In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.
There is a tiny bit of a difference between a “normal” data center with your typical web stack and a data center filled with GPU’s spending megawatts to confidently tell you that its alright to eat staples while raising your electricity bill, exhausting the water table, and providing no meaningful value.
True, but 9 times out of 10 you don’t see the distinction in the comments, it’s only “datacenters”.
I do feel bad for the “normal” companies that are general purpose data center and colo providers that are basically doomed to never being able to expand because of this shit show.
AI facilities should be rebranded as “slop farms” or “slop pens”. I think it would be pretty easy to isolate them as a normal facility might top out in the 1-2 megawatt neighborhood while a slop farm is going to need that just for the pumps and exchange fans for its cooling system. Just rough numbers but the two have extremely different requests to operate power requirements.