The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1780 - Here's What Nobody's Telling You About AI Data Centers
Aired: 2026-05-14
Duration: 47:40


=== Utility Bills and AI Fear (14:58) ===

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[00:00:56]  If you've been hoping to lie low while artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs and transforms the world's economy, then you need to pay very close attention to recent developments out of Lake.
[00:01:07]  Tahoe, California.
[00:01:09]  Now, in case you're not familiar, Lake Tahoe is home to some of the richest people in the United States on both the California and Nevada sides.
[00:01:15]  It's a premier tourist destination in our most populated state.
[00:01:19]  Median property values are north of $700,000.
[00:01:23]  People living there, as a general matter, are financially secure and highly educated.
[00:01:27]  Many of them work in tech.
[00:01:29]  You had to think of a list of people whose lives would be upended by artificial intelligence.
[00:01:34]  They would rank fairly low, you would think.
[00:01:37]  And yet, because of AI, 50,000 people living on the California side of Lake Tahoe have no idea where their power supply will come from in a matter of months.
[00:01:48]  Some are worried that the lights will go out indefinitely as if they'd been hit by a terrorist attack.
[00:01:54]  But what's happened is that the utility realized that it's much more lucrative to power data centers, which are used to train artificial intelligence and which consume near infinite amounts of electricity, than it is to power single family homes.
[00:02:08]  After all, by some estimates, depending on the size, a single data center can consume more power than half a million homes.
[00:02:16]  I'll say that again a single data center consumes more power than half a million homes.
[00:02:23]  Every utility is rapidly coming to the same conclusion because companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which collectively own one third of all data center capacity and which build the overwhelming majority of large data centers, are willing and able to pay enormous premiums for the electricity that they're using.
[00:02:42]  When they're able to price you out of the market, you're on your own.
[00:02:46]  And when the choice is between a big tech trillion dollar company or you in your single family home, the big tech company is going to win out every single time.
[00:02:58]  This is reporting from Fortune Lake Tahoe doesn't know where its power will come from after next ski season, and it's a major problem for the 49,000 residents who call the region home.
[00:03:08]  Nevada Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe's electricity.
[00:03:12]  Electricity for decades told Liberty Utilities, the small California company that services the region, that it will stop providing power after May 2027.
[00:03:20]  The reason?
[00:03:21]  Envy Energy needs the capacity for data centers.
[00:03:24]  As in, the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.
[00:03:32]  It's like we don't exist, North Lake Tahoe resident Danielle Hughes told Fortune.
[00:03:39]  Now, you might be thinking, well, okay.
[00:03:43]  This is no big deal.
[00:03:44]  The residents can simply find another utility to supply their power.
[00:03:48]  The government can simply assign some utility to pick up the slack.
[00:03:54]  I mean, surely we're not just going to leave these people without power.
[00:03:56]  We're not going to do that.
[00:03:58]  That can't happen.
[00:03:59]  The power company can't just come to an entire community and say, We're not going to give you power anymore.
[00:04:03]  There must be some sort of system in place.
[00:04:06]  Well, it turns out that there is no system in place.
[00:04:09]  And, you know, finding replacement power is actually not so easy in this case because Liberty, the California utility, is completely dependent on the transmission lines from the Nevada utility, Envy Energy.
[00:04:21]  And California regulators have no power in Nevada.
[00:04:25]  They can't order Envy Energy to forego the profits from these big tech companies and serve these residents.
[00:04:32]  So, the residents have two options.
[00:04:34]  Option number one, they can wait several years for someone to spend hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a new transmission line for their benefit.
[00:04:43]  In the meantime, they have no power.
[00:04:45]  They can use candlelight or something.
[00:04:48]  Or option number two, they can buy power on the wholesale market, which means their electricity bill will increase dramatically.
[00:04:55]  Some residents, even in Lake Tahoe, may not be able to afford the new bill.
[00:05:00]  The electricity will still flow through Envy Energy's transmission lines, but because it's coming from other suppliers in the West, Suppliers who know these residents are desperate, it'll probably cost two, three times as much at a minimum.
[00:05:12]  Could be much more than that.
[00:05:14]  So, right now, that's the plan.
[00:05:17]  It's a disastrous situation.
[00:05:18]  It's affecting people who never saw it coming.
[00:05:21]  And really, the ultimate message to these people is well, you're screwed.
[00:05:24]  You're on your own.
[00:05:25]  Too bad.
[00:05:26]  The data centers are more important.
[00:05:27]  Now, at the same time, as insane as this story is, I need to make it clear that the point of this monologue is not to indulge in any of the fear mongering about AI data centers that's all over the internet.
[00:05:40]  I don't want to imply that residents of Lake Tahoe are going to resort to cannibalism or anything like that.
[00:05:46]  Tourists who visit Lake Tahoe in a year, in all likelihood, will not encounter bombed out ski lodges full of zombies.
[00:05:55]  There's enough hysteria already out there without me adding to it.
[00:05:59]  I've seen people posting videos of lights in the sky, claiming the data centers are permanently changing the clouds, even though it's just normal lighting from an active construction project.
[00:06:09]  I've also seen videos like this one from a council meeting in New Jersey.
