Utah greenlights 9GW AI campus using over twice state electricity

Cool. Will it drive up the price of the existing grid's existing electrons though? It'll increase demand for the natural gas that keeps those electrons moving.

Why would the state, the county, and the military even consider letting an inexperienced developer with zero past successful datacenter projects undertake such a vast project?

I’ve been around the datacenter world for many cycles, and this story seems like a tale old as time.

Again, why would someone with no experience take such an enormous risk?

It may seem easy to build these things; but it’s actually quite difficult to get it all up and running safely and in sync at full capacity.

Even experienced people in these fields mess up from time to time.

For example, the largest electrical contractor in the dc area that was multigenerational family owned went under building the NSA data center in Utah, and they knew what they were doing!

This was an expert electrical contractor with over 50 years of experience, and they got in way over their head with cost over runs and bad engineering.

Somehow phases got crossed and things blew up if I remember correctly, and it lead to power surges that took them under.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/10th-largest-us-electr...

https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/breaking_ground/2014/...

How exactly is the shark tank guys property management company going to pull this off?

AI data centers are a new, expensive, and (soon to be) highly integrated layer on top of our economy’s tirimasu of dependencies. Especially as new generations come and rely more fully on the machines than we are comfortable doing ourselves.

Right new if you destroy a data center you might destroy tax documents, calendars, sensitive user data, etc. 50 years from now destroying an AI center could mean no one can fly a plane or produce legal arguments anymore. So much of our productivity will be tied into these datacenters and our new skill sets will be entangled in their operation.

Not good, not bad, just different.

And when they do and the residents' electricity costs go up because of it (which is baffling to me; the companies that use it should pay a premium for it that offsets the residential use), I guess there's just nothing that could be done. Not. One. Thing.

I love how AI made all the tech bros flip on 40 years of calling CO2 "pollution."