A Thief and a Liar

Starting off with an article from Ars Technica, $130 billion in data center projects blocked by protests so far this year.

Ashley Bellinger writes, "Winning the fight against AI data centers gives people a taste of political power.

Data Center Watch, a project from AI intelligent firm 10A Labs that tracks data center fights around the US, reported that protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide between January and March." [chuckles] Yeah.

Apparently, that's the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023.

So one of the ways that AI protest has emerged has really been at the infrastructure level, uh, and this is something I predicted some while back.

I actually negatively predicted that we would start to see violence in this area.

I was afraid that we would see people essentially attack, uh, data center infrastructure, uh, maybe go after people who are implementing these systems.

Um, thankfully, we haven't seen anything to that degree.

Uh, instead, people are mobilizing democratically, and that is very exciting 'cause that's what we want, right? We don't want violence.

We don't want sabotage.

Uh, but we do want citizens exercising their rights.

So this is really great news.

There is, however, a danger that some of this translates into NIMBYism in general, so we need to keep an eye on that.

For example, I recently heard a story that some, uh, large-scale battery projects are being halted in the Pacific Northwest 'cause citizens are concerned that, uh, these large battery installations, which, you know, look a little bit like data centers [chuckles], uh, are, are going into, you know, otherwise rural areas or whatnot, and there's fears around fires and other issues.

Um, I'm not saying none of those issues are valid, uh, but we, we need to make sure we're clear that, uh, renewable energy battery systems [chuckles], uh, that's a very different story than an AI data center.

Uh, the utility of it and the importance of it is, is quite a different picture.

So I do hope that opposition to data centers doesn't sort of get people excited about opposing anything anywhere for any reason.

Uh, not all development is horrifying and bad.

Um, so yeah.

This is a story overall that I will be tracking very closely.