[00:06:12]  This is a woman who's opposed to data centers watch.
[00:06:19]  Three counties in Indiana have put a moratorium on building data centers.
[00:06:23]  Several in Georgia, Missouri, Illinois, Arizona, across the country.
[00:06:27]  Communities are protecting themselves from this poison.
[00:06:30]  Are we going to allow it in Cumberland County?
[00:06:33]  I want to ask the council where will you go when the water stops flowing out of your faucets?
[00:06:42]  Where will you go when the air smells like gas and makes you sick?
[00:06:49]  Will you look around for a community whose leaders had the spine to say no to these billionaires?
[00:07:00]  Or will you stay in Cumberland County and offer your children what is left of it to inherit?
[00:07:06]  Thank you.
[00:07:11]  Now, even if you're opposed to AI data centers, if you agree with this woman on the issue, which I. Mostly do.
[00:07:22]  She's speaking in sort of apocalyptic terms about the whole county getting wiped out, air is poisonous, the water is depleted, and on and on.
[00:07:33]  You know, there's some class resentment going on.
[00:07:35]  It's reminiscent of the women like Ben Affleck's daughter who would berate the city council over so called long COVID.
[00:07:41]  We can't ignore the fact that whenever there's a contentious issue like this, people who are neurotic tend to panic and they start making wild claims in a hysterical manner, and therefore they are unpersuasive.
[00:07:52]  That's the problem.
[00:07:52]  It ends up being.
[00:07:54]  Counterproductive.
[00:07:56]  It's counterproductive because fear mongering is the single fastest way to discredit legitimate concerns.
[00:08:03]  And there are many legitimate concerns with these data centers, as we will discuss in a moment, including, yes, concerns about the water supply.
[00:08:12]  It's probably not going to be that you build a data center and then nobody has water anymore and the air is poisonous.
[00:08:17]  It's not quite that, but there are legitimate concerns.
[00:08:23]  Notice that in her entire diatribe, the woman actually doesn't talk about what these data centers are being used for.
[00:08:27]  She doesn't mention mass surveillance or how these companies are programming robots to take human jobs.
[00:08:32]  She also doesn't talk about how the land is being obtained.
[00:08:37]  Instead, she's sort of yelling and the people are applauding in the background.
[00:08:40]  Now, if you remember from a few weeks ago, we talked about those high level scientists who are strangely disappearing.
[00:08:48]  And while some of those cases obviously merit more investigation, some of them clearly don't.
[00:08:54]  And so this is a kind of a similar thing.
[00:08:56]  When people pretend, and in that case, people pretend otherwise, When their only motivation is to string together some kind of elaborate conspiracy that doesn't withstand scrutiny and they throw all kinds of dubious claims into the mix, then they end up undermining all reasonable discussion about a particular topic.
[00:09:13]  And in the case of data centers, that outcome works for the benefit of big tech.
[00:09:19]  What big tech wants, if you're a skeptic of these data centers or concerned about them, they want you to be as hysterical and hyperbolic as possible in your protest of the data centers because.
[00:09:33]  Then they can point to that and say, well, look, these people are totally unreasonable and they have no idea what's going on.
[00:09:40]  You know, some have pointed out that you could go back and recall the panic in the early 20th century over power lines.
[00:09:47]  Anytime somebody died as a result of a power line, it made national news for a while.
[00:09:53]  Cartoons went out of their way to terrify people.
[00:09:55]  You're seeing one right there.
[00:09:57]  There's a skull on the power line, everyone's running for their life.
[00:10:01]  Someone got tangled in the power line somehow, not sure how that would happen.
[00:10:04]  I mean, if you're walking on the sidewalk, there's no reason why you should end up tangled.
[00:10:08]  I don't know what you were doing to end up, what was that guy doing to end up in that position?
[00:10:11]  Was he like parachuting, skydiving right into the.
[00:10:15]  But it looks like something out of a horror movie.
[00:10:18]  And during the so called War of the Currents between Thomas Edison on the one side and George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla on the other, Edison's backers would publicly electrocute animals in order to demonstrate how dangerous alternating current supposedly was.
[00:10:31]  Of course, today, alternating current powers pretty much every grid in the world.
[00:10:37]  More recently, people who opposed fracking claimed that it would cause flaming tap water.
[00:10:42]  All this to say, you have to understand that some hysteria is going to result whenever there's new technology.
[00:10:48]  The question you have to answer is whether there's an actual problem underlying all of this and what to do about it.
[00:10:56]  In the case of data centers and AI generally, there are certainly, without a doubt, actual problems underlying it.
[00:11:04]  We want to get to those problems and discuss them in a In an honest and objective way, summer has a way of reminding you what actually matters the family vacations, road trips, your kids are outside, your family's together, life feels full.
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[00:12:11]  So, probably the single biggest red flag, even for people who believe AI is a net positive, has been the very abrupt By people like Microsoft co founder Bill Gates, who retains an ownership stake in the company.
[00:12:25]  Now, as you may remember, for many years, Bill Gates was basically Greta Thunberg.
[00:12:30]  And now, seemingly out of nowhere, he's declaring that climate change actually isn't that big of a deal.
[00:12:35]  Human welfare, he says, is more important.
