chart with, V-Vidia at the center, and basically everyone is invested in everyone else. So, Nvidia invests in Open AI, which then has an investment in Corweave, which is one of these Neo-Cloud Data Center companies, and Corweave buys chips from Nvidia, so the revenue gets recycled. So there's two, so it's basically everyone is linked to everyone else. And again, like bidirectionally, right? And bi-directionally, yes.

You pay someone and they pay someone else. It's like, you pay them and they pay you. Yes, exactly right. You invests them and they invest in you. Huh. That graphic is a sphere too. It's like, um... Oh, a ball sack!

That's what I was trying to think of. The ball sack gets bigger and bigger and then, you know, bursts with blood and pus. Because, hey, did you know that none of these AI companies are actually making money and in fact are in debt? They all promise to make money

someday, somehow. But the way they would do that sure feels unclear. Sam Altman said, Open AI brings in about $20 billion a year in something called annualized revenue run rate, which is another term for saying a wishful, educated guess of how much money they will make. But he also plans to spend $1.4 trillion on data centers in the future, which is, it's more than $20 billion. So that gamble only works if millions more people start paying for AI

services. Right now, only 5% of users actually pay for it. Because why would we pay for it? What do we need it for? At best, AI is a feature used in another product like translation on your phone or a way to sort through data. At worst, it's an annoying novelty product where you can stick huge milkers on a picture of Rasputin. That's not nothing, but it's not a trillion dollar product. And I think the companies are realizing this and are desperately trying to pretend otherwise. They're a gambler holding 2-7 and acting like they have pocket rockets. It's a pair of aces.

And hopefully you pick up another ace on the flop. A 2-7, it's a bad hand. In poker. 2-7 off suit, by the way. Shuffle up and deal. I'd love to, but I gotta do the news. Specifically though, these companies are using special purpose vehicles, aka financial structures designed to hide debt from their main balance sheets in order to inflate earnings.

These structures are famously what Enron used before it went up in flames in 2001. Oh good! What makes this situation different is that tech companies are just doing this out in the open. Because they're geniuses, right? Visionaries. So clearly they know something we don't. Take Wall Street firm Blue Owl, which teamed up with Meta to finance a Louisiana data Center. Blue Owl took out a $27 billion loan backed by Meta's lease payments, which is basically a mortgage. Meta only owns 20% of the equity, but gets 100% of the computing output. And because

of how the deal is structured, the loan won't appear on Meta's balance sheet. But if the AI bubble bursts and the data center goes dark, Meta will owe Blue Owl billions. There are also circular investments, which is that graph I showed you in that video before. AI hardware like GPUs and chips have ridiculously short shelf lives. So companies spend obscene amounts of money to replace them. This had led to a shady investment loop where Nvidia invested $100 billion in Open AI, and Open AI then spent money on surprise,

Nvidia products. It's like if you lend me $10 and I lend you $10, and then we both said we were up $200. That's bad math. But Silicon Valley is getting away with it. Because again, they're geniuses and they super duper promise that AI will be the future and everyone will love it and the Earth will be covered in data centers, which I guess is good. You know, when you see it from the air, I was really struck by that. I was like, this looks

like the motherboard of a computer. Yeah, it looks like the motherboard of a computer. You start to see like how the planets in like a lot of these like sci-fi movies, a lot of them look, have that R2D2 look on the outside of because they've been covered in data centers. Yeah, which is kind of wild. Do you know where we're going and you're not telling it? I don't. I don't. You promise, dude. I don't know. I mean, I have all my guesses. Like, I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.

Oh, cool. Thanks, CEO of OpenAI. I definitely want that to happen. It just reeks of a bubble, right? You can already see the Adam McKay film about this. A bunch of slick and wealthy tech gurus have talked up this one technology without presenting any practical uses for it. And in fact, every time they gush about it, It seems like it actually sucks and no one would want it.

And do you use ChatGPT when raising your baby? I do. I mean, I feel kind of bad about it because we have this like genius level at everything, intelligence sitting there, like waiting to unravel the mysteries of humanity. And I'm like, why does my kid stop dropping his pizza on the floor and laughing? Yeah. You asked Chat GPT, why does my kids stop dropping pizza on the floor? Are you stupid?

Are you a stupid fucking person, man? Seems like you're a stupid person. In the fairness of balancing, though, I guess we can probably assume that he just misspoke his planned bit and meant to say that he asks chat GPT, why does my kid drop pizza on the floor? Or how do I get my kid to stop dropping pizza on the floor?

