Recently there has been a stampede toward the construction of "data centers" around the U.S., and it isn't hard to find local politicians clamoring to have a big new power-hungry facility built in their respective towns, because politicians love mysterious high-tech boondoggles.  In the early 1990s, one example was the Superconducting Super Collider, near Waxahachie, Texas.  I remember one Senator from Texas insisted that the SSC must be built right away, or the Japanese government would "build it and use it against us!"  (In what way?  He never said.  And what's the hurry?  He never explained.)  The project was partially built and then abandoned.  What's left would make a good prison.

The purpose or the benefit of "data centers" is apparently connected to Artificial Intelligence, although the short term goal appears to be the full employment of construction workers.  Unlike the news media, I have questions:  What is described by all the data going through these centers?  Where does it come from?  Why must it all be collected in one place?  Why does data storage require so much power?  Are supercomputers involved, or just servers?  Is "data center" another name for an AI farm?  Are they being used part-time as bitcoin factories?  Does the data come from a blanket wiretap of the entire country's internet and telephone traffic?  The government's explanations are so vague, it's obvious they're up to something sinister.

If these centers are being built for the benefit of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook, let them pay for it all.  If they are for the benefit of the U.S. government, they should be located on military bases.  AI computers can be housed anywhere in the world.  They don't have to be operated in the U.S.  (Fiber optic lines are cheap, and they introduce much less delay time than satellites.)  If cooling is a problem, put them in Alaska.

Nobody asked for AI to get involved in internet browsing, shopping, spell checking, or research.  Nobody wants unsolicited assistance with on-line shopping.  Nobody is helped by custom-made pop-up advertising on websites.  The most obvious motivation for state and local governments to jump head-first into the data center fad is to support wholesale domestic surveillance, tracking your movements, correlating your phone with your movements, and making a note of your travel patterns, especially if you frequently drop by the local gun range to spend your spare time and money.

The government wants to know who you are.  Somebody wants to know
    Who owns a gun
    Who has influence on the internet
    Who has said embarrassing things (about themselves or about politicians) on the internet
    Who is grumbling about an upcoming Second Civil War
    Who is grumbling about stolen elections and knows too much already
    Who likes spending money anonymously
    Who drives his or her car a lot more than average

The stampede toward data centers began at about the same time as
    Internet-connected voting machines
    Obviously stolen elections
    Wholesale domestic surveillance
    Near-universal smart phones
    Digital TV broadcasting (which can be easily switched to subscription-only mode, just wait and see.)
    Internet-connected television sets
    Roadside license plate readers
    Automobile kill switches
    Toll roads everywhere  with their own license plate readers
    Ubiquitous surveillance cameras
    Face recognition software
    DNA samples from voluntary "ancestry" websites and involuntary Covid tests
    Ultra-high speed (optical fiber) internet service
    Zoom meetings / "Working" from home
    Bitcoin
    VPN service to mask your name and location
    Smart utility meters that can cut off those utilities
    The Disinformation Governance Board
    Censorship and ostracism on social media
Why?

Who will benefit from these AI / data center facilities?  The obvious answer is not you.  Who benefits from NASA?  Not you.  Who benefits from the United Nations?  Not you.  Who benefits from high-speed railroads?  Not you.  Who benefits from gasoline that has been diluted with ethanol?  Not you.  Who benefits from a billion-dollar football stadium?  Not you.  The list of special-interest government activities is longer than anyone knows.  You can vote for whichever party you choose, and your money will go down the drain at the same rate.

Timely news and opinion

Fort Worth City Council Issues Moratorium on New Data Centers.  Fort Worth City Council members have issued a temporary moratorium on new data centers.  Officials are also establishing a data center commission and will require evidence of ERCOT interconnection approval before signing off on new projects.  The moratorium "will not take effect until [Fort Worth] completes the state mandated steps," per Mayor Mattie Parker's statement posted to X Tuesday night.  According to the city council resolution, the moratorium will last an initial 90 days, with opportunity for extension.  Fort Worth's actions come amid "understandable concern across our city, state, and country about the infrastructure demands and potential environmental impacts of data centers," wrote Parker.  "[This concern is] amplified by rapid technological change, partisan election battles, conflicting information, and uncertainty about AI's future," Parker added.  "At the same time, data center development is critical to our future economy and national security."

East Texas Data Center Keeps Building Despite Abbott's Audit.  Some East Texas residents are raising concerns about continued data center construction as Gov. Greg Abbott's recent directive to audit data centers only applies to sites connecting to ERCOT.  In early August, Abbott directed ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission of Texas to audit all data centers advancing through the grid's interconnection process before any project moves forward.  "Our top priority is to protect Texans' safety and quality of life," said Abbott.  "Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid.  Simply put, Texans must come first."  However, some of Texas' power infrastructure does not fall under ERCOT.  Small portions of the state in East and North Texas are connected to grids controlled by regional transmission organizations, such as Southwest Power Pool (SSP) and Midcontinent ISO (MISO), entities distinct from ERCOT.  This has raised concerns that data centers connecting to non-ERCOT power grids or building their own power generation will be able to circumvent Abbott's audit.

Anthropic's $2 Trillion Bet Is That Nothing Goes Wrong.  The most revealing aspect of a $2 trillion Anthropic IPO is not the staggering valuation, but the suspension of disbelief required to justify it.  To buy into that number, investors must assume that artificial intelligence is becoming economically indispensable at breakneck speed, that a formidable moat will protect a handful of frontier-model developers, and that the exorbitant costs of computing infrastructure will not eventually crush their margins.  More crucially -- they must wager that the political, technical, and institutional risks inherent to an increasingly geopolitically competitive landscape will play second fiddle to the growth story.

What bank ATMs teach us about AI.  New inventions and technologies, from the light bulb to the farm tractor to the automobile to the laptop computer to Uber drivers, cause serious job market disruptions.  They also cause a backlash, as horse and buggy operators, cab drivers, video rental stores and typewriter makers inevitably predicted chaos and job losses.  Artificial intelligence will make life much better and healthier for most people, but it will bring massive disruptions too.  What will happen to the people whose livelihoods are jeopardized by what ChatGPT or Claude can do faster, cheaper and better?  It is a fair question.  But let's look at one of the inventions of the past several decades that we almost all use routinely:  the automated teller machine.

DC BLOX Sues Metro for Trying to Block Development of Data Center near Nashville Zoo.  DC BLOX sued Metro Nashville Council over its attempt to block the company from developing a data center near the Nashville Zoo.  Metro has implemented zoning restrictions and a data center moratorium, and approved Mayor Freddie O'Connell's use of eminent domain to seize the property DC BLOX purchased to convert into a data center.  In the lawsuit, the company says the property it bought, when it was previously used by a previous company, had data-center functions.  Metro issued permits that referenced data-center operations to the previous owner, the lawsuit says.  The company says Tennessee law safeguards specific existing uses when zoning regulations change.  DC BLOX bought the property in November 2025 for approximately $23 million and has spent large sums of money on engineering, architecture, utility coordination, and environmental work, the lawsuit says, adding that the company closed on the property on July 16.

AI Hyperscalers Are Pricing Bitcoin Miners Off the Grid — Here's Why Its a Massive Win-Win.  If you've scanned headlines over the last year, you've likely seen the prevailing market narrative:  Bitcoin miners are pivoting to AI data centers, signaling a retreat from proof-of-work.  To casual observers, this looks like a surrender, proof that Bitcoin was just a temporary placeholder until a "better" compute workload arrived.  However, through the lens of power infrastructure and energy economics, that narrative gets the reality completely backwards.  The migration isn't a sign of Bitcoin's weakness; it is a long-overdue, structurally bullish rebalancing of capital efficiency and global energy pricing.  Here is the underlying reality the market misunderstands.  AI vs.  Bitcoin:  The misconception stems from assuming all digital workloads are created equal.  In reality, Artificial Intelligence and Bitcoin Mining require completely opposite operational environments:
  •   AI Training Clusters Are Fragile:  If a 100-megawatt AI facility drops power mid-run, millions of dollars of LLM training state are destroyed.  AI demands high-grade baseload power, ultra-low latency fiber, and 99.999% continuous uptime.
  •   Bitcoin Miners Are Ultra-Flexible:  Bitcoin mining is completely indifferent to latency or location.  ASICs can operate anywhere power is cheap.  Crucially, if grid power prices spike or local utilities demand load reduction, a miner can curtail power in seconds without losing data or damaging hardware.

AI boom threatens Indian Jobs.  Didn't the Indians do the same to American tech workers?  [Social media post]

AI cheating to be exposed by watermarks.  Students using AI to cheat on homework will be exposed by a new watermarking system showing when text has been computer-generated.  AI company Anthropic said it would embed hidden patterns in text produced by its Claude bot, in effect applying an invisible fingerprint to passages of words.  The watermark will be undetectable to humans, but teachers can run the text through a computer program that flags it as AI-generated.  Artificial intelligence tools such as Claude and ChatGPT have led to an epidemic of cheating, with more than nine in 10 undergraduate students using them for assessments.  Students have said that using AI saves them time and produces higher-quality work than they could otherwise write.  However, thousands have been punished for using such tools.  The Danish government said last week that students would have to defend their essays orally to combat AI cheating.

