Electoral Ramifications While We Are Talking About Data Centers

Data centers, data center, data centers…everybody is talking about data centers.  Here’s what gets to me, you know how the people that made real money in a gold rush were the outfitters, not the prospectors?  I think we are going to find the same thing is true in the new burgeoning tech that is A.I.  Chipmakers, printed circuit board makers, fan makers, case and rack manufacturers, building contractors, energy and water suppliers – that’s where the money is really going to be.  Especially in energy, and it is time we took a sober look at the energy landscape.

In a year, a data center uses about as much energy as a couple hundred thousand cars – roughly one month’s worth of new car sales.  Given that a significant portion of car sales also represents a car off the road – data centers will soon far outstrip automobiles in energy consumption.  It’s got to come from somewhere.  There is lots of talk about having data centers generate their own, but that is adding a lot of overhead to the data center – will they be commercially viable under such regulation?  Particularly since they will be competing on a global scale with centers in nations that don’t care much about generating plant emissions, etc.  Pie-in-the-sky visions of a data center with a neat little SMNR (small modular nuclear reactor) sitting next to it are just that – pie-in-the-sky.  A.I. is now, and such possibilities are a decade or more away.

In the meantime, we are rapidly shrinking the available energy supplies in the nation, not because it can’t come through the Strait of Hormuz, but because once it gets here we can’t refine it, or move it around the nation.  If we lose the A.I. race, it is not going to be because of we are behind the tech curve, but because we are behind the energy curve.

All of which makes me wonder if this new drone warfare is really as cheap as people seem to think it is.  It requires a lot of computing and is only going to require more as the tech advances.  For example – Ukraine imports a lot of electricity – a significant portion of which goes into the drone strikes against Russia.  I can’t find any information on it, but I wonder if the data centers those strikes rely upon are not outside the country as well, at least in part?  In the internet age, it is hard to tell.  Makes you wonder who is fighting whom and who is allied with who?  “Lend-lease” indeed.

In the meantime, Abdul El-Sayed is talking about a billionaires tax – out of both sides of his mouth about Obama – and he can’t bring himself to condemn terrorism.  James Tallarico just disappears among some really ugly rumors.  Mamdani and AOC have a laugh while the names of the dead in 9-11 are being read.

I have not written much about this election because Democrats seem fundamentally unserious in this election.  I just laid out some tremendous challenges, in one small area, for this nation in the imminent future while the Democrats are putting up people more suited for the student elections I participated in in junior high than a high stakes national election.  All the experts tell me they have a legitimate shot, but I cannot bring myself to believe it – Trumpian effects notwithstanding.

But then turnout is everything and I often forget that because I vote as religiously as I go to church on Sunday.  I wonder if there is a method to Democratic madness?  This group of candidates are so insane it is easy to figure, “they can’t win,” thus depressing Republican turnout and suddenly we are faced with a crop of fools in DC.

So be sure and vote.  Makes sure your neighbors vote.  Just make sure everyone votes with their common sense.