The People Tracking America's AI Data Centers

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you parallel access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the 404 Media co-founders, the first being Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hello. And then we're also joined by our regular contributor, Matthew Galt.

0:45Hello. All right. So we are officially back for the new year. I hope everybody enjoyed the replays of our interview episodes. It was mine with the head of Signal. Sam had one about Pornhub as well. Definitely check those out if you haven't already. And I think those were good because a lot of stuff has happened in both of those broader stories when it comes to AI, encryption, backdoors, age verification, porn, and everything else. So I thought those were good to carry us over. But we're back. It's good to be back. New content. New content, please. Exactly. And we actually published a ton over the holiday break.

1:30Obviously, we wrote a lot of this beforehand. and that one of those is the first story we're going to talk about. That is Matthew's one. The headline was, Researchers are Hunting America for Hidden Data Centers. I'm actually going to read the lead because I thought it was really, really good. And I think that'll set us up for the rest of the discussion. If I can read it on my tiny screen here. A team of researchers at Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute, are using open source intelligence to map the growth of America's data centers. The team pours over satellite imagery, building permits, and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer-filled buildings springing up across the United States.

2:15Matthew, this is really, really interesting. It came in pretty late in the year, right at the end, and then we published it, as I said, over the holiday. So we'll get into the map and the specifics and your experience with it. What is this organization? What is Epoch AI?

2:36Sometimes I struggle with what to call these things. It's like a think tank, basically. It's a non-profit think tank that is just tracking the growth of the AI industry. And having talked to them, I think that they are ambivalent to pro-AI, quite honestly. but they are serious about like understanding the impact of this technology especially with regards to like the infrastructure that it's going to take to build it out and so you can kind of think of them as like they're collecting a bunch of data to explain to any claim if anyone that would come to them uh about like what's going on in the country and the rest of the world quite frankly but the like one of their main focuses is america they are looking outside of the u.s as well.

3:24Sure. So what is, just to expand on that a little bit, what is this motivation for building this map? It's just, hey, we think more information is better? Or why specifically focus on this? Like, what's sort of the drive behind it? Because we don't know a lot about it. I wouldn't say that data center construction is a secretive industry. But it is just something that's kind of sprung up in the last couple years in the United States and is affecting a lot of communities. People don't always understand how it's affecting the communities and what's being built exactly and who owns what. So it is just an attempt to get a baseline knowledge of what's in the country and what it seems to be costing in terms of energy infrastructure and what exactly it looks like, how big it is, and who owns it.

4:25Yeah. It's like sometimes you live... I've been talking to people the last six months. Sometimes you live down the street from a woodland area. It gets cleared out and buildings start being constructed and you have no idea what the hell's going on. Right. Jason, I feel like you've brought it up a few times about how we want to cover data centers or AI data centers more and more. Matthew has been doing that with, I think, three or four articles at this point, something like that. There's another one in the hopper too. It's going to be super interesting. Great. So what's the context here, Jason?

5:04I mean, this is the entire American economy at this point. It's pretty shocking if you actually look at the numbers, which I do not have in front of me right now. But if you look at the jobs numbers, it's like there are two places where there is job growth. in the United States right now. It's like nursing and healthcare because they're an aging population and it's data center construction. It's like construction jobs, like HVAC jobs, like electricians and things like that. And so one, it's like the entire American economy is like betting on this. Two, data centers are like really controversial in the places that they are being built and set up for a variety of reasons.

5:48One, often they're pretty loud. Two, and more importantly, they use a shitload of energy. And so there is quite a lot of discussion about how we are powering these things. In many cases, they're powered by fossil fuels. In some cases, very rarely, or not often enough, I would say, are they being powered by renewable energy. and so there's there goes like a hand in hand like who how are these things being powered and also what are the impacts on the local community because of that because in a lot of places these data centers have come in and people's electricity bills have gone through the roof because there's you know the the actual like power generation there's like not enough of it to go around and And so the price of it goes up.

6:41And often, I mean, these things are, well, maybe the map shows more, but I would say the ones that are quite controversial are ones that are being built in relatively poor areas. And so they're being built in places where people can't afford to pay more for their electricity. and that's happening because a lot of times, you know, the city governments, the state governments are giving tax breaks to these companies to build these things. And so they're getting put in places where there's not as much like NIMBY type pushback. There's also a lot of them being built in like Northern Virginia, which is a pretty wealthy place.