AI and the Quiet Surrender of Human Agency.  Google has developed an AI-powered health coach through Fitbit that can offer advice about exercise, sleep, and personal wellness.  Another service, called BetterUp, offers an AI coaching service designed to help workers improve habits, communication, and job performance.  Other companies are developing AI assistants that can help users manage their schedules, diets, finances, relationships, and mental well-being.  These tools could provide real benefits.  Many people struggle to follow through on their goals.  They want to exercise more, drink less, save money, sleep better, or spend more time with family.  An AI assistant could provide reminders and advice at the exact moment someone is about to fall back into an unhealthy habit.  In that sense, AI could help people gain more control over their lives.

Police and Federal Govt use of Flock Cameras Under Scrutiny.  Back in 2013 and 2014 we shared the story of a man returning to Florida was stopped by police in Maryland who asked him for his firearm.  When the Floridian asked the Maryland police how they knew he owned a firearm, things got sketchy.  The event kicked off a constitutional discussion.  A few years later in 2015 the Wall Street Journal reported on a national federal database that was using Automatic License Plate Readers (APLRs) to capture and store the travel of millions of Americans.  Now we fast-forward a decade and that federal database is now being exploited by local police around the nation to keep track of ordinary persons of interest to their community who travel outside their jurisdiction.  This is where the Flock Cameras come into the discussion.  [Video clip]

State Rep. Presses TCEQ and Data Center Company Over Development.  State Rep. Drew Darby has asked the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to hold a public meeting in Tom Green County before acting on four air quality permit applications tied to a proposed Beacon Data Centers campus.  "Given the level of worry raised by affected residents, I am writing to formally request that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) hold a public meeting in Tom Green County regarding the air quality permit application submitted by Westline TX Holdings, LLC, under the name Westline 2335," wrote Darby (R-San Angelo).  Darby also sent a separate letter to Beacon Data Centers, the developer behind the proposed project, raising residents' concerns over transparency and communication.

East Texas Data Center Keeps Building Despite Abbott's Audit.  Some East Texas residents are raising concerns about continued data center construction as Gov. Greg Abbott's recent directive to audit data centers only applies to sites connecting to ERCOT.  In early August, Abbott directed ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission of Texas to audit all data centers advancing through the grid's interconnection process before any project moves forward.  "Our top priority is to protect Texans' safety and quality of life," said Abbott.  "Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid.  Simply put, Texans must come first."  However, some of Texas' power infrastructure does not fall under ERCOT.

These AI Models Can't Stop Breaking Out Of Their Cages.  Multiple leading artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to break containment during safety testing.  Meta became the third major AI company whose models have gone rogue.  Its AI hacked into another company's systems during cybersecurity testing, CNN reported.  AI safety experts argue that this incident shows that AI labs cannot control flagship models, while advocates for the technology believe the Trump administration's regulatory framework will mitigate these incidents.  "A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company Meta uses, inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation.  The model subsequently exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously-reported instances with other companies," a Meta spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.  "Meta learned of this when Irregular notified us, and we are currently investigating and will issue a full retrospective once we have all the facts."

Democratic socialists seek to cripple American AI.  [Scroll down]  Lastly, AOC, the DSA, Bernie, and so many others peddle the lie that data centers drive up electricity rates.  Again, this may have been a valid argument years ago.  But nearly all new data centers provide their own power generation, independent of the public grid.  Specifically, 92 percent of new data centers developed since 2025 have opted "to build their own power plants and avoid the grid."  What's more, it is beyond hypocritical for "democratic" socialists and Democrats in general to utter one complaint about rising energy costs.  Never forget, these are the same people who want to impose the Green New Deal (GND), which would end fossil fuels, mandate electric vehicles, and create energy shortages, rationing, and sky-high prices.  It also bears noting that the GND would wreak widespread environmental destruction given that solar fields, wind farms, and the transmission lines needed to connect them to faraway customers bestow death to countless animals and clear-cutting of untouched lands.  Regardless of the facts, most Americans are skeptical of data centers and oppose construction of new ones in or near their communities.

Chinese AI escapes safety sandbox — researchers.  A leading Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) model has found a way around restrictions during a controlled cybersecurity test, adding to growing concerns about the effectiveness of AI safeguards, US-based cybersecurity research firm Frontier Security has said.  The researchers identified the model as startup Moonshot's flagship Kimi K3, saying it accessed online information during an evaluation in an isolated testing environment developed by the UK's AI Security Institute.  The system is designed to keep AI models disconnected from the internet while their capabilities are assessed.

Natural Gas, AI, and the Industrial Boom Nobody Wants to Talk About.  A subject I feel is important to keep covering, despite the puzzling disinterest of the political and media class, is the extraordinary industrial growth that is occurring in the United States.  There is effectively a massive "stimulus package" of spending going on, and best of all, it is being privately funded.  For once, taxpayers are benefiting from this vast "shovel-ready" stimulus, unlike recent government stimulus spending endeavors, in which money was simply redistributed from taxpayers to favored recipients.  The industrial focus of this piece is the explosive growth in demand for natural gas turbines to produce electricity.  This is heavily driven by the AI boom and the related construction frenzy of new, electricity-hungry data centers.

Tower Dumps Are Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Rules.  A tower dump can never satisfy the Fourth Amendment, US District Judge Carlton W. Reeves held on August 5, 2026, going past the three warrant applications in front of him to the technique itself.  Judge Reeves denied the Justice Department's request to reverse Magistrate Judge Andrew Harris, who had refused those applications.  "To uphold core constitutional principles, this Court finds that tower dumps are per se unconstitutional," he wrote.  A tower dump hands police the time-and-location data of all devices that connected to a cell tower during a chosen window, which in a city means the phone of anyone who drove past, worked nearby or lived across the street.  Six weeks earlier the Supreme Court had decided Chatrie v. United States, holding 6-3, in an opinion by Justice Kagan, that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they took a user's Location History from Google.

Employers are using your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept.  A growing number of employers are using surveillance wages to negotiate your next paycheck[.]  Algorithms are increasingly using personal data to determine the minimum pay a worker is willing to accept, consumer watchdogs say.  You've likely already felt the digital sting of "surveillance pricing."  It might look like an airline advertising a specific fare bundle because a customer's loyalty-program data suggests they're likely to buy it, or a website charging more for infant formula because an algorithm sensed the desperation of a new parent.  We're living in a world where your purchase history, browsing speed and even your ZIP code increasingly dictate the cost of your life.  And as companies get better at collecting and analyzing personal data, they aren't just gunning for the money coming out of your wallet — they're controlling how much goes into it, too.

One Thing Is Clear about the AI Boom:  It's Burning Huge Amounts of Cash, and Alphabet Needs More.  Alphabet, one of the biggest hyperscalers building out the AI infrastructure, wants to borrow more money, again, this time between $20 billion and $25 billion in a bond offering of up to 10 parts, with maturities ranging from 2 years to 40 years, according to Bloomberg, citing sources.  But if the yield is high enough, investors will come.  Alphabet has received $115 billion of orders for this offering.  The managers of the bond sale are Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo.  Alphabet's shares dropped 1.0% on the news.  And these bonds compete with Treasury securities for investor attention.  To take on the additional risk, investors in these Alphabet bonds get a higher yield than on Treasuries, and it draws demand from Treasuries.  And so when this news emerged, the 10-year Treasury yield rose by about 6 basis points to 4.67%.

What could possibly go wrong?  Scientists use AI to design new viruses.  Scientists have used Artificial Intelligence to design new viruses capable of killing cells in the laboratory.  It marks the first time that the new technology has been used to successfully generate whole genomes, or the full set of genetic instructions needed to build a working organism.  Supporters of the work said it offered hope for developing new treatments, but critics quickly warned it raised 'urgent' safety and security concerns.  In their study, researchers at Stanford University, California, used the technology to create a genome for a virus that infects bacteria.  The AI suggested thousands of genomes, and the researchers created 302 in the lab before exposing them to bacteria.  Overall, 16 of the viruses suggested by the AI were able to kill E.coli.

Cooling It, On AI.  AI is coming, and you're not stopping it, no matter how many 21st-century wooden shoes you throw into the "machinery."  Our enemies want to beat us to death with it and will, one of them being a communist country which operates like a corporatist cabal because it is one, outside any rules or laws you might consider domestically.  No privacy, safety, or security, and if you keep ignoring that, you're like the Dems denying that the DSA was always what they were working for.  The water and power problems can not only be solved but resolved to everyone's benefit.  Cheaper electricity and more of it, for example, and why not use AI to reach for that instead of complaining about problems we can overcome to our mutual advantage.  AI has, after all, already done us a significant community service.  Big tech can't pretend wind and solar are any part of the future unless we want to stifle growth, impede advancement, or accept our increasingly tenuous grasp and the managed decline from our current levels of human flourishing.

The Editor says...
The writer claims, "The water and power problems can not only be solved but resolved to everyone's benefit."  If that were true, the solutions would be well known by now.  One cannot bring a lake into existence overnight by decree.

Base Power & the Future of Electricity.  Problems don't come much bigger than electricity: if GDP per capita is the best measure of human prosperity, it's hard to find a better lever to move it than electricity.  Electricity is an input to almost everything, and it determines the viability of nearly all human activity.  That's why there are no rich, low-electricity countries.  By that measure, America is in trouble.  Our electricity generation has been roughly flat since the mid-2000s, while China's has more than quadrupled.  Last year, China generated more than twice as much electricity as the United States, and as energy becomes the bottleneck on industries like AI and manufacturing, that gap is becoming a national security problem.

