OMFG The Conversation did that article really need to be a interactive story with AI memes? All I wanted to know was the location (western Sydney), but no, The Conversation thought this small post needed to be dressed up for a night out in the town.

Thanks, I hate it and I don't want it in my neighbourhood (or anyone else's)

“The way I see AI, this is the biggest single biggest gold rush in human history. It’s going to generate so much wealth for everyone,” AirTrunk’s founder Robin Khuda told Forbes last year.

Oh, cool! Sounds like a great idea th-

But major AI companies are losing billions of dollars each year and there are already examples of newly-built, mega data centres sitting idle because of energy supply constraints.

Well, at least it will only effect people with monetary investment in-

It’s also not clear how domestic power bills will be affected, though some data centres in the US have pushed prices 267% higher for local residents.

The better question is, should we?

I hope we don't

AI is a useful tool, but right now it's being weilded by fools as a solution in desperate search of a problem

Interesting to compare this quote,

But generating this silly AI video requires a lot of energy – roughly 940 watt hours – which is akin to running a microwave for over an hour.

To this quote from an Our World in Data post on c/overseasnews,

Let’s consider a typical single-room air conditioner that uses around 1,000 watt-hours of electricity in an hour. ... In at least 45 countries, the average residential electricity use per person for an entire day is less than the electricity that is required to power an air conditioner for one hour.

So we can use about the same electricity to run an AC unit for an hour as it takes to make an AI generated cat video. Both actions use more electricity than the average person gets in a day in at least 45 countries.

Edit: changed link to Our World in Data link. Other link wasn't working.

There was an article in the AFR with GHG opining there is a huge unmet demand for data centres.

https://www.afr.com/property/commercial/world-demand-for-data-centres-materially-exceeds-supply-goodman-20260218-p5o3hq

Almost three-quarters of Goodman Group’s $14.4 billion workbook is now devoted to building data centres, as the ASX-listed property giant swings harder into the AI-driven demand for digital infrastructure.

"Bypass paywalls clean" extension on FF or

https://archive.is/5YQGf