[00:12:37]  So here's a side by side that was put together by Maisie Moore.
[00:12:42]  The first clip is Gates from 2019, and the second clip is from last year.
[00:12:48]  It's only a six year difference.
[00:12:51]  Watch.
[00:12:54]  How great a problem bovine flatulence is.
[00:12:57]  Nobody knows how to get rid of, how to get cows to stop farting.
[00:13:02]  Exactly, or burping.
[00:13:05]  And so there is artificial meat, but that's at a very early stage.
[00:13:08]  If it was a 50% reduction, then you could ignore, okay, leave the cows alone.
[00:13:14]  But because we're trying to avoid the temperature continuing to go up, You do need to go to zero, not just everything should be solely for climate.
[00:13:26]  Wasn't the goal here to improve human lives?
[00:13:30]  Climate is super important, but it has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.
[00:13:40]  Now, a few years ago, we were so desperate that we needed to find a way to stop the cows from farting.
[00:13:46]  No sacrifice is too small.
[00:13:48]  And now, you know, climate change is important, but it's not a big deal.
[00:13:53]  Now, what makes this even weirder is that Gates is denying that he's changed his position, but he clearly has.
[00:13:59]  That clip was not a one off.
[00:14:00]  In a speech at Harvard University four years ago, Gates said that climate change would make life, quote, essentially unlivable at the equator by the end of the century, leading to the instability of hundreds of millions of people trying to get out of those regions where a lot of the world's population is, and particularly the poorest in the world.
[00:14:15]  Avoiding a climate disaster will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on, he said.
[00:14:22]  Meanwhile, current Bill Gates talks like this, quote, There's a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this.
[00:14:28]  In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.
[00:14:33]  Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.
[00:14:35]  Although climate change will have serious consequences, particularly for people in the poorest countries, it will not lead to humanity's demise.
[00:14:41]  Our climate strategies need to prioritize human welfare.
[00:14:45]  This may seem obvious.
[00:14:46]  Who could be against improving people's lives?
[00:14:48]  But sometimes human welfare takes a back seat to lowering emissions with bad consequences.
[00:14:52]  We should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature.
[00:14:58]  Wow.

=== Cheap Land for Data Centers (15:57) ===

[00:14:59]  It's like he's a completely different person.
[00:15:03]  Think about how important the climate change agenda used to be, like till 10 seconds ago.
[00:15:10]  It was the central plank of the WEF globalist utopia, in which the peasants don't own any property and we have to rent everything from BlackRock.
[00:15:18]  He told us again and again that our most important overriding objective as a species was to reduce carbon emissions.
[00:15:24]  And now, one of the WEF's most prominent ambassadors has issued brand new marching orders.
[00:15:31]  We're suddenly obligated to pursue human welfare.
[00:15:34]  And even things like reducing carbon emissions shouldn't happen if it has a negative impact on human welfare.
[00:15:45]  I mean, this version of Bill Gates, if he was around in like 2012, he would have been stoned to death as a climate denier.
[00:15:56]  And by the way, you'll often hear people say that if you criticize AI data centers, then you're falling for a Chinese psyop.
[00:16:03]  The idea is that China wants the United States to sabotage its progress with artificial intelligence, so they're encouraging useful idiots to attack data centers.
[00:16:12]  But if that were the case, it wouldn't explain why Bill Gates, who's been a useful idiot for China his entire life, Is supporting an approach that will lead to more data centers in the United States.
[00:16:22]  It seems more likely that big tech and China are both aligned on this point.
[00:16:26]  They all want an AI driven surveillance state in the United States.
[00:16:31]  And coincidentally enough, they also want mass migration and more foreign workers to take American jobs, particularly the kinds of remote jobs that data centers will enable.
[00:16:40]  So, indeed, a shift towards human welfare instead of climate change, which is.
[00:16:48]  Taken on face value, taken surface level, that's the right answer.
[00:16:53]  We should be focused on human welfare.
[00:16:54]  We shouldn't be focused on climate change at all because it's made up.
[00:16:58]  But that's not what's actually motivating this sudden shift.
[00:17:05]  Because actually, this shift is good news for companies like Microsoft, which don't want environmentalists and climate change activists to stand in the way of their data centers.
[00:17:14]  And ordinarily, I'd say it's good news for humanity as well.
[00:17:18]  After all, anything that upsets climate change activists is, by definition, a good thing.
[00:17:23]  You would think.
[00:17:24]  These are insane people who stand in the way of human progress at every opportunity.
[00:17:29]  But in this case, it's unfortunately not that simple.
[00:17:34]  It's worth paying close attention to the specific words that Bill Gates used.
[00:17:40]  So, what's the significance of this pivot to human welfare?
[00:17:45]  What could he possibly be trying to do?
[00:17:46]  Well, as it turns out, human welfare or the public good is essentially a standard for eminent domain.
[00:17:56]  Okay, that's the process that the government uses in order to seize private property, including lands and homes.
[00:18:03]  If the government can demonstrate that your home stands in the way of the public good, then the government can seize your home by force, as long as they pay you a fair market value, as defined by a government employee who's going to lowball you because you have no leverage in the situation at all, because they're just going to take your home anyway.
