Shucking Oysters: The Future is Far From Friendly
By Alex Allen
Data. It records our actions: what we read, what we watch, where we travel, what we purchase, what we write, what we search, and on. Far from being held in the clouds, our data is being held in data camps all around the world. Some can be millions of square feet in size, stretching across thousands of acres; others are hidden innocuously behind building façades in downtown metropolises. As cloud computing and AI increase the world’s demand for data storage, there are even bigger plans to build even bigger data warehouses globally.
A data centre, Alexander Nazaryan wrote, is kin to a server centre, “the lymph node of the digital economy.” Typically windowless warehouses, they constantly process the ginormous amounts of data we use all day long. Much like industrial animal factory farms, these are industrial digital farms. Both need large amounts of floor space, both have high power requirements and both need ample water. Instead of the screeching of abused animals in distress one gets to hear the high-pitched buzzing of fans and cooling systems.
With his brazen lack of concern for the environment or life and his obsession with winning, Trump has big, big plans. In January, he announced “Project Stargate,” which he called “the largest AI infrastructure project in history.” The project, a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, Japan-based SoftBank and Emirati investment firm MGX, is financing massive data farm construction across the US.
As we well know, Trump has no boundaries. Beyond arable farmlands, pristine federal lands are also primed for big, beautiful data farms. “Obviously, we are not oblivious to the fact that data centers require energy, they require water,” a White House spokesman commiserated. “We understand those concerns. But there’s a cost-benefit analysis here.” Indeed. Everywhere data farms are being proposed (forced), communities are being told of the huge employment benefits. The reality is, once construction ends, a data farm may need only a dozen or so people to operate.
In north Virginia, two years ago, the world’s largest data farm, Digital Gateway, was given the go-ahead, a 23-million square foot cluster fuck of 37 data farms on 2,100 acres of former farmland. Last August, a judge voided its rezoning due to, of all things, a public notice violation. Then in September, a county board appealed the ruling, citing that private investments could be “irreparably jeopardized.”
“Halting this project disrupts critical momentum and raises serious concerns among investors.” We all know this mantra. It’s not about the environment, it’s about the almighty shareholder. If you’re against data farms, you’re against innovation and prosperity. Fun facts: the power requirements for the proposed Digital Gateway site, are estimated to be about the equivalent of the needs of 750,000 households. And water? As much as five million gallons of water a day (the usage of a community of 50,000 people).
AI is worse. For every 50 questions it’s asked, ChatGPT needs 16-ounces of water. And according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a single ChatGPT query requires 2.9 watt-hours of electricity, compared to a mere 0.3 watt-hours for a Google search.
It’s a generative AI building boom. As Franklin Foer wrote, data is the new oil. Construction is planned in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. Rajiv Garg, a cloud computing professor at Emory University in Atlanta, says these data farms aren’t going away – if anything, they’re becoming the backbone of “modern” life.
In January, Zuckerberg’s Meta opened a $1 billion data farm, that spreads over two-million square feet on 396 acres, in Mesa, Arizona. It doesn’t matter that the surrounding county, where Microsoft also has two data farms, is facing extreme drought. And it hasn’t stopped Google’s plans for a second center, while the first can use over five million cubic metres of water a year.
In Louisiana, Meta is currently building a four-million square foot, $10 billion complex data farm, dubbed “Hyperion,” on 2,250 acres of farmland (the size of both North and South Pender Islands combined), that could use the energy equivalent of four million homes. “We are making all these investments because we have conviction that super intelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do,” Zuckerberg said in July.
Touted as the largest construction site in North America, Delaney Nolan wrote, “this is rural Richland Parish, once a floodplain tangled with meandering bayous and wild canebrake where black bears still wander and a quarter of the 20,000 residents live below the poverty line.”
There are over 5,000 data farms in the US, followed by Germany with 529, China 515, the UK 514, and Canada 336. With no surprise, soon to be the largest data farm in Canada, is a massive $70 billion AI complex in Alberta, driven by dragon/shark Kevin O’Leary, called Wonder Valley, stretching over 760,000 square feet. Premier Danielle Smith, who someone once described as having a “kind of bombast and defensive determination to keep doing the wrong thing,” has plans to blanket rural Alberta with $100 billion worth of data farms. Meanwhile in BC, Bell AI Fabric plans to build six AI data farms, with the altruistic aim of creating the largest Canadian AI infrastructure (for its shareholders).
The IAE recently estimated that “the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals.” So it is with supreme irony, speaking at Italian Tech Week last week, that Jeff Bezos announced that he’s going to be building giant gigawatt data centers in space.
“Because we have solar power there, 24/7. There are no clouds and no rain, no weather,” Bezos said. “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades.”
Bezos assures us that the shift to “space infrastructure is part of a broader trend of using space to improve life on Earth” (after Big Tech destroyed it). “It already has happened with weather satellites. It has already happened with communication satellites. The next step is going to be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing,” Bezos enthused.
As Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee, eloquently put it: “Let’s be clear about what we are doing here. We are using lakes of clean water, reviving coal-powered stations, gulping methane, raising electrical prices, squandering agricultural land and cannibalizing electrical supplies to ask inane questions and make videos about stupid shit.”