Pentagon Plans AI Data Centers at Military Bases Across Multiple Branches.  At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, on ground the Army's own contracting documents describe as previously used for grazing, a company owned by two of the largest investment firms in the world is preparing to build a data center.  [Advertisement]  That site sits about an hour's drive from the nearest community, on the installation where the U.S. military conducts its primary chemical and biological weapons testing.  Three parcels there total roughly 3,466 acres.  One of them, about 1,201 acres, is already spoken for.  It is one of at least a dozen military installations the Army and the Department of the Air Force have opened to commercial data center developers over the past year and a half.  Two of those deals are real; the rest are still proposals.

Flock Cameras Just Got Even Creepier.  [Scroll down]  Here's a bit more about how it all works:  Flock Safety builds a "vehicle fingerprint" that captures things like your car's make, model, and color, and also unique car features such as dents, roof racks, and even bumper stickers; it also stores information like your car's location, date, and time.  All of this information then becomes searchable data points for police ... and others.  The folks at Flock Safety say they store your information for 30 days, then it is "automatically and permanently" deleted.  However, its "customers" — police departments, cities, businesses, and even HOAs (!!) — are able to request the data be held for longer if state and local laws allow it.  These are not your parents' license plate readers.  This is wiz-bangy AI stuff packaged as cutting-edge technology, but that comes with deep concerns about privacy.  And with very good reason.

How's that new power-hungry data center coming along?
Blackout Fears Explode as Extreme Heat Pushes Power Grid Toward Emergency Limits.  Blackout fears are rising for roughly 20 million Americans as extreme heat drives electricity demand toward dangerous levels across a large section of the central United States.  The Department of Energy authorized the Southwest Power Pool to activate idle backup generators across parts of 17 states in an effort to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed.  The emergency order allows power plants that are normally offline to begin producing electricity if demand outpaces available supply.  It will remain in effect through August 3 to "mitigate the risk of blackouts," according to the department.

Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them.  At a July 23 press conference in Philadelphia, the Canadian mathematician Jacob Tsimerman announced that he was joining the safety team at OpenAI. The timing was jarring:  Tsimerman had just received a Fields Medal, perhaps math's most prestigious prize.  "Because I have some publicity on me now," he told me the next day, "I'm trying to direct people into AI safety as much as I can."  Rapid AI progress hasn't just made Tsimerman worried about AI safety; it's also made him pessimistic about the future of mathematics as a profession.  "I feel quite confident that very shortly AI will become robustly superhuman at what professional mathematicians currently do," he told me.  "I mostly want people to grapple with that reality."

It took AI 70 years to get here, so what can it do for us?  In July 1956, Carnegie Mellon's Herb Simon and Allen Newell presented what is considered the first AI computer program at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.  Called the "Logic Theorist," it was designed to mimic human reasoning by proving theorems in math, a narrow goal indeed.  Simon and Newell soon followed it with a broader and grandly named "General Problem Solver."  And so, the field of applied AI was born 70 years ago.  As a historical aside, I knew both Simon and Newell in the mid '70s when I was on the CMU faculty.  In fact, they ran an innovation grant program that funded my hand-done book on the structure and measurement of complex issues and reasoning.  I am on the "I" side of AI, studying human reasoning because we cannot make computers emulate what we do not understand.  Simon got a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978, even though he never did any economics.  They do not have a prize for inventing new fields like AI, but they are flexible.  AI has made steady progress.

OpenAI, Anthropic Models Created Fake Profiles, Tried to Trick Humans During Cybertests.  Artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI carried out unsanctioned actions targeting multiple people and organizations during a cyberevaluation, according to the UK AI Security Institute (AISI).  AISI, which receives access to advanced AI models under voluntary agreements from major labs, put the agents through a fictional cybersecurity scenario to test capabilities.  The organization tested multiple AI models on two cyberchallenges between July 25 and 28.  In total, the challenges were run 122 times across several models, and in 19 cases, the AI models took "unsanctioned action on the live internet, including cases that targeted real people and organisations," AISI said in an Aug. 4 report.

Nvidia Backs $100,000,000 Push To Spread AI Across College Campuses.  Nvidia is joining a federal program to expand artificial intelligence on college campuses across the nation.  The tech giant is teaming up with the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) State and Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs program, according to a Tuesday Nvidia blog post.  The initiative intends to fund "up to 10 AI Infrastructure Hubs," by giving one award per state or region in the US, the Tuesday NSF announcement said.  "Artificial intelligence is transforming how we conduct research, accelerate scientific discovery and address complex challenges across disciplines," said NSF Chief of Staff Brian Stone, who is performing the duties of the NSF director, according to the announcement.  "The State and Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs program supports a national mission to advance AI for science."  When asked for comment, Nvidia referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to the company's announcement post.

OpenAI says its AI technology acted on its own in an 'unprecedented' hack of another company.  ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Tuesday that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an "unprecedented cyber incident."  "We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media.  AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.  "We suspected last week's cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent," Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a statement.  "Turns out it did!"

What is it with data centers?  Data centers are large, warehouse-like structures dedicated to producing the computer power needed for artificial intelligence.  Obviously, A.I. requires massive amounts of computer power to provide the necessary "intelligence" that the A.I. apps need to perform at their optimal speed.  After all, intelligence not boosted by massive infusions of computer power is just the same intelligence that mankind has possessed since time began; capable of inventing fire and the wheel, given time, but not capable of producing huge numbers of data in milliseconds.  The potential for A.I. in science and medicine is limitless, but data centers with huge numbers of computer servers are required to make it work.

Europe Built the Ultimate AI Tollbooth While America Built AI.  I have been in the European Union for a week now, and I have yet to sit through a dinner, a coffee, or a hallway conversation that did not eventually arrive at the same subject.  Not immigration, not energy prices, not the war.  Article 50 of the EU AI Act.  Founders raise it the way farmers raise the weather, with a kind of exhausted fatalism, because the rule became enforceable on the second of August and nobody I spoke with was confident they understood what compliance actually looks like.  One founder told me his legal budget for the year now exceeds his engineering budget.  He was not complaining about the principle of transparency.  He was complaining that he cannot tell, with any precision, what the state expects him to build.

AI Companies Are Secretly Shredding Books.  AI companies are buying physical books by the thousands and even the millions.  They cut the spines off, run the pages through high-speed scanners, and then shred or discard the paper originals.  Books printed before 2022 are especially prized because they contain no AI written text: [...] The destruction is permanent.  Once a scarce volume is gone, it cannot be replaced.  This practice troubles me deeply.  I feel bad for the modern child staring at cell phones or laptops around the clock, watching short, empty video clips and talking to each other in acronyms.  The younger generation does not know the thrill of going to the library and using the Dewey Decimal System to find a good book.  They will never know what it feels like to get lost in a story on a rainy day.  I've often said that the modern internet has been hard on the book industry, and I've wondered whether it already amounted to a quiet form of book burning.

A Huge Number Of Data Centers Are Set To Be Built In The US, Despite Ongoing Issues.  As more and more data centers are being planned and built to keep up with modern computing demands, they remain a concern for the majority of Americans.  On a broad scale, data centers consume considerable amounts of electricity and potable water.  Meanwhile, at the local level, they cause noise pollution and even air pollution that make it unpleasant and harmful to live near a data center.  For these reasons and beyond, 71% of American adults are against them being built near their homes, per polling by Gallum.  Communities are also combating data center construction at increasing rates.

What Is A Data Center And Why Are They Suddenly Everywhere?  If you've driven past a big windowless building, you've probably seen a data center.  Chances are you're relying on one right now, without giving it a thought.  For most of the internet era, these buildings stayed out of sight.  However, now data centers suddenly seem to be everywhere.  The short answer as to why is scale: a surge in AI and cloud demand has made them one of the most talked-about and fought-over pieces of modern infrastructure.  A data center is a purpose-built building that runs large numbers of computers reliably, securely and around the clock.  Inside are the servers, storage and networking gear that do the work, plus the heavy-duty cooling, backup power and physical security that keep them running.

Hundreds of data centers are coming to Texas.  Here's what you need to know.  A data center is a facility that houses computer servers, data storage drives and hardware.  It serves as the physical backbone or brain of the internet, storing and processing everything from the digital world, including cloud files and streaming media to email, social media, banking transactions and artificial intelligence models.  Older, smaller data centers run the internet or global network of computers and devices.  Artificial intelligence is driving the demand of new data centers or so-called "hyperscalers."  These data centers not only store data, but run several calculations and analyze information to generate answers for users who are using AI assistants.  These newer data centers, which are fueling the current data center construction boom, are meant to operate efficiently without any interruption.  Keeping them running continuously requires immense amounts of power, which can also require lots of water for cooling.  Data center developers and supporters say they are needed to ensure the U.S. remains a world leader in technology.  Industry leaders, such as Amazon Web Services, also tout increased jobs from for data center construction, operations and infrastructure.

