'AI is a place': data centers drain water and power from the real world
relic_radiation · x · 2026-10-18
Quoting the essay "AI Is a Place": AI is not magic or placeless — it is wind, water, coal. Data centers increasingly sit in water-stressed Texas and Nevada, not Silicon Valley. Anthropic announced a $45B data center buildout; OpenAI's Stargate in Abilene, TX needs at least 100MW and about a million gallons of water daily for cooling. California's Imperial Valley hosts >$15B in planned data centers drawing from the Colorado River, which already supplies more water than Arizona and Nevada combined — with no state requirement to report usage. The essay pushes back on Sam Altman's "abundant intelligence and energy" framing as hiding AI's physical costs.
Related event: AI Is a Place: The Water, Power and Minerals Behind Computation(2 posts)→
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