Turns out people aren’t thrilled about paying higher electricity bills so billionaires can build enormous server farms next door. The industry spent years calling every objection irrational fear of progress. Apparently voters have discovered a more effective feedback form: the ballot.

I'm curious if Utah voted in a ban or moratorium on that Elder Box County hyper scale data center.

The lone exception to the 41 ballot measures came from Harwood, North Dakota, where citizens voted “no” to adding an additional review stage to data center zoning procedures.

I can recall when AI was first building momentum around 2022/2023 and a comparison was drawn with Bitcoin for power usage. Gemini alone used more power than all the Bitcoin mining combined. Mind you, Gemini was still pretty early on then, so imagine the escalation now!

Yet... "The grid can't sustain electric vehicles"...

It wouldn't need ai bass I'd it wasn't this inflated race against "best", and actual research was done, small enough scale that the race was for the most efficient model without the needs to destroy the compute market, water supplies, GPUs/gaming, ecosystems from clearing land, and running turbine jet engines 24/7 (39 of them for xAI) to generate power.

We're backwards! It used to be everything was built to be extremely efficient with what little resources were available. We built awesome computers in the 90s and early 00s for what they were.

Harwood, North Dakota

But it was a “no” vote, for adding existing review steps. Having seen our ballot initiatives I really wonder if they thought they were voting no to the data center. Perhaps Trump’s DOJ should investigate “voter confusion” here.

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But what about cute guys?