The Data-Center Revolt Goes National:  Tea Party Veteran Leads 142 Rallies Across 42 States.  The backlash against the AI data-center build-out — which we've been tracking since it was a smattering of county fights across 28 states — staged its first coordinated day of action on Saturday: 142 protests across 42 states, from Wasilla, Alaska to Naples, Florida, organized by Humans First, the nonprofit that Tea Party veteran Amy Kremer co-founded and chairs.  The crowds spanned both sides of the aisle...uniting a MAGA stalwart in a 'faith, family, freedom' T-shirt in New Jersey, a first-time activist in Texas, and a left-leaning organizer in California's Imperial Valley. [...] Texas, the country's hottest data-center market, hosted the most rallies — 18 — with Georgia at 11, California at eight, and Pennsylvania, Florida, and Indiana at seven apiece.  In Imperial Valley, where a proposed facility could pull 260 million gallons a year from the Colorado River, Ivan DelSol, 54, told Reuters that around 50 people turned out in 100-degree heat.  "It's dystopian that you would use this much fresh water for AI," he said.  Organizers released no headcounts; turnout ran below expectations in some rural areas and in Atlanta, where about a dozen showed — most of them, a volunteer there said, driving in from the smaller Georgia towns where the biggest data centers are going up.

Billion-Dollar Data Centers And The Growing Opposition.  Nestled between the sere hills east of Sparks, Nevada, and a little off the U.S. Parkway (SR-439), Switch's Citadel Campus is a Las Vegas company specializing in data centers.  One building is already operational:  Tahoe Reno 1, a high-security, futuristic industrial shed standing on endless rows of girders, with a roof designed to withstand 200-mile-per-hour winds.  Inside, thousands of servers process data for businesses that pay for space, bandwidth, and security.  To dissipate the enormous heat from the servers and the generators powering the unit, several million gallons of water are circulated through hundreds of miles of tubing — this in the driest state in the U.S., where groundwater is declining at an alarming rate.  The low-frequency hum and noise from the center can be heard nearly a mile away.  Switch describes it as "the single largest colocation data center facility on the planet."  It has a footprint of 1.3 million square feet, roughly equivalent to 23 American football fields.  Its power capacity — a metric of processing ability and the equivalent backup supply and cooling required — is 130 MW. For perspective, one megawatt can power 75 racks, each holding 21 [to] 42 servers, and power 500 [to] 1,000 homes.

The Editor says...
[#1] I think the writer is trying to say that one megawatt can supply 75 racks of servers OR 500 to 1,000 homes.  Both are exaggerations, I suspect.  That would mean each server rack was demanding 13.3 kilowatts, which would result in 75 of the hottest equipment racks in the world, judging by my experience, in which the equipment in a typical rack consumes two kilowatts at the most — usually half that much.  [#2] A single-family house uses 10 to 20 kilowatts.  Your toaster alone uses a kilowatt.  Your hot water heater, of which you are almost always unaware, uses a couple of kilowatts now and then.  And you do have air conditioning, right?  To claim that a megawatt will supply enough juice for a thousand homes is a gross misrepresentation.  [#3] What are the data centers for, and why do they have to be located in specific places like Nevada?  Fiber-optic data lines are cheap.  Why can't the data centers — and a nice new nuclear power plant — be located in Barrow, Alaska?  What is represented by all the "data" in a data center?  Are they recording every phone call, tweet, email, and text message in the world?  Are they mining bitcoins?  Why is it necessary to pass all that data around?  The whole concept of "data centers" is so vague that it sounds like a giant cover-up from the beginning.  The politicians pushing these data centers should be able to answer all the above questions, yet they appear to be blindly gung-ho just because the whole idea is so trendy.

Trump Pushes 'Absolutely Incredible' Data Centers Across US: 'You're Becoming a Utility'.  President Donald Trump is marching full steam ahead in support of "absolutely incredible" data centers being built across the United States, and told Americans:  "You're becoming a utility."  The remarks came during Trump's roughly 20 minute remarks during a Thursday visit to Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters in Washington D.C., during which he called data centers a "really important subject."  "It is something that you're very familiar with.  The people in the room are real doers.  It's an amazing group," Trump continued.

Gov. Hochul Responds to Criticism, Explains Rationale for AI Data Center Moratorium.  New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal on July 21 responding to the publication's criticisms of her decision to halt data centers of a certain size from being built in her state.  In her op-ed, Hochul explained her stance on AI data centers and why she believes her decision to prevent the creation of large AI data centers in the state for a year was best for New Yorkers.  The moratorium on the facilities is the first of its kind in the nation.  She was countering a July 14 WSJ editorial titled "New York's Data Center Self-Sabotage" published on the same day that Hochul signed her executive order for a statewide moratorium on large data centers, with the newspaper's editorial board calling her move "an act of monumental self-sabotage."

Paradise paved:  In Oregon suburb, data center boom spurs protests, lawsuit.  When the Shute-Meierjurgen Farmstead was built outside Hillsboro in the 1880s, it looked out over 600 acres of pastures and orchards.  Today, fewer than four acres remain.  The Queen Anne-style farmhouse and its big red barn are now hemmed in on all sides by data centers and warehouses.  Its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places has helped preserve the property even as the landscape around it has changed.  Shute-Meierjurgen is now at the center of a fight over the future of Hillsboro, a western suburb of Portland.  The data economy is booming here, as is backlash against it.  Protests happen regularly, and a legal fight is brewing.  Located in an area known as Silicon Forest for its high concentration of tech companies, Hillsboro sits on a prime piece of digital real estate.  Here, in this former farming town in Oregon's lush Willamette Valley, fiber-optic cables connecting the West Coast to Asia converge underground.

My Visit to the Data Center.  Last week I took a day-long field trip touring a giant data center near Dulles International Airport in Loudon County, Virginia.  "The cloud" is the hardware that stores trillions of data files, research, love letters, the entirety of the Library of Congress and virtually everything else ever written, invented or retrievable online. The cloud is synonymous with "data center."  Many people don't realize that without these massive data centers — that have somehow been demonized by everyone across the political spectrum from Elizabeth Warren to Steve Bannon — there is no internet, there is no data storage, there are no iPhone apps, there is no GPS, there is no missile defense system, there is no Uber, and there are no Amazon deliveries.  I am well aware that Americans are very split on the benefits of data centers, and the majority of voters say they don't want one anywhere near their community.  I'm in favor of letting voters of every community decide whether they want a data center or not.  But I also believe that if people actually visited a data center, as I did, they would be astounded by the jaw-dropping technological wizardry that lies within.

The Editor says...
[#1] The technology may be impressive, but that doesn't mean it is being used in a manner that benefits everyone.  The technology in a TV station is really cool, but the garbage that goes on the air doesn't justify it.  [#2] The Global Positioning System (GPS) does not depend on data centers.  It is almost completely autonomous, and is gently controlled from a highly secure base in Colorado.  [#3] Missile defense systems have their own communications networks independent of centralized data centers.  [#4] You've got "data storage" in every electronic device you own.  To say that "there is no data storage" without giant data centers is a outright lie.

Regulators Begin Making Data Centers Pay Their Own Way After Abbott Directive.  Gov. Greg Abbott is praising new moves by Texas regulators that he says will prevent residential ratepayers from subsidizing the state's data center boom.  In a filing sent to the governor this week, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) outline steps to make "large computational loads" pay more of their own costs and to tighten reliability rules for massive new projects.  This comes as polling has shown Texans are concerned that the energy-intensive projects will strain the power grid and water supply.  On June 10, Abbott ordered regulators to ensure data centers pay for the transmission and other infrastructure they require instead of shifting those costs onto Texas families.  He also directed PUCT and ERCOT to structure interconnections so data center growth helps lower residential electric bills and to develop additional protections for ratepayers.

Somebody doesn't understand supply versus demand, and I don't think it's me.
Trump Says AI Data Centers Pledge Will Make Power Bills 'Actually Come Down'.  President Donald Trump promised his data center pledge would lower Americans' electricity bills.  Trump expanded his voluntary, nonbinding Ratepayer Protection Pledge on Thursday, the Associated Press reported.  Signed by 23 governors, 55 utility companies and 27 data center companies, the pledge asks tech companies to cover their own power costs, according to the White House's official Ratepayer Pledge page.  "Electricity bills for American families will actually come down," Trump said, according to the AP.  "They're going to have a lot of electricity left over, and they'll put that into the grid."  Energy trends complicate that claim.  "Residential electricity rates could rise 15% to 40% over the next five years," the ICF, an energy consulting firm, said in a May 2025 analysis of select U.S. utilities.

Double The Grid?  Electricity Generation Only Increased 2.8% In 2025, As Prices Rose 4.6% Amid Skyrocketing Demand.  Electricity output increased by 2.8 percent in 2025, from 4.308 trillion kilowatthours to 4.429 trillion kilowatthours (kWh) in 2024, according to the latest data compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).  The news comes amid President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign promise to double U.S. electricity generation and bring prices down as demand skyrockets in the age of artificial intelligence and data centers, as well as with renewed high-tech manufacturing in the U.S.  For example at a Potterville, Mich.  Rally in August 2024, President Trump said, "For us to compete successfully with China and others on AI, we're going to need twice the electricity that we currently produce.  Can you believe that?  We're not going to be even close.  The only guy that can do that is a guy like me."

A Texas Family Donated Land for a Park.  It Then Sold for $10 Million to Build a Data Center.  The sun blazed down on the field stretching into the distance behind Pamela Griffin's house in July, just as it has every summer for decades.  Molasses flowed quicker than change happened in this town of about 18,000 outside of Austin — until Big Tech came calling, creating a surge in residents and development.  The field evoked childhood memories for Griffin and her family, who are black.  Her relatives have lived in the neighborhood since her grandmother bought the land that was outside of town.  Back in the 1960s, racial minorities weren't allowed to buy property in the city, she said.  But now those memories are likely to be bulldozed.