To which I will once again ask, are you a stupid fucking person, man? Seems like there's no reason. anyone would need your stupid product that answers very basic questions and makes the world look like a circuit board Thank goodness Chad GPT finally exists just two years ago you would have stepped on your baby and eaten it What a grift once again propped up by cardboard cutout Jimmy Fallon This apparently bumbling oaf of a tech genius has convinced enough other stupid people to invest trillions of dollars in his bullshit.

And our stupid old guy president fell for it and has begun to build our economy around it. Because Trump needs this too, mind you. Taking data centers out of the equation, GDP growth was just 0.1% in the first half of 2025. He needs this to pretend like the economy is good. But when it collapses, it could quite possibly take the entire economy with it. In ways that I'm not equipped to go into right now. or here, I'm just far too thirsty.

As for the physical data centers themselves, well, I hope you like laser tag and escape rooms. I mean, sure, we will still need data centers for the internet in general. But not this many, not thousands more. There's no way all these new buildings and power plants will find a use if AI crashes and burns, no doubt creating a new wave of dusty mill towns across the country.

A good comparison, weirdly, is when the UK built too many railway tracks in the 1840s. Here's a cool nerd explaining what I mean. The UK in 1843 had 2,000 miles of track and they approved 9,000 miles of track to be built in five years. So a quadrupling of the rail network. And what is similar, I think, to today is that it may be rational for every single management team or operator of a rail line to actually put the line in. But collectively, it was madness because there were lines cannibalizing each other's traffic. And the source of the implosion of that was this.

Costs were 50% higher. Revenues were 40% less. Thank you, bodacious poindexter. The difference, which the sick nerd points out, is that, that we knew why we needed trains and what trains were being used for. But now we don't really know why we need all this AI, and if we keep building all these data centers, we won't really know what to do with them either. The hardware in these data centers can be repurposed like iron.

Invidia rolls out a new generation of chips every 10 months that goes obsolete quicker than an iPhone. This constant hardware churn is part of what's driving tech companies to invest billions in new data centers, which, beyond A. AI training and crypto hogwash aren't equipped to do much else. If funding suddenly stops, a lot of these luxury apartments for computers will turn into ghost towns. So in many ways, this isn't like the UK railway situation or the dot com or housing bubble at all. It's likely worse. Again, unless you like indoor paintball arenas, which I actually do, so thumbs up. In the end, a handful of tech billionaires have convinced the federal government to stand by while they hollow towns, strain power grids, poison air and water, and destabilize economies, all so that AI actor Tilly Norwood could get representation. The physical world is

being sacrificed to prop up a digital one, and it's not even one we want. Like, best case scenario is that the AI bubble doesn't pop, and I get replaced with a wifu while every town in America starts to look like a Decepticon's taint, or the bubble pops, the economy gets worse, and I guess the entire internet collapses, which is bad, but, you know, also amazing. I could get a job as a bartender or something, I guess. Start a new life in Canada, get some fresh air, finally,

learn to whittle bear figurines, stop feeling so thirsty and dizzy all the time. Eat all the butter and sugar I could buy, you know? I think this could be really good for me, actually. So I guess more data centers. Yeah, let's drive this turd into a ditch for Cody. And then we can sell the ditch to the guy we got the turd from. And then we'll hold on to the turd.

And then when he's like, I don't need this ditch anymore. Oh, I'll buy the ditch back from you for half of this turd. And then we, so we have, so then we're like in a ditch and we're holding half a turd. Never mind. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for the watching that you did of that. That was it. And now we're at the end of this final of the end of the end of the episode.

Thanks for watching. till the end of the episode, everybody. Make sure to like and subscribe. We would love it if you did that. We've also got a podcast called Even More News. It's on this YouTube channel twice a week or Earwise podcast place. Also Earwise, this YouTube show

that you just watched as a podcast, where all that is. Check out other stuff. What else? Oh, well, let me tell you about it. Oh, Patreon.com slash some more news. I can't wait to visit that way. website. So on the screen, furthermore, thanks for watching. That's, I said, beginning.

End of the episode. We've got a merch and dice store. Not a Brigh and Mortar store. You can't go to the store for it, but online, online stores. So check out the merch at the merch at the merch store. And, Oh my gosh, next week, an episode for you to watch. And then over it, it will be. And I will say, thanks for watching. Make sure like and subscribe. Sorry, I tried to get Chad GPT to write an endplate thing for us, and it just fucking sucked at it. I read that verbatim.