[00:18:18]  One of the classic uses of eminent domain involves public infrastructure projects relating to utilities, specifically transmission lines.
[00:18:26]  And this is an aspect of the data center story that most people are not talking about, but already people are losing their homes as a result.
[00:18:33]  This is a woman from Georgia, for example.
[00:18:35]  Watch.
[00:18:37]  Hey, you guys, my name's Ansley.
[00:18:39]  I live in Coweta County, Georgia.
[00:18:41]  I wanted to come out here and show you guys firsthand what is happening to our county.
[00:18:45]  So, as you can see behind me, we have these power lines.
[00:18:48]  Georgia Power is going to expand these lines to support power to the data center.
[00:18:54]  What they're doing to homeowners is they're taking their homes.
[00:18:57]  This is my childhood home behind me.
[00:18:59]  It is being taken by force by Georgia Power.
[00:19:03]  Homeowners in this county do not have a choice.
[00:19:05]  It is called eminent domain, and they will take it.
[00:19:12]  Well, this is one way to ensure that people own nothing, as the WEF has long desired.
[00:19:17]  It used to be climate change would bring about that result.
[00:19:22]  Climate change, well, you don't need that anymore when you've got AI and you've got data centers.
[00:19:27]  Politicians could just take your home from you.
[00:19:30]  That's exactly what's happening.
[00:19:32]  It's not just one case in Georgia.
[00:19:34]  More than a dozen farmers in Kentucky recently received threats that eminent domain will be used to seize their land for a data center, according to The Guardian.
[00:19:41]  Meanwhile, as the ABC affiliate in Virginia reports, quote, a Charlotte County farmer is frustrated after he said Dominion Energy is threatening to invoke eminent domain on his land.
[00:19:49]  He said the company is pushing for him to accept an offer to make way for a transmission line.
[00:19:54]  Todd Lacks has a farm in Randolph with over 200 acres of land.
[00:19:57]  Lacks at Dominion offered about $1,500 per acre and money to cover the cost of timber.
[00:20:03]  In his case, that adds up to about $13,000 total.
[00:20:07]  He would like $11,000 per acre.
[00:20:10]  Lacks said that his own legal counsel advised him not to take the lower offer.
[00:20:14]  Generally speaking, they said eminent domain cases are settled three to five times the initial offer, but in this area, because of the high solar stakes with data centers, that could easily be 10 to 15 times what they offered, according to Lacks.
[00:20:27]  Now, what this farmer doesn't realize is that he's actually pretty fortunate in this scenario.
[00:20:30]  He knows the identity of the organization, in this case, an energy company that's trying to seize his property.
[00:20:36]  That's a major advantage because very often, large Corporations will use shell companies in order to trick landowners into selling their property at bargain rates.
[00:20:44]  Disney pioneered this tactic in the 1960s.
[00:20:46]  They realized that they wanted a lot of land in Central Florida, south of Orlando, to create a new mini city, which ultimately became Walt Disney World Resort.
[00:20:55]  But if the landowners knew that Disney was the buyer, they'd immediately raise their prices.
[00:20:59]  So Disney established shell companies with names like Empty Lot Real Estate Investments.
[00:21:05]  Empty Lot, get it?
[00:21:07]  They hired fake executives and lawyers.
[00:21:09]  And as a result, they were able to get some of the land for as low as 100 bucks an acre.
[00:21:13]  And by the time Disney was revealed as the buyer, the price went as high as 80,000 an acre, but it was too late at that point for most of the sellers.
[00:21:20]  Now, today, big tech is running a very similar strategy.
[00:21:23]  This is from an investigative report that Business Insider recently posted.
[00:21:26]  Watch.
[00:21:28]  Giant warehouses are popping up across the US, more than two every week.
[00:21:33]  They feed AI algorithms, store photos, and answer our questions.
[00:21:38]  Hey, Google.
[00:21:39]  A data center campus like this can consume as much power and water as an entire city.
[00:21:46]  and many of the biggest server farms are emerging from the desert.
[00:21:50]  But there's no official record of how many of these are being built, where they are, or even who owns them.
[00:21:57]  To be honest, I've never really run into so much resistance for records than this project.
[00:22:03]  Big tech companies often go to great lengths to hide the details.
[00:22:07]  So, you know, it's been really tricky to kind of get these records because the companies don't want to disclose all of that information.
[00:22:15]  By tricky we mean redacted records and requests denied on the grounds of trade secrets.
[00:22:23]  It turns out there is one thing that most data centers need, backup generators, in case the grid fails.
[00:22:30]  And anyone who wants to install a generator needs to apply for an air quality permit.
[00:22:36]  So what we set out to do was request all of the permits that are issued to data centers for those backup generators.
[00:22:43]  That meant filing public record requests for air permits in every state.
[00:22:49]  They list the capacity of the generator so we can extrapolate the power needs of the data center.
[00:22:57]  They also provide clues about who owns it.
[00:23:02]  Take this hotspot rapidly expanding close to Columbus, Ohio.
[00:23:06]  There are at least 164 emergency generators permitted here.
[00:23:11]  This is a data center where the air permit was applied for by an LLC called Magellan Enterprises LLC.
[00:23:20]  But the company has applied for a trade secrets exemption.