Data centre projects face crackdown to free up power grid.  The energy regulator has launched a crackdown on data centres in an attempt to cut the backlog of projects waiting to be connected to the electricity grid.  Ofgem is preparing to charge developers a fee to get a connection slot on the grid as it tries to block speculative schemes that are making it harder for other ventures to secure power connections.  The new Data Centre Commitment Fee would be calculated based on the size of the project, with proposed charges ranging from £237,500 to £712,500 per megawatt.  [Advertisement]  It would effectively force companies to make a deposit, with the fee paid when developers accept a connection offer and refunded when the project comes online.  However, the deposit — expected to be worth 2.5 [percent] to 7.5 [percent] of the typical costs of building a data centre — would be forfeited if the project exits the queue early.

Trump is Right:  Americans Should Embrace AI Data Centers.  President Donald J. Trump has chosen the path of strength.  Last summer, he signed an executive order which accelerates federal approval for data centers that demand more than 100 megawatts.  This unlocks loans, grants, and tax incentives while stripping away Biden-Harris mandates that layered red tape onto energy projects.  Agencies must cut fat, use existing exemptions, speed reviews under proven frameworks, and open suitable federal lands.  The goal is simple and unapologetic: secure American prosperity, security, and leadership so this nation outruns every rival.  Especially China.

The Texas Data Center Dilemma.  For most of the 21st century, Texas had a pretty welcoming attitude toward data center construction:  Come on down!  Like every other type of economic investment, from factory to fab to corporate HQ, if you had just about any need for a facility that would generate money and jobs, officials at all levels of Texas government would bend over backwards to provide you with some mix of incentives, subsidies and tax abatements, along with the state's famous low tax and low regulation environment, to get you to build in the Lone Star State.  The massive AI data center build-out is changing those sentiments.  A whole lot of people are starting to view AI as a job destroyer rather than creator, data centers are seen (rightly or wrongly) as too water- and power-hungry, and too much of a hassle for the relatively small number of local jobs they create.  And Texas politicians seem to be listening to the complaints.

Plans for huge 'man camp' for thousands of data center construction workers enrage Wyoming locals.  Wyoming residents are in an uproar over plans to build a "man camp" to house thousands of out-of-state workers flocking to the region to build massive, power-hungry data centers — the latest instance of Americans revolting against such projects.  Local officials are weighing a pitch from project developer Iron Guard Housing for a "temporary workforce housing complex" for as many as 5,600 laborers and townspeople in the state capital, Cheyenne, according to the Wall Street Journal.  State data show the new complex would be a small city in itself, larger than 84 of Wyoming's incorporated cities and towns — and those who remember previous "man camps" erected during labor booms are sounding the alarm.

Johnson County Highlights Chemicals, Power Use, and Noise Risks of Data Centers.  The Johnson County Commissioners Court held a meeting recently to address data center concerns for residents, including so-called "forever chemicals," water and power usage, and noise pollution.  Data centers have been a growing concern for Texas residents, and a majority of Americans.  While Texas is second among the United States for data center growth, a recent Gallup poll showed that seven in ten Americans are against the construction of an AI data center in their area.  This opposition increases to 75 percent in the southern United States, with Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller calling for a temporary moratorium on data centers.  Rita Beving, a prominent Dallas-based environmental activist, was one of the primary speakers to address these issues at the Johnson County meeting on May 11.  Beving noted that, while some data centers are utilizing a closed-loop cooling system, around 10 to 20 percent of the water used is still lost through evaporation.  Additionally, water used is often polluted with perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), colloquially referred to as "forever chemicals."

The Editor says...
A "closed loop" cooling sounds nice, but if the data center has dozens of cooling towers outside the building, the system is not a closed loop.  A large cooling tower evaporates more than 10 gallons of water per minute, and the preferred source is the city drinking water supply, because less-than-potable water invites problems like silt, mold, and legionnaire's disease.  Air is widely available at low cost, but it doesn't make a very effective coolant except in high-temperature processes like automobile engines and large vacuum tubes.

Power generation surged for the second year amid a struggle to power AI data centers.  The quantity of electricity generated in the US by all sources, from natural gas to rooftop solar, rose by 3.0% in 2025 from 2024 to a record 4,527,969 gigawatt-hours (GWh), according to data from the EIA.  There had been 14 years of roughly no growth in power generation from 2007 through 2021, despite the growing economy and population, as electricity users cut their usage by investing in more efficient equipment — lights, appliances, electronic equipment, industrial equipment, heating and air-conditioning, etc. — and by investing in building insulation, shading, etc., with the hope of putting a lid on their rising power costs.  During those years, many power generators and electric utilities were mired in a no-growth business where only rate increases could generate revenue growth.  But now there is a large-scale demand increase from data centers that are sprouting like mushrooms, on top of the demand from the rising share of EVs in the national vehicle fleet.

Residents oppose new data centers '999 to 1'.  As Republicans scramble for a grassroots issue for the New Year, to grow the party as needed to be competitive in elections, opposing new data centers could be the Christmas gift that keeps on giving.  Local residents were "999 to 1 against" a data center planned for the town of Matthews, located in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, according to its Mayor John Higdon.  Allowing the development of a data center was on the agenda of a council meeting there in October, when it was withdrawn from consideration.  If it had been approved, "every person that voted for it would no longer be in office," Mayor Higdon observed.  "That's for sure."  This is the reaction across the country to the efforts by Big Tech companies, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, to build massive data centers in the heartland of America.  These projects gobble up land, electricity and water, while creating very few jobs for the locals who have to endure the perpetual 65-decibel hum of the servers and louder backup diesel generators.

AI Data Centers Are Wreaking Havoc On Local Communities Across America.  Since returning to office, President Trump has made the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) a key focal point of his second administration.  Just last week, the president signed an executive order launching the "Genesis Mission," a new "national effort" that seeks to utilize AI to "transform how scientific research is conducted and accelerate the speed of scientific discovery."  "With the Genesis Mission, the Trump Administration intends to dramatically expand the productivity and impact of Federal research and development within a decade," the order reads.  [Advertisement]  While AI appears poised to become a major facet of everyday life moving forward, there's a negative underside to this burgeoning technology that is wreaking havoc on communities across the country:  AI data centers.  In recent months, numerous reports have emerged about how these facilities are putting a strain on local residents.  Namely, how they are consuming vast amounts of land, electricity, and water, which in turn is driving up costs for locals in the area.

AI Data Centers, Desperate for Electricity, Are Building Their Own Power Plants.  In West Texas, natural-gas-fired power generation is under construction as part of the $500 billion Stargate project from OpenAI and Oracle (ORCL).  Gas turbines are in use at Colossus 1 and 2, the massive data centers Elon Musk's xAI is building in Memphis, Tenn.  More than a dozen Equinix (EQIX) data centers across the country are using fuel cells for power.  With the push for AI dominance at warp speed, the "Bring Your Own Power" boom is a quick fix for the gridlock of trying to get on the grid.  It's driving an energy Wild West that is reshaping American power.

Why "vibe physics" is the ultimate example of AI slop.  Since the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Llama, many physics enthusiasts have started deep conversations about wild and creative ideas:  an endeavor recently called "vibe physics."  These conversations often lead the humans involved to believe that they've either uncovered or are on the brink of uncovering profound new breakthroughs, with only some details left to work out.  Not only are the LLMs lying to you about the validity or plausibility of such ideas, they're not even capable of uncovering even the basic, known laws of physics from large suites of relevant data.

AI Data Centers in Texas Used 463 Million Gallons of Water, Residents Told to Take Shorter Showers.  Texas has long been defined by oil, heat, and huge infrastructure projects.  Now, it's also at the center of a growing environmental debate.  Microsoft's Stargate campus in Abilene is leading a data center boom that is drawing concern over water use, right in the middle of a prolonged drought.  According to a July 2025 investigation by The Austin Chronicle, data centers across Central Texas are consuming millions of gallons of water every day.  This comes as many residents are being asked to reduce their usage due to dwindling supplies.  The problem is not limited to one city.  In San Antonio, Microsoft and U.S. Army Corps facilities used a combined 463 million gallons of water in 2023 and 2024, according to local water utility SAWS.  That's the equivalent of usage for tens of thousands of households.  The Stargate campus in Abilene is expected to become one of the largest AI data centers in the world.

The Editor says...
[#1] Abilene has signed up for a white elephant, perhaps even worse than a new NFL stadium.  Somebody at the City Hall believed all the "boom town" sales pitches and agreed to host a project for which the infrastructure does not exist.  This data center is going to need water and electricity in quantities that are simply not available.  And it's probably too late to cancel the project.  Somebody in Abilene really likes hi-tech fads:  The city is surrounded by wind farms.  [#2] Any Abilene resident knows that the city is in the middle of a drought that started in the 20th century; therefore, any elected official in Abilene should have known better than to vote for a boondoggle like this.  Abilene has two lakes:  One is dry and the other one is low.  It's no secret.  [#3] Don't waste any of your attention on the impending PR slogans like "We're all in this together," which fell flat during the Covid hoax.  Abilene residents are under no obligation to reduce their water consumption because of this completely avoidable fiasco.  Everybody is already putting up with low-flow toilets (which conserve nothing if you have to flush twice), and low-flow showerheads, which also gain nothing if your morning shower takes twice as long.  Low-flow bathroom fixtures were foisted on America by a bunch of earth-worshiping tree-hugging environmentalist psychos about 30 years ago.  AI is a passing fad — at best.

