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Whitmer is pushing this massive AI data center in Saline Township, calling it “The Barn” because they’re designing the buildings to look like big red barns instead of typical industrial boxes. It’s for Oracle and OpenAI, a 16 billion dollar project on about 250 acres of what was farmland....

12,498 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten •via X (Twitter)

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Billion-Dollar Data Centers Are Taking Over the World | Lauren Goode, WIRED When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI’s Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn’t kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth’s circumference, the CEO and his cohort are now dotting the planet with their own latifundia—not agricultural estates, but AI data centers. Tech executives like Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison are fully bought in to the idea that the future of the American (and possibly global) economy are these new warehouses stocked with IT infrastructure. But data centers, of course, aren’t actually new. In the earliest days of computing there were giant power-sucking mainframes in climate-controlled rooms, with co-ax cables moving information from the mainframe to a terminal computer. Then the consumer internet boom of the late 1990s spawned a new era of infrastructure. Massive buildings began popping up in the backyard of Washington, DC, with racks and racks of computers that stored and processed data for tech companies. A decade later, “the cloud” became the squishy infrastructure of the internet. Storage got cheaper. Some companies, like Amazon, capitalized on this. Giant data centers continued to proliferate, but instead of a tech company using some combination of on-premise servers and rented data center racks, they offloaded their computing needs to a bunch of virtualized environments. (“What is the cloud?” a perfectly intelligent family member asked me in the mid-2010s, “and why am I paying for 17 different subscriptions to it?”) All the while tech companies were hoovering up petabytes of data, data that people willingly shared online, in enterprise workspaces, and through mobile apps. Firms began finding new ways to mine and structure this “Big Data,” and promised that it would change lives. In many ways, it did. You had to know where this was going. Now the tech industry is in the fever-dream days of generative AI, which requires new levels of computing resources. Big Data is tired; big data centers are here, and wired—for AI. Faster, more efficient chips are needed to power AI data centers, and chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD have been jumping up and down on the proverbial couch, proclaiming their love for AI. The industry has entered an unprecedented era of capital investments in AI infrastructure, tilting the US into positive GDP territory. These are massive, swirling deals that might as well be cocktail party handshakes, greased with gigawatts and exuberance, while the rest of us try to track real contracts and dollars. OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and SoftBank have struck some of the biggest deals. This year an earlier supercomputing project between OpenAI and Microsoft, called Stargate, became the vehicle for a massive AI infrastructure project in the US. (President Donald Trump called it the largest AI infrastructure project in history, because of course he did, but that may not have been hyperbolic.) Altman, Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son were all in on the deal, pledging $100 billion to start, with plans to invest up to $500 billion into Stargate in the coming years. Nvidia GPUs would be deployed. Later, in July, OpenAI and Oracle announced an additional Stargate partnership—SoftBank curiously absent—measured in gigawatts of capacity (4.5) and expected job creation (around 100,000). Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have also shared plans for multibillion-dollar data projects. Microsoft said at the start of 2025 that it was on track to invest “approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled data centers to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.” Then, in September, Nvidia said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, provided that OpenAI made good on a deal to use up to 10 gigawatts of Nvidia’s systems for OpenAI’s infrastructure plans, which means essentially that OpenAI has to pay Nvidia in order to get paid by Nvidia. The following month AMD said it would give OpenAI as much as 10 percent of the chip company if OpenAI purchased and deployed up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs between now and 2030. It’s the circular nature of these investments that have the general public, and bearish analysts, wondering if we’re headed for an AI bubble burst. What’s clear is that the near-term downstream effects of these data center build-outs are real. The energy, resource, and labor demands of AI infrastructure are enormous. By some estimates, worldwide AI energy demand is set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year, WIRED has reported. The processors in data centers run hot and need to be cooled, so big tech companies are pulling from municipal water supplies to make that happen—and aren’t always disclosing how much water they’re using. Local wells are running dry or seem unsafe to drink from. Residents who live near data center construction sites are noting that traffic delays, and in some cases car crashes, are increasing. One corner of Richland Parish, Louisiana, home of Meta’s $27 billion Hyperion data center, has seen a 600 percent spike in vehicle crashes this year. Major proponents of AI seem to suggest that all of this will be worth it. Few top tech executives will publicly entertain the notion that this might be an overshoot, either ecologically or economically. “Emphatically … no,” Lisa Su, the chief executive of AMD, said earlier this month when asked if the AI froth has runneth over. Su, like other execs, cited overwhelming demand for AI as justification for these enormous capital expenditures. Demand from whom? Harder to pin down. In their mind, it’s everyone. All of us. The 800 million people who use ChatGPT on a weekly basis. The evolution from those 1990s data centers to the 2000s era of cloud computing to new AI data centers wasn’t just one continuum. The world has concurrently moved from the tiny internet to the big internet to the AI internet, and realistically speaking, there’s no going back. Generative AI is out of the bottle. The Sams and Jensens and Larrys and Lisas of the world aren’t wrong about this. It doesn’t mean they aren’t wrong about the math, though. About their economic predictions. Or their ideas about AI-powered productivity and the labor market. Or the availability of natural and material resources for these data centers. Or who will come once they build them. Or the timing of it all. Even Rome eventually collapsed.