[00:23:25]  So they were actually able to redact pretty much all the information that we wanted.
[00:23:31]  But all of the big tech giants must disclose any companies like LLCs that they own.
[00:23:37]  And by digging into their official records, we managed to pull back the mask.
[00:23:43]  And it turns out that the data center in Ohio it's not Magellan Enterprises LLC.
[00:23:48]  That's actually owned by Google.
[00:23:53]  Okay, so you've got these big, creepy warehouses propping up like weeds all over the country, two a week, we're being told.
[00:24:01]  And they use up more power and water than a small city.
[00:24:08]  But nobody knows who's building the warehouses or what they're really using them for.
[00:24:13]  That's a great situation.
[00:24:14]  Now, there are several reasons why Google might want to hide the fact that they're building a data center near your house.
[00:24:19]  It's bad PR, for one thing.
[00:24:21]  They also might want to hide their expansion from competitors.
[00:24:25]  But on several occasions, the motivation appears to be getting land for cheap.
[00:24:29]  The Washington Post reports that Google set up shell companies for negotiations and at least.
[00:24:32]  Five cities where they ultimately built data centers.
[00:24:35]  In one case, Google established a Delaware company called Jetstream LLC to quote, negotiate the land purchase with a private owner.
[00:24:42]  No word on how that land purchase went exactly, but we can assume it was very favorable for Google.
[00:24:46]  Now, it's hard to know how many of these transactions occur.
[00:24:51]  Shell companies, by their nature, are difficult to track, but it's a good bet that farmers in Louisiana can expect to hear from a few shell companies in the near future.
[00:25:00]  That's because they're getting a massive new meta data center.
[00:25:03]  In the next couple of years.
[00:25:04]  And already, according to a local tax assessor, rents have increased from $650 a month to $2,000.
[00:25:11]  And of course, property values have gone up, meaning residents owe much more in property taxes.
[00:25:15]  Watch.
[00:25:17]  Billions of dollars are moving through a tiny town in Louisiana.
[00:25:20]  Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is building what some predict will be the biggest data center in the world.
[00:25:26]  Tan Trong traveled to Richland Parish, where he found a community experiencing rapid growth and the pains that come with that.
[00:25:36]  Many people born and raised in Richland Parish are used to a slower pace of life.
[00:25:41]  I'm not for change.
[00:25:42]  I don't change my furniture around or nothing.
[00:25:45]  I stay just like it is.
[00:25:46]  We've been a simple farming community.
[00:25:49]  It's a great place to raise your kids.
[00:25:52]  It's quiet.
[00:25:54]  You won't find much quiet in certain parts of the parish anymore.
[00:26:00]  Entergy Louisiana is now speeding toward a deadline.
[00:26:03]  The power plant will be online at the end of 2028.
[00:26:07]  Troy Heightens is Energy Louisiana's vice president of hyperscale execution.
[00:26:12]  That title requires him to oversee massive jobs.
[00:26:16]  Heighton says this one dwarfs any he's ever seen.
[00:26:19]  This is the biggest customer project that Energy Louisiana has ever undertaken.
[00:26:24]  The only thing that is a similar scale that we've done in the past is building brand new nuclear power plants.
[00:26:30]  All of this is to support what's happening just down the road on Highway 183, where Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, says it's building a $27 billion data center to advance its ambitions.
[00:26:42]  In artificial intelligence.
[00:26:44]  In a parish of about 20,000, Brown says there are now at least 4,000 extra people living and working here.
[00:26:52]  That kind of growth can come with pains like rising rents.
[00:26:55]  There's bumps and bruises, and we're feeling them.
[00:27:00]  You know, a rental that might have been six, seven hundred a month is now 2,500 a month.
[00:27:08]  So it's not affordable for the people that were here, and I hate that.
[00:27:12]  It hurts my heart.
[00:27:14]  When Meta came in, they moved some of the folks out and put in the trailer park.
[00:27:19]  Well, they had to find a place to go, and some of them couldn't afford that, so I don't know what happened to them.
[00:27:25]  81 year old Joyce Piercy feels the changes are coming too fast.
[00:27:32]  Now, normally I don't have any issue with tax credits that encourage massive new businesses to come into town.
[00:27:36]  Taxes in general are bad.
[00:27:40]  The government takes your money and wastes it very often.
[00:27:43]  Therefore, tax credits are good.
[00:27:46]  Problem is that if you're going to offer tax credits to major corporations, the community needs to benefit in some way.
[00:27:52]  If you simply give the corporation a discount that it doesn't need, And in turn, you disrupt the lives of innocent people without benefiting anybody in any way outside of that corporation, then the tax credit has backfired.
[00:28:07]  It is not advancing what was Bill Gates' phrase, human welfare.
[00:28:12]  And that appears to be what's happening with these data centers.
[00:28:15]  Yes, they create construction jobs, but once those jobs are gone, which doesn't take long, you've mostly got an empty warehouse with a couple of security guards.
[00:28:24]  The data center churns along without many employees.
[00:28:28]  This is from the Wall Street Journal.
[00:28:30]  Quote In Abilene, Texas, some 1,500 people are building the first data center for the Stargate artificial intelligence venture led by OpenAI.
[00:28:38]  Once it's completed, a lot fewer people will work there.
