Karl Bode:

One lie that companies have been telling local municipalities is that if they greenlight a massive local AI data center, it will immediately bring a flood of savvy innovators to your podunk-ass town.

The promotional materials for Kevin O’Leary’s still hypothetical “data centre park” imagine a futuristic campus full of bright young minds doing complicated A.I. stuff on-site in north-central Alberta. But why would they be there — fifty kilometres from the nearest city and 500 kilometres from Edmonton, the nearest major city? Why would they not be in Vancouver, or Silicon Valley, or anywhere else with an internet connection?

Also:

These companies aren’t coincidentally aiming construction at states and municipalities that are too broken and corrupted to put up meaningful regulatory opposition. […]

That is one reason why we are seeing a bunch of these proposals here. And these companies benefit from a lack of transparency.

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Jonathan Weil, Wall Street Journal:

It seems like a marvel of financial engineering: Meta Platforms is building a $27 billion data center in Louisiana, financed with debt, and neither the data center nor the debt will be on its own balance sheet.

That outcome looks too good to be true, and it probably is.

The phrase “marvel of financial engineering” does not seem like a compliment. In addition to the evidence from Weil’s article, Meta is taking advantage of a tax exemption created by Louisiana’s state legislature. But, in its argument, it is merely a user of this data centre.

Also, colour me skeptical this data centre will truly be “the size of Manhattan” before the bubble bursts, despite the disruption to life in the area.

Update: Paris Martineau points to Weil’s bio noting he was “the first reporter to challenge Enron’s accounting practices”.

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Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan says AI will shorten our workweek

[…]

“Today, I need to manually focus on all those products to get work done. Eventually, AI will help,” Yuan said.

“By doing that, we do not need to work five days a week anymore, right? … Five years out, three days or four days [a week]. That’s a goal,” he said.

So far, technological advancements have not — in general — produced a shorter work week; that was a product of collective labour action. We have been promised a shorter week before. We do not need to carry water for people who peddle obvious lies. We will always end up being squeezed for greater output.

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