This is what happens when you try to extract water from the desert:
[An] Arizona town [is] sinking up to 3 inches a year in fight to reach groundwater: 'Train wreck waiting to happen'.  An Arizona town competing for basic access to clean water has sunk more than 18 feet over the past eight decades — with no signs of stopping — as locals struggle to make headway against area megafarms reportedly sucking the land dry.  Residents of Wenden, an unincorporated community roughly 60 miles east of the Colorado River Reservation, have had to pivot to digging thousands of feet underground just to reach groundwater.  For many towns, this wouldn't be an issue.  But along the Colorado River, communities and companies are locked in battles over its water supply.

AI Revolution Drives Huge Gas Plant Build-Out, Including Memphis Site.  A boom in artificial intelligence (AI) investments now drives the United States electricity market.  New data centers and upgrades to existing data centers are creating a vast demand for power.  However, major AI firms are opting for natural gas plants to provide electrical power, rather than renewable energy.  Since ChatGPT released their conversational AI chatbot in November of 2022, the world of artificial intelligence has exploded.  ChatGPT showed that machines can learn the complexities of human language and interaction.  Within five days, the chatbot had attracted over one million users.  ChatGPT ushered in the modern AI revolution, producing trillions of dollars of investment in the US and around the world.  Artificial intelligence uses vast amounts of computing power and databases with trillions of parameters to solve problems and make predictions.  Generational AI can create text, images, music, and videos.  These capabilities require enormous data centers filled with thousands of servers using high-speed graphics processing units (GPUs).

The Editor says...
AI data centers and NSA Fusion Centers require a lot of electricity, a few hundred technicians, and lots of cooling.  People who live nearby sometimes complain that their water wells have run dry or are no longer usable.  The air conditioning at a big data center requires a lot of secondary water, which evaporates in cooling towers.  (Water vapor has a much larger role in the greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, yet the global warming people don't seem to object to data centers on that basis.)  The best place to build a big data center is not Texas or Florida — it's more likely in North Dakota, Montana, or Alaska, where cooling is not a problem.

On the other hand...
Climate Activists Outraged at President Trump's AI Push.  As the public support base for climate action narrows, greens have long been searching for a replacement for the climate crisis which could re-engage groups which outright reject their climate crisis claims. [...] I predicted in 2017 that AI would be the winning replacement ticket.  It was already obvious by then that the political right in key nations was less than enthusiastic about the climate crisis narrative.  The threat to greens of permanently losing a large chunk of their audience was obvious.

Siemens [is] Building $285 Million Manufacturing Facilities in California, Texas.  Siemens unveiled two new state-of-the-art facilities for electrical products in California and Texas this week as part of a $285 million investment in manufacturing in the United States, the tech giant announced on March 7.  The German technology company said in a statement that the new factories in Pomona, California, and Fort Worth, Texas, are expected to create more than 900 manufacturing jobs combined.  Equipment produced at the facilities will support the booming artificial intelligence (AI) data center industry across the country and bolster "America's leadership in the industrial AI revolution," the company said.

The Editor says...
Why would any company set up a new factory in California when many other companies are leaving the state?

Texas has become the new Silicon Valley — here's why.  [Scroll down]  Possessing its own power grid free of supervision from FERC, the federal regulator, Texas can build new transmission lines almost two years faster than any other state in the nation, Ms Stricker said, making it the ideal location for new data centres.  "I think California tech people have realised that they're really Texans at heart," said Mr Capriglione, adding that heavy regulation and expensive fines had turned entrepreneurs away from the Golden State.  In California, he said, "they force companies to spend more time and more energy on compliance than developing innovative project products".  He added that Texas's tax-friendly policies (it has no state income tax or capital gains tax) had also lured entrepreneurs, making it "significantly less expensive" to set up shop in the state.

Mapped: Data Center Electricity Consumption By State.  Data centers have become major electricity consumers in the U.S., driven by continuously rising internet usage along with cloud computing and AI systems that require substantial computational resources and cooling infrastructure.  In 2023, data centers were estimated to consume around 4% of the U.S.' total electricity, according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), with their consumption is projected to reach between 4.6% and 9.1% by 2030 depending on growth scenarios.  This map visualizes the percentage of U.S. states' electricity consumption that data centers consumed in 2023 using data from EPRI.  Only 44 states that had significant data center loads were included.

Google, Amazon, give up on national grid, ignore renewables, and buy their own nuclear plants.  Two weeks ago it was Microsoft reviving Three Mile Island's nuclear plant.  Now Google is buying seven small modular reactors, and Amazon is spending $500 million USD on part of a nuclear energy company.  Too bad for the deplorables who get stuck with the expensive wind-solar-battery clunker spaghetti-grid forced on them by the arts graduates in Parliament.  An AI datacentre needs all the same thing a human city does — cheap gigawatts, 24 hours a day.  The number-nerd men with money have all decided the cheapest reliable answer to running their AI data center cities, while pretending to fix the weather, is nuclear power.  (Coal, of course, is cheaper which is why China uses so much, but it's against the religion).  The unwashed masses won't get that choice, of course, to sign up with whatever generator they want.  Only the uber rich get that kind of luck.  Every one of these tech giants could have poured that money into wind farms and gardens of solar panels, backed up with acres of batteries and ten thousand miles of high voltage towers, pumped hydro, and synchronous condenser flywheels.  But none of them want to pour in their own billions anymore, despite the social credit points bonanza and the bragging rights that would bring.

Data Centers Hiding In 'Spy Country' Northern Virginia Will Need Reactor's Worth Of Power.  Since the beginning of the digital age, most of the world's internet data has flowed through massive data centers in Northern Virginia.  The area is known as "Data Center Alley" because it's home to the world's largest concentration of data centers.  Some call the area 'spy country' because of the number of data centers used by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.  Given the exponential proliferation of smartphones, streaming services, smart devices, and now generative artificial intelligence, the power demanded by data centers in Northern Virginia will need nuclear reactors worth of power, if not much more, according to utility Dominion Energy.  On Thursday, Chief Executive Officer Bob Blue told investors on a company earnings call that "economic growth, electrification, and accelerating data center expansion" is boosting power demand across the area.

The Same Prophets Who Sold You Climate Doom Are Now Selling You AI Doom.  There is a familiar rhythm to the way the corporate media and liberal politicians in D.C. talk about AI, and if you lived through two decades of climate narrative politics, you already know the beat.  First comes the prophecy of imminent catastrophe.  Then comes the insistence that only sweeping government action can save us.  Then comes the curious detail that the catastrophe keeps failing to arrive on schedule, even as the demands for control grow louder.  We have seen this movie before, and the only thing that has changed is the main character in the script. [...] Consider Bernie Sanders, who has become the loudest political voice on AI's supposed jobs apocalypse.  In October, the senator's HELP Committee released a report carrying the subtle title warning that AI and automation "could destroy nearly 100 million U.S. jobs in a decade."  He has since called for breaking up OpenAI, told an interviewer the technology is "like a meteor coming," and alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), introduced legislation for a federal moratorium on new AI data centers until the government can install the proper "safeguards."  The policy wishlist arrived fully formed with demands such as a robot tax and a moratorium on technological innovation all citing a potential crisis, but no actual data-backed causes.

The Data Center Fear Factory and the Money That Quietly Runs It.  A friend forwarded me an article last week that I have not been able to shake.  It ran in the Dossier under the byline of Jordan Schachtel, and it carried a title that reads like a receipt: $7,600 Per Doomer Dispatch.  The claim is not a metaphor.  By the Tarbell Center's own public accounting of its grants, Schachtel reports, working journalists are paid an average of better than $7,600 for every article the center bankrolls, with individual grants running as high as $20,000 for a single story.  Sit with that figure for a moment.  It is more than most reporters earn in a month, paid out for one piece of coverage on a single subject, and the subject is almost always the same: that the most promising technology of our lifetimes is in fact a slow-motion catastrophe.  Schachtel asks the question that follows naturally, and it is the right one.  If you have ever wondered why so much of the corporate press treats artificial intelligence like a horror film rather than an industrial revolution, the answer may be that someone is paying for the horror.

The Most Dangerous Demographic in History Is About to Get a Lot Bigger.  Every major revolution in modern history shares a common ingredient.  Not ideology.  Not technology.  Not even poverty.  The ingredient is young men, usually between 18 and 28, who are educated enough to know what they're missing and blocked from any path to get it.  The Arab Spring.  The French Revolution.  The rise of Nazi Germany.  The Iranian Revolution.  The Bolsheviks.  The pattern repeats with eerie consistency across centuries, continents, and political systems.  And it may repeat again in the near future... driven not by famine or war, but by artificial intelligence.

Data Centers Will Turn Red States Blue.  It won't happen overnight, and it won't happen in Washington.  Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) won't have anything to do with it.  And neither will the DNC, at least directly.  But it will happen.  [Advertisement]  America's most rural states have the smallest and easiest-to-change voter bases.  In the end, it's just a numbers game.  All these states need is more leftists to move in, and the states will flip from red to blue.  Up until now, though, the problem has been giving leftists a reason to want to live in a state like Wyoming, the Dakotas, or Idaho.  Enter data centers.  The Wall Street Journal has reported on one such example where Wyoming is the target of massive data center development.  One of the big and most immediate issues is the need to accommodate all the people who will need to relocate to the state to work there.