Owen Gregorian

55,427 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Jolly: Byron Donalds’ real plan to bring down property taxes is to devalue your house by building a hyperscale data center next door to you. Byron Donalds is doing something that Donald Trump is doing and every other conflicted politician is doing who’s on all sides of this issue now. So big tech wants to come in and bring in the hyperscale data centers. Politicians like Byron Donalds have said, “Yeah, come on in. Build on our pristine lands. Give me the money in my campaign account, and I’ll let you do it.” Voters said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We don’t want hyperscale data centers.” And so now the position of the White House and Byron Donalds has pivoted to the following: “Ratepayer protection.” Ratepayer protection is what they’re saying to make it look like they’re pushing back. Now, understand what that means. That means that big tech and utilities have to pay their own way. They’re allowed to plunder as long as they pay for the plundering. Well, voters are saying, “We don’t want you to plunder.” And by the way, paying your own way should have been the baseline. That’s not a big reform. That’s just because they got caught subsidizing the development of these hyperscale data centers. Now, their position is, “We’re going to make them pay their own way,” and they’re taking a victory lap as though it’s some important consumer protection. No, it’s not. Look who’s cheering on the Trump-Donalds plan for hyperscale data centers. Who is cheering it on? Big tech and big utilities. Who’s against it? Voters. And so, it is a bold-faced lie when you hear Byron Donalds say, “I’m protecting the people of Florida.” No, he’s not. He’s allowing big tech and hyperscale data centers to come into your backyard, plunder our environment, devalue your property, destabilize your community, and then pat himself on the back all the way on his road to what he thinks is going to be a November victory. He’ll be proven wrong.

Acyn

64,845 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen

Every Wall Street giant that owns an AI data center is suddenly looking for a buyer. And NONE of them want to be the last one holding it. Three of them made their move in the last two weeks: Vantage Data Centers is exploring an exit. Its owners, Silver Lake and DigitalBridge, are weighing a listing at around $100 billion, or a sale, or a stake sale. It would be the largest data center IPO ever done. Three days earlier, CyrusOne started the same process. KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners met Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and the banks pitched for roles on a listing that could come as early as 2027. Last month, Switch hired Goldman and JPMorgan to take it public at close to $80 billion including debt, possibly by the fourth quarter. Three different companies moved inside the same 14 days, and the same handful of investment banks took every call. And these are the exact same firms that BOUGHT these companies off the public market four years ago. Between June 2021 and early 2022, private equity took the data center industry private. Blackstone bought QTS. KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners took CyrusOne private in a deal worth about $15 billion. DigitalBridge and IFM took Switch private for about $11 billion. Together those deals ran past $35 billion. By 2023 there were only two pure-play data center companies left on the public market. The logic at the time was that data centers burn cash for years before they pay, and public shareholders hate that. But private money was patient, and private money could wait. Four years later, the AI boom arrived and every one of those buildings became a gold mine. So follow this: Switch went private at about $11 billion in 2022. Its owners now want close to $80 billion for it. That is roughly 7x, in four years, on the same buildings. And DigitalBridge sits on both sides of this. It owns a piece of Vantage and it took Switch private. It is now looking for the door on BOTH. The question now is who is supposed to buy. There is no bigger private buyer left to sell to. These are already the largest infrastructure funds on Earth, and the price tags now run to $100 billion. The only pocket deep enough is the public market, which means anyone with a brokerage account or an index fund. The people who bought low from the public are now organizing to sell high back to the public. And they are doing it while telling everyone the buildout is just getting started. KKR raised a record $19.2 billion for its newest infrastructure fund this month, and in June launched a separate company with over $10 billion committed to finance more construction. So one hand raises fresh billions to build more data centers, and the other hand sells the finished ones to whoever will take them. None of this proves anyone thinks the boom is ending. Selling into strength is what these firms are paid to do, and every one of these deals is early stage and might never happen. But the timing tells you something: The most sophisticated infrastructure investors alive spent four years accumulating these assets in private, and all decided in the same two weeks that now is the moment to find someone else to own them. Four years ago these firms decided the public market was too impatient to own data centers. Now they want the public market to own them again, at 7x the price. Quite suspicious.