[00:28:40]  The facility will have about 100 full time employees, according to the city's Economic Development Agency.
[00:28:45]  That totals a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same 1 million square feet if it were an office park or a factory or warehouse.
[00:28:52]  A 286,500 square foot cheese packaging plant that broke ground in Abilene in 2021 was projected to employ 500 people.
[00:29:00]  The reality is, data centers can employ more than 1,000 people in the several months or years it takes to build them, but rarely need more than one or 200 once they open.
[00:29:10]  And that's another thing with these tax credits and tax breaks and things for corporations.
[00:29:15]  Generally, the idea is well, it's good to have big corporations move into your town because they're going to bring jobs with them.
[00:29:22]  That's the idea.
[00:29:23]  The problem with the data centers, as we just went over, is they don't bring very many jobs once they're built.
[00:29:29]  This is Megan Basham of the Daily Wire, inviting you to join me for the 2026 Issues, Etc., Making the Case Conference, Friday, June 12th, and Saturday, June 13th, at Concordia University, Chicago.
[00:29:43]  I'll be speaking and signing copies of my book, Shepherds for Sale, and joining me at this annual conference for Christian laity are Molly Hemingway of The Federalist, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, and Aaron Holley of Alliance Defending Freedom.
[00:29:57]  Learn more at IssuesETC.org.
[00:30:01]  IssuesETC.org.
[00:30:04]  So, if the data centers aren't creating jobs, then how are the residents getting any benefit exactly?
[00:30:10]  If the answer is that the town has a lot more tax revenue, well, then great, pass it along to the people living there.
[00:30:17]  Give those same massive tax credits to the people who actually need them.
[00:30:20]  Send them a tax refund to cover their rent increase or the electricity bill, something.
[00:30:25]  If the local government is swimming in cash from all the new tax revenue, then they should be able to afford that easily.
[00:30:31]  But at the moment, none of that is happening.
[00:30:33]  Instead, residents are being told to deal with all the downsides of these data centers without any upside whatsoever.
[00:30:39]  And as many residents are discovering, the downsides are significant.
[00:30:47]  Even if you don't lose your home in the process of the thing moving into town, which you might, your quality of life will go down.

=== Loud Noise and Water Issues (08:35) ===

[00:30:56]  The downside involves things like loud noises at strange hours.
[00:30:59]  These next three clips are all from Virginia.
[00:31:01]  The first one is at midnight.
[00:31:03]  Listen.
[00:31:17]  The proximity of the houses to this noise, and as of right now, I don't see the black smoke.
[00:31:31]  But often, there are multiple black particles blowing in the air along with this sound.
[00:31:42]  Why is this allowed right next to single family homes, right next to other townhomes?
[00:31:50]  and other townhomes here.
[00:31:54]  Listen to this.
[00:31:55]  The ambient sound of Dulles Town Centre in Northern Virginia recorded on a phone.
[00:32:06]  Three Amazon data centres sit roughly 200 metres away.
[00:32:11]  I ran the audio through noise reduction software.
[00:32:14]  Only then do you realise that hidden behind the drone of the data centres there is birdsong.
[00:32:29]  Well, it's hard to imagine something more dystopian than that.
[00:32:32]  You've got this big, creepy, empty warehouse, box like massive building towering over these single family homes, and this creepy buzz, high pitch buzz sound just emanating from it.
[00:32:50]  It's like something out of a dystopian fiction, but it's real.
[00:32:54]  Here's another one.
[00:32:55]  This is time from Minnesota.
[00:33:01]  So, this is comparable to the data center that is going to be built over in the Bertram chain of lakes.
[00:33:15]  The guy from Skinner Properties told me to come and check out this data center.
[00:33:24]  I'm hoping that my phone is capturing that noise.
[00:33:29]  It is actually significantly loud.
[00:33:45]  Now, in fairness, as I said, we're trying to analyze this issue objectively with no hysteria.
[00:33:53]  In some of these videos, they're recording the sound of the on site generators, which, as you might imagine, are very loud.
[00:33:59]  And those generators don't run all the time.
[00:34:01]  But all the same, they're obviously very annoying, to put it mildly, for anybody who lives nearby.
[00:34:11]  And that's not a small thing.
[00:34:12]  You know, having a massive building that's, by the way, also just ugly to look.
[00:34:16]  Ugly a lookout, it makes an ugly sound.
[00:34:18]  It actually reduces your quality of life in measurable and significant ways.
[00:34:23]  It's not a small thing.
[00:34:24]  And they also lower property values.
[00:34:27]  More serious problems, like the ones that the woman mentioned in the city council meeting, are generally related to the construction of the data centers.
[00:34:35]  This is one of the prominent cases, one of the more prominent cases from Georgia.
[00:34:38]  Watch.
[00:34:42]  This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen.
[00:34:48]  This is where I fill up water for storage.
[00:34:51]  Those are the things we have to fill up to flush the toilets.
[00:34:54]  So you can see the sediment from the data center.
[00:34:59]  Wow, and that's just from the water coming out of your faucet.
[00:35:01]  Yeah.
[00:35:02]  And this is what's in all the pipes.
[00:35:05]  Just the well itself is probably 20,000, and that's not counting any of the water.