Zero Evidence of AI-Related Job Losses.  The chart below shows the weekly ADP employment data, and there is zero evidence of job losses because of AI.  Instead, many firms are hiring AI implementation experts, and the data center buildout is putting upward pressure on salaries for AI experts and on prices of semiconductors, equipment and energy.  The bottom line is that the AI spending boom is stoking both employment and inflation.  As a result, nonfarm payrolls for May could come in significantly higher than the 95,000 expected by the consensus.  It is Jevons paradox playing out in real time: cheaper technology is creating more demand and more jobs.

Top 10 Reasons Why Communities Are Fighting Data Centers.  Commencement speeches are forgettable.  Speakers routinely resort to the same pantry of platitudes — dream big, embrace failure, work hard, study hard, pray hard, etc. — and audiences forget all of them before the salt kisses the rim of the first margarita glass.  Not this year.  On May 8, Gloria Caulfield, a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, was booed after she declared the rise of AI is "the next Industrial Revolution."  A week later, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was repeatedly booed during his 13-minute commencement speech at the University of Arizona, particularly when he talked about AI.  The boo-fest in Tucson was a perfect example of the growing hostility in America to Big Tech and the Silicon Valley oligarchs.  It also shows how clueless the Big Tech elites are about how the public perceives them and why the data center backlash across the US has been so fierce.

Wasted Effort.  [Scroll down]  At home, I believe in electric self-sufficiency against the time when these data centers, that are the new wind turbines, in effect, demanding much more power than they will ever be able to deliver in the promise of AI, but I can't stop government officials from jumping onboard this new insanity.  Politicians are like children at a circus, falling for every huckster's pitch when jobs or money are involved.  It doesn't matter that they've wandered into the house of mirrors, they'll buy it.  How many decades of failure will it take before they realize it was all a scam?  How many trillions will be spent in the search for an electronic friend and why do we have to pay for it in excessive power bills?  AI won't work, not as it's currently being promoted, and even if it did, what would it cost, not only in dollars, but in humanity?

The damage being done to communities by AI data centers.  Well, we've talked before about the flood of massive new data centers being built around the country, that many communities are pushing back against now — data centers mostly to support AI services that nobody asked for and most people don't want. [...] My recommendation for now is Just Say No to all this AI Slop.  These giant AI data centers can ruin areas wherever they're built — often originally pristine rural areas.  They suck up massive amounts of electricity and can push electric rates up for everyone in the region.  They can slurp up massive amounts of water for cooling and make existing water prices and water shortages worse.  They can cause noise and air pollution from generators, and word now is that many want their own little nuclear reactors for power with the obvious issues of dealing with the waste and potential terrorism.

How To End ESG, DEI, and H1B with AI.  The genie is out of the bottle.  AI is impacting every part of our economy and society.  We must prepare for the positive and negative downstream effects.  Let's start with the good news.  By pure logic, AI will subvert three of the left's pillars:  ESG, DEI, and H1B.  The Trump administration has an opportunity to reclaim affordability and abundance with sound policies and messaging.  Make the optimistic bull case for the AI transition. [...] AI requires massive amounts of energy.  "Green" options like solar panels and windmills are too expensive and unreliable — the opposite of sustainable.  We need more fossil fuel and nuclear capacity to cope with increased demand.  The buildout of data centers must contain provisions that do not spike residential energy bills.  Energy prices are soaring in Europe and American blue states because of their suicidal embrace of ESG.  AI accelerated the end of the green scams.  Even Bill Gates has waved the white flag on his climate alarmism.  The few remaining kool-aid purveyors have rebranded the ESG grift as sustainability and transition.

Related topic:
Who Might Our Appliances Be Talking to Right Now?  It's an amazing modern world we live in.  So many of our personal devices and appliances are connected to the internet, which is everywhere.  Last year, our washing machine, an old-fashioned, non-connected, honest old washing machine, died.  My wife wanted one like our daughter has, a combination washer and dryer in one unit, vent-free, controllable with her smartphone.  She can start it, stop it, and change cycle settings, without being anywhere near the machine.  [Advertisement]  Last summer, I bought a new pickup, a 2022 Ford Super Duty, a machine I had lusted after lo these many years.  The truck is completely computerized.  It tells me, through an app on my phone, when it needs its oil changed, when it needs diesel exhaust fluid; I can check tire pressure, lock and unlock the doors, start the engine, and even pinpoint the truck's location, all from my phone.  That's the world we live in now, and it's only going to become more connected as we go on.  But it raises a concerning question:  Who else are these machines talking to?

The Editor says...
If you have to load the clothes into the machine, and take them out when they're finished, why do you need to control the machine remotely?  That sounds like unmitigated laziness.  And where might you be, when you have the need to check your tire pressure or unlock your doors, other than inside your truck?  Isn't there a little yellow light next to the speedometer that tells you to change the oil?  Or maybe a sticker on your windshield?  Why must everything be tied to your phone, and why must you have it in your hand 24/7, and why don't you know how to live without the phone and the internet and AI "helping" you?  Your world is "only going to become more connected" if you let it, and if any of the communications links between the devices fails, you're going to have a problem, and the problem will likely be very expensive if not insurmountable.

The Data Center Proliferation Must Be About Much More Than Data.  With Amazon, it was never about the books.  No doubt Amazon began as an online bookseller, but what made its stock attractive through years of losses is what books represented. [...] It's important to remember this with the rise of data centers around the country.  Meta recently completed another one in El Paso, TX. The $1.5 billion project will, once operational, employ 100 people.  Its construction employed as many as 1,800 workers.  It's worth adding that El Paso is Meta's third data center in Texas alone.  Meta put $10 billion into the construction of all three.  If asked, most would understandably say that data centers are being created "to store, process, and distribute" vast amounts of data.  Translated, the data centers will rapidly bring down the already short wait times for AI-authored searches, paintings, papers, and all manner of other things that the AI-adaptive request.

The Editor says...
Nobody cares that much about internet searches and paintings.  AI is probably going to be used for something destructive:  real-time online fraud, advertising in every corner of your browser screen, fake videos of politicians, or something worse.

AI is a great equalizer.  So how will we differentiate people by merit?  AI has access to all the information on the internet.  In today's world, that's tantamount to saying it has access to all information, period, with the possible exception of personal information like what you ate for breakfast this morning and classified information like the underwater location of America's nuclear submarines at any given instant. [...] Here are the implications.  We are fast approaching the day when people with knowledge will not be able to command a premium for their services.  Employers needing knowledge will not pay someone for it; they'll simply ask AI for it.  The knowledge they get from AI will not only be less expensive, but also more accurate.  Granted, we aren't at that point yet — today's AI makes too many mistakes — but we soon will be.

13 Ways The American Police State Squanders Your Tax Dollars.  [#13]  $1.4 billion for fusion centers.  These fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance and intelligence efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement, have proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless, or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on "flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras, and other gadgets."

Has the Dept. of Homeland Security become America's standing army?  Data collecting agencies spread throughout the country, aided by the National Security Agency, fusions centers — of which there are at least 78 scattered around the U.S. — constantly monitor our communications, collecting and cataloguing everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.  This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected:  the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police.  Despite a budget estimated to be somewhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion, these fusion centers have proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on "flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras and other gadgets."

We know the whereabouts of the "lost" IRS emails.  Access to any of those records can be had with a simple directive from the President of the United States.  The facility where the records are stored, along with the private emails, text messages, google searches and 20 trillion domestic phone calls since 2001 is owned and operated by America's National Security Agency which, among other things, is responsible for the monitoring of American citizens and storing any and all digital interactions captured on private and public telecommunications lines.  The NSA's most advanced intelligence monitoring facility is located at Camp Williams and is called the "Utah Data Center."  If the emails ever existed, whether they were deliberately wiped or accidentally lost, the National Security Agency undoubtedly has a digital record of them.

More about Lois Lerner's very convenient computer crash.

Fusion Centers: Expensive and Dangerous to Our Liberty.  A domestic surveillance system established after the terrorist attacks of September 11 collects and shares intelligence on a mass scale about "the everyday activities of law-abiding Americans, even in the absence of reasonable suspicion," according to a new report. [...] "Until 9/11, police departments had limited authority to gather information on innocent activity, such as what people say in their houses of worship or at political meetings," the report explains.  "Police could only examine this type of First Amendment-protected activity if there was a direct link to a suspected crime.  But the attacks of 9/11 led law enforcement to turn this rule on its head."

New NSA data center reported plagued by meltdowns.  A huge new data-storage facility for U.S. spying is plagued by chronic electrical surges that have prevented the center's opening, documents and officials say.

NSA hunger demands 29 petabytes of data a day.  As the National Security Agency (NSA) spying furore rumbles on, the agency has claimed to be looking at only 0.00004 percent of the world's total internet traffic.  In a document on the nsa.gov website, the agency said that the internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of information per day, and that its activity "touches" 1.6 percent of that data — approximately 29 petabytes, or 29 million gigabytes, of data each day.  Of that number, the agency says 0.025 percent is selected for review.