Ricardo

70,858 Aufrufe • vor 12 Tagen

Elon just got Mississippi to pay for his $20 billion AI data center. And the state thinks they WON. This is funny, let me explain: xAI announced a massive data center in Southaven, Mississippi. Governor Tate Reeves called it "the largest private investment in state history." $20 billion. Hundreds of jobs. Economic transformation. Except Mississippi isn't getting $20 billion. They're GIVING Elon $2-3 billion in tax breaks. The fine print: Under Mississippi's 2024 data center law, xAI pays ZERO sales tax on equipment, ZERO corporate income tax, ZERO franchise tax. xAI is buying $15-18 billion in computing hardware. Mississippi sales tax is 7%. That's $1+ billion waived just on equipment purchases. Add corporate tax exemptions over the next decade and you're looking at $2-3 billion in total giveaways. For a state with a $7 billion annual budget. What Mississippi actually gets: "Hundreds of permanent jobs" (no specific number). "Thousands of indirect jobs" (construction work that ends when building is done). Tax revenue from... wait, they exempted all the taxes. So the only money coming in is property tax and income tax from a few hundred employees. In a state that already has super low tax rates. The timeline makes it obvious this was already done: Announced January 8th. Operations begin February. Three weeks from announcement to launch? They bought and retrofitted an 800,000 sq ft building BEFORE telling anyone. This wasn't a negotiation. It was a press conference for a done deal. Mississippi Development Authority said xAI "didn't ask for special treatment." Because Mississippi already created a law giving data centers everything they want. xAI just exploited it at the biggest scale yet. The name is perfect: MACROHARDRR. Opposite of Microsoft. Elon trademarked it last year. He's building a $20 billion troll to Microsoft funded by Mississippi taxpayers. What actually happens: xAI operates tax-free for a decade. Builds the world's most powerful AI supercomputer. Generates billions in revenue. Pays Mississippi nothing. Meanwhile Mississippi schools and hospitals stay underfunded. When locals complain about environmental impact, xAI points to the jobs they created. Perfect closed loop. Every other state is watching this. "If Mississippi can give away billions in taxes and call it economic development, why can't we?" Race to the bottom starts now. Elon just proved the playbook: Raise $20 billion, find a desperate state, get them to waive all taxes, build your infrastructure for free, own it forever, profit tax-free. All while media calls it "investment." It's not investment IN Mississippi. It's extraction FROM Mississippi. Mississippi gave Elon a $20 billion playground and didn't charge admission. He gets the world's most powerful AI infrastructure. They get a press release and construction jobs. Biggest corporate giveaway in modern history or genius economic development... Next 5 years will tell us. But one thing is for sure: Elon's smart as f*ck for this.

Ricardo

41,539 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

I started digging into the rapid expansion of hyperscale data centers and energy projects in Ohio and what I found raised serious questions about transparency, public oversight, and who these deals are really benefiting. JobsOhio was created in 2011 and funded through the state’s liquor enterprise revenue, billions generated from public assets. Yet it operates as a private nonprofit that is not subject to traditional open-records laws. Today, Ohio is being marketed as “deployment ready” for hyperscale data centers, massive facilities that require constant, industrial-scale electricity and water usage. To support that demand, new energy infrastructure is being proposed across the state, including advanced nuclear projects like Oklo in Pike County. Policy changes like Ohio Senate Bill 52 shifted how energy siting decisions are handled at the local level, while utilities such as American Electric Power have proposed new tariffs and grid upgrades to support the surge in data center demand. Communities across Ohio are raising concerns about farmland loss, water usage, electricity costs, and the lack of early public input before these deals are shaped. Regardless of where you stand on development, one thing should be non-negotiable: Transparency. Accountability. And a real voice for the people of Ohio. Public resources and infrastructure should serve the public first. Decisions that shape our land, our water, and our power grid should not happen behind closed doors. If you care about your community, your property, and your future, now is the time to start asking questions and paying attention.

Kim Georgeton for Lt. Governor of Ohio

14,671 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten