Pete Ashdown

It’s quite the sight to see Governor Cox, Senator Stuart Adams and the MIDA board fall all over themselves to allow a datacenter encompassing 60 square miles be built in Box Elder County. Suddenly, AI datacenters are job creators instead of job destroyers. Suddenly, lights-out datacenters need more people than an automobile factory to run. Suddenly, datacenters are cooled with minimal water use, instead of what every datacenter over a megawatt has done, use evaporative cooling to cool the closed loops that move heat from the inside to the outside. Of course, the concern for the lake hasn’t changed. I’d argue that Cox still hasn’t gotten on board with any actual remediation of the lake, because he still believes God will provide as long as we beg Him hard enough. God helps those who help themselves, indeed.

After the driest winter in recent memory, the governor and co. want to install one of the largest heat generators on the planet with no environmental studies whatsoever. Moreover, they want to give tax breaks to the Canadian who lives in Florida to do it. It reminds me of the time in 1995 when I applied to a newly created “Utah Technology Finance Commission” for a $50,000 loan and they turned me down. Needless to say, I haven’t received any tax breaks over the past 25+ years of running a datacenter, nor do I get municipal water for any cheaper than any other business in Salt Lake City. The fact that I have paid a premium for power with carbon offsets, throughout XMission’s history is far beyond what any billionaire-built datacenter would. This is what anyone with ethics would do, but it would seem the last good billionaire died in 2023.

Why build hospitals, clinics, libraries, and schools when you can spout your demented visions of technocracy, advocate for invading Greenland, and plunder the taxpayers for hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars?

“National Security” is currently the “Save the Children” for the military frenzy in datacenters and “AI”. Unfortunately, what the politicians fail to realize is that bigger does not equal smarter. It just means faster and more concurrency. The current website based LLMs that aren’t much more capable than what can be downloaded and run on a Mac Mini. The Black Swan Files does a great job of disassembling the myth of bigger is better. The “arms race” with China is not going to culminate in a super-intelligence to offset our political idiocy. It will simply continue to funnel money from the taxpayer to the rich with a trail of environmental devastation.