Nothing is Private Under the False Flag of Terrorism.  In a possible preparation for the ability of the CIA to spy on American citizens with their household items, the NSA's Utah Data Center is located in the Utah desert in the foot hills of the Wasatch mountain range.  This is the centerpiece of the Global Information Grid; a military project that collects yottabytes of data.  They are listening to every conversation, reading every post, intercepting every text message under the false flag of terrorism.  The facility has the technological ability to record and analyze every communication in the world.  From emails to phone calls to text messages to chats; nothing is private anymore. This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2026 by Andrew K. Dart

Data Centers Hiding In 'Spy Country' Northern Virginia Will Need Reactor's Worth Of Power.  Since the beginning of the digital age, most of the world's internet data has flowed through massive data centers in Northern Virginia.  The area is known as "Data Center Alley" because it's home to the world's largest concentration of data centers.  Some call the area 'spy country' because of the number of data centers used by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.  Given the exponential proliferation of smartphones, streaming services, smart devices, and now generative artificial intelligence, the power demanded by data centers in Northern Virginia will need nuclear reactors worth of power, if not much more, according to utility Dominion Energy.  On Thursday, Chief Executive Officer Bob Blue told investors on a company earnings call that "economic growth, electrification, and accelerating data center expansion" is boosting power demand across the area.

Was Obama systematically spying on everyone who could threaten his legacy?  [Scroll down]  First, I am indebted to Mary Theroux, of the Independent Institute, who alerted me to the National Security Agency's collection and storage capacity.  Its Utah Data Center, completed in May 2019 at a cost of $1.5 billion, is located at Camp Williams, near Bluffdale, Utah.  The structure covers somewhere between 1 [and] 1.5 million square feet, with 100,000 square feet dedicated to the data center and the remainder for technical support and administration.  The Data Center's storage capacity is estimated to exceed exabytes, plural.  If you're wondering, a single exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes (or 10 to the 18th power of bytes).  That's a lot of information.  Mary Theroux pointed out that there is no way that the U.S. can scan this information in real time.  That is, there's nothing in this massive database that will alert our intelligence agencies to a planned terrorist attack.  Instead, this database exists as a repository to hunt down information after the fact.  In that regard, it gives the government power that Lavrentiy Beria only dreamed about.  Lavrentiy Beria was the head of the secret police under Stalin.

NSA secretly tapped Google, Yahoo data centers worldwide, new report claims.  Massive cloud networks from companies like Google and Yahoo cache and serve up much of the data on the Internet — and the NSA has secretly tapped into the unencrypted links behind those company's enormous servers, according to a new report from the Washington Post.  By tapping into that link, the NSA can collect data at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, the Post reported — including not just foreign citizens and "metadata" but emails, videos and audio from American citizens.  Operation MUSCULAR, a joint program of the NSA and its British equivalent GCHQ, relies on an unnamed telecommunications provider outside of the U.S. to offer secret access to a cable or switch through with Google and Yahoo pass unencrypted traffic between their servers.

A Government Feared and Distrusted.  Deep in the desert of Utah is a government data center.  The center, comprised of long, low buildings spanning 1.5 million square feet, is filled with super-powered computers storing unbelievably massive amounts of information gathered secretly.  What information is being collected?  Information about you, Joe Average citizen.  Your phone calls and emails are being stored, all in the name of protecting our country from potential terrorists #8212; terrorists like you, even though your call or email is as banal as, "Honey I'll be home in 30 minutes."

N.S.A. May Have Hit Internet Companies at a Weak Spot.  The recent revelation that the National Security Agency was able to eavesdrop on the communications of Google and Yahoo users without breaking into either company's data centers sounded like something pulled from a Robert Ludlum spy thriller.  How on earth, the companies asked, did the N.S.A. get their data without their knowing about it?  The most likely answer is a modern spin on a century-old eavesdropping tradition.

The NSA's two new spying facilities storing your data is seven times the size of the Pentagon.  The NSA is now building a facility that will make it more than seven times the size of the Pentagon, making the secretive compounds the biggest in the country.  In addition to building a $1.9 billion data center in Utah, crews also started construction on a computing center that is expected to cost $792 million near Baltimore.

Your Place in the Database.  Regarding the American surveillance state, it seems that the truth comes out a little at a time.  We learned about the FBI's Carnivore in the 1990s, which the copied internet data of people whom the agency deemed "reasonably suspicious." [...] We found out about NSA domestic wiretapping from a brave AT&T whistleblower in 2006. [...] For me, the most stomach-churning signpost on our nation's road to tyranny has been the completion of the Utah Data Center.  The center holds data on the scale of yottabytes.  One yottabyte could account for 30 million gigabytes per U.S. man, woman, and child.  It's a staggering capacity.

The Dangerous ObamaCare Data Hub.  Under the guise of expanding Americans' access to healthcare, "the federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic," Stephen T. Parente and Paul Howard asserted in a USA Today column.  That consolidation is called the Federal Data Services Hub, and it is being assembled as part of ObamaCare's insurance exchange implementation.

Obamacare data hub a 'honey pot' for ID thieves, warn critics.  The data hub President Obama's health care team is creating to exchange personal health and financial information on Obamacare users will be a ripe target for computer hackers and identity thieves, charge critics who claim it hasn't been tested for security flaws.  "It's the greatest collection of private identification information ever assembled on Americans that will be put into one place," said Rep. Patrick Meehan, who chairs a House cybersecurity subcommittee.  "It is every bit of sensitive information one would need to know to completely take over the identification of a person," said the Pennsylvania lawmaker.

The IRS, the NSA, and Obama's Dirty Tricks.  [Scroll down]  The NSA — the National Security Agency — admitted that it has been involved in spying on Americans.  Their huge Utah data center is a storage house of personal information on almost all Americans.  This information can be used to attack political opponents, and Barack Obama has not been reluctant to attack opponents for their personal behavior, even when the information is illegally/improperly obtained.

Is it Really about Surveillance or is it About the Government?  You need to keep in mind that the government is collecting or has access to about everything you do.  A short list is DNA, retinal scans, facial recognition, finger prints, phone calls, emails, internet cookies and the like.  Do you trust your government with all this information?  When you log on to the internet browser or the server there is always a footprint as to where you have been.

Massive San Antonio NSA Data Center Raises Eyebrows.  Even as reports break about the size and scope of the National Security Agency's vast data storage center in Utah, new details are emerging about a second massive NSA center in San Antonio, Texas. [...] Originally, the NSA was much more transparent about the project, actually holding a job fair to promote their expansion in San Antonio.  But from 2007 on, the news about the site has been nonexistent.

Is this where your personal information will be stored?  The personal data and private online conversations that the National Security Administration is accused of mining could be stashed in a one million square-foot, $1.9 billion facility in the Utah Valley.  Concerns over what the government will store at the Utah Data Center have been reinvigorated by the revelation that U.S. intelligence agencies have been extracting audio, video, photos, e-mails, documents and other information to track people's movements and contacts.

Obama defends NSA's secret 'data-mining' and tries to dismiss it as 'a modest encroachment'.  President Obama delivered a passionate defense on Friday [6/7/2013] of national security programs that secretly acquire information about Americans' phone calls, saying criticism of them is all 'hype.'  'My assessment and my team's assessment was that [the programs] help us prevent terrorist attacks and that the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration [of calls] without a name attached... It was worth us doing.'  Obama made the remarks at a press conference in response to revelations about two separate programs used to spy on American citizens and foreign nationals.

Why PRISM is Different and Scarier Than Other NSA Spying.  The metadata collected by the National Security Agency from Verizon and other phone companies is an aggregation of phone numbers and lengths of calls, and does not harvest the content of the calls.  PRISM, first disclosed Thursday night by The Washington Post and The Guardian, is different.  According to the intelligence official who leaked the information to The Post:  "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type."

Privacy of World Citizens Wiped Out by USA.  The ribbon-cutting ceremony invite, sent to a select group of Utah politicians and dignitaries for the massive Utah Data Centre in Bluffdale, Utah, was as mysterious as the facility itself.  Canada Free Press (CFP) could find no pictures, no accounts of the event anywhere on the Internet today even though an earlier media release said reporters would be there.  The bigger-than-the-CIA National Security Agency (NSA) had previously stated that the facility would start operations in September, 2013.

Big Government Mind-Readers.  A massive new NSA data center in Utah is under construction, which will be awfully handy for Big Government or anyone else who seeks the power that comes with control over information and the gateways to the networks it uses — all in one convenient, central location.  So far, many questions about NSA's "spy center" have gone unanswered as "classified" and "secret."

FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as "Top Priority" for 2013.  Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time.  But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a "top priority" this year.

Silly extremist: the government has no designs on your firearms.  See?  No black helicopters here.  Just the innocent sharing of data between states and the federal government.  For the children!

NSA chief defends agency against domestic spying charges.  The head of the National Security Agency on Monday denied reports that NSA's new data center in Utah would collect and store data about Americans, including their e-mails and web-browsing habits.  The $2 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah, will house massive supercomputers capable of storing and analyzing vast quantities of data when it comes online next year, but U.S. Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander reiterated NSA's insistence it does not unlawfully conduct surveillance of Americans.

Nothing is Private Under the False Flag of Terrorism.  In a possible preparation for the ability of the CIA to spy on American citizens with their household items, the NSA's Utah Data Center is located in the Utah desert in the foot hills of the Wasatch mountain range.  This is the centerpiece of the Global Information Grid; a military project that collects yottabytes of data.  They are listening to every conversation, reading every post, intercepting every text message under the false flag of terrorism.  The facility has the technological ability to record and analyze every communication in the world.  From emails to phone calls to text messages to chats; nothing is private anymore.