[00:35:10]  All the replacement of the fixtures and pockets and toilets and the lines that come underneath the house.
[00:35:17]  Overwhelming because you really feel like you are up against this huge wall that you can't penetrate.
[00:35:28]  There's nothing that you can do, and they don't care.
[00:35:33]  The light pollution is.
[00:35:34]  We don't have to have a night light in the house.
[00:35:36]  You can walk around the house at night and see everything.
[00:35:40]  It's that pride.
[00:35:43]  This is a video of the dust from Facebook where the construction was.
[00:35:50]  That's what it looks like right now out my front door.
[00:35:53]  The wind blowing in all of this stuff from across the construction, across the road.
[00:35:59]  This is all from.
[00:36:00]  You can't even see it.
[00:36:01]  Yeah, I was standing on my front porch.
[00:36:03]  I think eventually that affected our well water.
[00:36:06]  We're on a well here and we started having issues with our well in 2018.
[00:36:12]  I have to replace a hot water heater.
[00:36:14]  I've replaced two washing machines and a dishwasher because of the sediment that's coming in.
[00:36:22]  Now, to be clear about this, these people were using a separate well, and during construction, they said that their well was affected.
[00:36:28]  Meta claims they did a groundwater study, and that's not true.
[00:36:32]  Whatever the case, this is not a situation where the data center itself caused the problem.
[00:36:38]  Building any large structure could have caused the same problem, and this is not a case where the entire town lost water pressure or ran out of water or anything like that.
[00:36:46]  It's obviously a sympathetic story, but it doesn't connect to a Larger problem with AI data centers in particular, necessarily.
[00:36:55]  What is a sign of a larger problem potentially is how much water these data centers are consuming.
[00:37:00]  Many of them use a technique called evaporative cooling, where they pull in hot air, the air hits the wet cooling pads, and then the heat dissipates.
[00:37:10]  These are often closed loop systems, so the water isn't being wasted, but it's still putting a strain on many communities.
[00:37:15]  This is from the New York Times reporting out of Georgia Newton County is on track to be in a water deficit by 2030.
[00:37:23]  If the local water authority cannot upgrade its facilities, residents could be forced to ration water.
[00:37:28]  Meta's data center uses about 10% of the county's total water use daily, said Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewage Authority, which is the county's water authority.
[00:37:38]  In recent months, Mr. Hopkins said that nine companies had applied to build data centers in Newton County, some asking for as much as six million gallons of water a day, more than the county's entire daily use.
[00:37:50]  Some applicants are tech companies as large as Amazon, according to the water permits, while other companies used aliases to hide their identities.
[00:37:59]  Now, if you zoom out, the water consumption for these data centers isn't crisis level on a national level.
[00:38:07]  All the water within Withdrawals made by these data centers combined account for about 5% of the water usage of golf courses.
[00:38:13]  But at the local level, if politicians aren't careful with the permits they're using, then they could indeed run out of water and power.
[00:38:22]  But here's the point if you're spending all your time worrying about whether a local county will issue an ill advised permit that leads to water rationing in three years, then although that is a concern, you're missing the greater threat that's posed by these data centers.
[00:38:39]  They're a direct threat not only to your job, but also to your home, also to your personal privacy.
[00:38:46]  Now, this is an argument that very few people are making, aside from Mike Cernovich on X, who's making this point, and a few others.
[00:38:54]  A well trained AI is designed to draw accurate inferences about human behavior based on a near infinite data set.
[00:39:02]  If you use the internet, then it's all but guaranteed that Google and Meta have an enormous amount of data about your political opinions, your hobbies, your location, even when you're not at home.
[00:39:12]  And if they wanted to, these companies could tell the authorities precisely what you're doing, who you're with at any given second.
[00:39:19]  They could provide a complete breakdown of your health issues, your mood, your goals in life, your fears and anxieties.
[00:39:26]  And they could predict with a high degree of certainty what you're going to do next.

=== Trillionaires and Health Risks (06:48) ===

[00:39:32]  How much are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness worth to you?
[00:39:35]  This is the question America's founders had to answer more than 150 years.
[00:39:39]  For more than 150 years, America's 13 colonies governed themselves until Britain declared that they had no right to self rule.
[00:39:46]  So, ordinary people had to make extraordinary choices and risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to fight for independence.
[00:39:53]  And against all odds, they won.
[00:39:55]  And in victory, they built one of the most stable and lasting republics in history.
[00:40:00]  Now, experience the American Revolution like never before, thanks to our friends at Hillsdale College.
[00:40:05]  Revolutionary America, a new documentary from Hillsdale Studios, narrated by Tom Selleck, brings the founding of our nation to life through the voices of those who lived it, alongside insights from leading scholars and commentators.
[00:40:17]  At a time when history is often distorted, this is your chance to see the story as it truly happened and ask yourself what you would risk for freedom.
[00:40:25]  Face the decisions that our founders grappled with in Revolutionary America as Hillsdale Studios film.
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[00:40:51]  Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about their liver.
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[00:41:58]  Now, right now, according to the latest polling, the Democrats' leading candidate for president in two years is not Gavin Newsom, it's AOC, the socialist from New York.
[00:42:06]  You think she'd hesitate even for a second to use this data to harass and imprison her political enemies?
[00:42:11]  You think for a second that big tech would hesitate to share all this information with her administration?
[00:42:16]  That's not fear mongering.
[00:42:18]  Democrats have already done this without the benefit of AI.
[00:42:21]  They already rounded up conservatives and thrown them in jail.
[00:42:24]  They did it to the president of the United States.
[00:42:27]  The last thing we need to hand these people is a powerful AI to do that for them.
[00:42:33]  Now, does that mean that we should never build any data centers?
[00:42:36]  Does it mean that we should abandon AI?
[00:42:37]  Entirely, that AI has no useful applications at all.
[00:42:42]  Of course, it doesn't mean that.
[00:42:43]  But we should also be very careful to avoid racing forward with AI with no guardrails, no caution whatsoever, all based on some vague notion that we need to get there first and beat China.
[00:42:58]  Get where exactly?
[00:43:00]  If we impoverish millions of people and power bureaucrats and big tech oligarchs with surveillance tools beyond their wildest imagination, then what good is it to win the race?
[00:43:11]  What's the reward for winning?
[00:43:13]  I mean, if we're actually concerned about human welfare, and we should be, then how is human welfare secured or advanced by creating a society where we are tracked and surveilled every hour of the day?
[00:43:26]  And at the same time, millions of jobs become obsolete all at once.
[00:43:31]  AI is already in the process of taking away not just individual jobs, but entire categories of jobs, entire industries.
[00:43:38]  How does that advance human welfare?
[00:43:41]  I can see how it advances the welfare of big tech executives who are all about to become trillionaires or already are trillionaires.
[00:43:47]  But if you lose your job to AI and then your house to an AI data center, I'm not sure you'll have as many reasons to celebrate.
[00:43:56]  To me, the most terrifying thing about the current moment is that we are not, it's not that we're simply moving forward with a revolutionary new technology.
[00:44:06]  We are sprinting with it.
[00:44:09]  It is a mad dash.
[00:44:11]  Into the unknown.
[00:44:12]  There has not been any real discussion about the downsides.
[00:44:16]  Nobody has really explained how our society is going to absorb the inevitable job losses or what those people are supposed to do.
[00:44:26]  We don't know how many of these data centers will be needed or how many people will be displaced.
[00:44:32]  Nobody's told us what the limiting principles are.
[00:44:34]  I mean, we don't even know who's, who are, how many of these things are they going to put up and who's, we don't even know who's putting them up in the first place.
[00:44:45]  There have been no national referendums or votes on any of this.
[00:44:50]  And those of us who try to simply have this conversation are shouted down as being anti progress or somehow being tools for the Chinese.
[00:45:00]  This seems to be the answer from those leading the charge.
[00:45:03]  Their answer is that they have no answer.
[00:45:07]  And we must simply accept that.
[00:45:09]  And we must simply accept that, you know, big tech companies are going to do whatever they want with AI because China.
[00:45:17]  Which is to say that all the questions remain.
[00:45:20]  The corporations that are using shell companies to buy farmland in Iowa aren't going to answer the questions.
[00:45:26]  Neither will hysterical women screaming about entire counties being wiped off the face of the earth.
[00:45:34]  But before we proceed any further with this expansion, hundreds of data centers are under construction as we speak.
[00:45:41]  Someone in a position of power needs to do so.
[00:45:45]  We need some actual answers.
[00:45:49]  The AI data centers themselves are a very legitimate concern, yet, still far less of a threat than the AI itself.
[00:45:58]  And anyone who says otherwise, whether they realize it or not, is guaranteeing that big tech will get exactly what they want.
[00:46:09]  That'll do it for the show today and this week.
[00:46:11]  Talk to you on Monday.
[00:46:12]  Have a great weekend.
[00:46:13]  Godspeed.

=== King's Dream vs Modern Power (01:20) ===

[00:46:20]  Martin Luther King Jr. is an American icon, widely considered one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, a man who had a vision for a colorblind society, a post racial America.
[00:46:31]  He had a dream.
[00:46:33]  It's just not the dream you thought it was.
[00:46:35]  Were his true aims a colorblind society or something far more radical?
[00:46:40]  Who bankrolled him?
[00:46:41]  What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963?
[00:46:45]  Was civil disobedience actually peaceful?
[00:46:50]  We wanted to show you a clip of the I Have a Dream speech, but according to our lawyers, we can't.
[00:46:55]  In fact, King's family has made a lot of money suing media outlets.
[00:46:58]  They want to silence critics like us.
[00:47:01]  What they're doing makes it very difficult to judge Martin Luther King Jr. not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
[00:47:08]  Is America today stronger, more unified, and racially equal than before King's rise?
[00:47:14]  These questions demand answers, and as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting of the Civil Rights Movement and its consequences.
[00:47:21]  King's movement fundamentally transformed our country and our system of government.
[00:47:25]  I speak as a citizen of the world.
[00:47:28]  Each day the war goes on, the hatred increases, though the cause of evil prospers.
[00:47:33]  The first part of our two-part special on the Civil Rights Movement, a new constitution.
[00:47:38]  Available now on Daily Wire Plus.