7:27And there is a lot of pushback there because that's a pretty rich part of the country. Um, and it's just become like this huge political issue in, in those places. Like we probably should do this at some point, but there's a state representative in Virginia who ran essentially on like an anti AI, anti data center platform and he was elected. um so yeah i mean that that's like the broader context and i bring up virginia because it's close to dc it's also close to where the um the internet like enters the country there's like all these different places where the undersea cables enter the country and so you have like a lot of internet like throughput capability there and so that's like one of the reasons that that's that's happening there among others um but yeah it's like hugely important um at the moment yeah Yeah.

8:17Also the water. Right. The water. And then one other thing is like, once these things are actually built, they don't bring that many jobs. It's like, there's a lot of jobs in actually building them. But then once they're up and running, it's like, there's not that many people who work on them to keep them up and running. So it's not like it's some amazing financial boon for these local communities. There's kind of like a lot of promise. And then once they're up and running, it's like, okay, we have like seven people working there or whatever. I don't know actually how many people it takes. But I think I mentioned this on a recent podcast that we recorded.

8:50But I went to a Bitcoin mine in upstate New York that was causing some of these problems a few years ago. The Bitcoin mine was built there because they had really cheap hydropower. And the Bitcoin mine sucked up so much of the energy that people's bills were going through the roof. and the Bitcoin mining company was like, oh, but we're bringing jobs back to this town that doesn't have that many. And it's like, there was actually only two people working at the Bitcoin mine. Because it's just like, they needed someone to turn on the light and they needed security, essentially. Once it was actually like, everything was installed, there was nothing going on there.

9:30And it's like, that is not the exact same as these data centers, but it's similar in Vibe where it's just like you just have a bunch of computers running and you just have to make sure that the computer don't blow up. Well, for this, it's probably even worse because once it's built, the AI is going to be running in the data center. It's like, cool, now we have the AI to take even more jobs which aren't even physically located here. Obviously, I'm generalizing. Matthew, what were you going to say? There's just a similar situation happening in West Texas in a city called Clarendon where it's got like a population of 10 ,000 people and it's mostly retirees.

10:07It's people that moved out there because it was cheap to live there. And this is like they wanted to retire close to the plains and just like that's... This is the final place they're going. Well, guess where they're building a data center and guess what's happening to everyone's electricity bills. And they're giving the same line. Like, well, we'll bring jobs to the communities. Like we didn't need... It was a bunch of retirees. We didn't need jobs. They literally don't want jobs. Yeah. And the other thing that I think is... One of the other things I think is really interesting about this stuff, and one of the things that worries me about how it's propping up the community, is that it's an enormous gamble that people think is going to pay off in like 5, 10 years.

10:49How so? So like in West Texas, again, near Amarillo, they're going to build four big nuclear reactors, suck up a bunch of water from an aquifer that's already not doing great, to fuel them. The reactors probably won't come on for at least five years, probably more. So to get the data center up and running that they want to power with the nuke plants that will be constructed before the nuke plants are, they're going to build a bunch of

11:24natural gas plants to burn everything off. It's going to spike everyone's energy bills because none of that's going to go back into the community. And what happens in 5 years, 10 years, if there's a contraction on LLMs? If this AI stuff doesn't pan out, and now we've invested billions of dollars in all this infrastructure that's just going to be unnecessary overnight, no longer profitable to build, what happens then? Yeah. Totally fine. I mean, this is like the huge trillion dollar question. It's like, are we going to have these husks of data, these abandoned data centers. And I think Emmanuel, to put you on the spot, is a little bit more bullish on this, that regardless of what happens with AI, there will be some need for these data centers eventually at some point.

12:18So perhaps the risk of this is not as high, but nonetheless. We will compute something, whether that's generating images on Grok or something else is to be seen. Or it doesn't mean it will be a good return on investment, but I don't think they'll sit there empty like abandoned gold mines or something. Streaming video games, right? I mean, it's like... Anything, yeah. Xbox can put their servers there or whatever. Have you followed... That'll be dead in five years. This happened right before we went on break and I hesitate to open this Pandora's box, but have we followed the data centers in space debate?

13:01It doesn't make any sense to me from a logistical perspective. Again, it's one of those things where it takes too much money to build it to get any kind of return on it in anything under 100 years, right? It's a great idea because it's cold up there, etc. But to get everything up there and get it running and then beam everything back, It's just like, that seems like a pretty tall order. I thought we were putting them in the ocean. I think the ocean is better. Well, don't clip this because I don't... The negative externalities of having them underwater could be many. But ocean is also very cold and is a lot closer and the internet's already down there.

13:46And they've done it. They did one test. I remember Microsoft put one. Microsoft has or had one. Yeah. well speaking of maybe there's one under the water is that on the map Matthew or rather let me rephrase the question to bring it to the story they have this map and you can scroll through it and zoom around and look all of these different data centers across America how is Epoch AI actually building this map I touched on this by reading out the lead but like how are they making this map Are they just on Google Street View? What are they doing? I mean, they're using slightly fancier things than Google Street View.

14:29But yes, they're looking at satellite imagery. They're kind of tracking news stories about the announcement of data centers. And then you go and you look at the satellite imagery for the location. You pour through local filings at the county level and at the city level to see what people have declared that they are building. And then one of the things I thought was really fascinating is looking at the satellite imagery for these construction projects and looking specifically at what cooling infrastructure is like. So they look and they see if something's uncovered, which a lot of stuff is, like how many fans are they building?

15:10How big are the fans? And then they kind of have a formula that they go through and say like, So they've got this number of fans, and that tells us that it's using this much electricity and that it's generating this much data. And working backward from the problem. Because a lot of this stuff is... Google doesn't want to necessarily tell you how much megawatts a deep mine facility in New Albany is using. So they look at the outside of the thing and work backwards that way. It's all open source and open information. I mean, it actually sounds like a fair bit of work. It is. Bringing it all together.

15:57What is your experience scrolling through the map? Is it pretty intuitive? Is it informative? What's it like actually to use this map? I think it's really good. because it's all... You just look at the map. It's all right there. You got your bright blue circles. You click on a blue circle. Go into it. And then it's all annotated. I'm looking at this one for Google that's in Oklahoma. And it'll walk you through all the little individual pieces like I was talking about. This is where the backup power is. This is where its fans are. And then you can even click through dates to see what it looked like as it was under construction.

16:42You get a lot of information about what these things look like and how they work just by going through these maps. Interesting. How busy is the map? Are we talking like a few results? Dozens? Because it can't be a massively populated map. Or maybe I'm wrong. No, no, no. It's only got, in the US, it's only got a few results right now. Because they kind of have, because there's kind of an arbitrary line that they've marked where it's like, you could technically say like everyone's PC is a data center, right? Because it's doing compute, it has a GPU in it. At what point do you have enough GPUs strung together that you consider it a data center for the purposes of this map?

17:28Right. And right now, they're kind of only looking at bigger, more massive projects. And that's what they're charting out. And also, they don't know about everything. And they haven't run the numbers on every little thing they've found. So that's just stuff kind of comes up as they have the time to get it up on the map. Yeah. So right now, it's like a dozen things in the United States. They've got some other stuff in other places in the world. They've got some in Oman and one in China that they've found. But I imagine the map is going to grow as the year goes on. Right. It's not cataloging every digital ocean and AWS data center, because of course, they're all over the place and have been for years and years and years, because everything's obviously moved to cloud infrastructure and that sort of thing.

18:09But it's not that. It's very specifically stuff about AI. Right. It's very narrowly focused on, yeah, the stuff that is powering like DeepMind and XAI and Anthropics stuff, and like even an Alibaba data center that's here, or in China rather. So yeah, it is very narrowly on those kinds of things. And they also have some stuff that we think that this is what it is. So yeah, that is kind of what's going on. What, I think just to round out, what happens now? Are you going to keep an eye on this map and return to it? I mean, I guess that it's not really going to break news, probably. I don't think this map is going to reveal a new data center because it's going to be picked up in local or national press, presumably before it's on the map.

18:59But do you think you'll come back to this as a resource? Yeah, this is going to be a resource for me this year. And it was especially interesting because we... This is one of those that I kind of stumbled on this at the end of the year, because I was talking to some guys about some Nuke stuff and some OSINT stuff they're doing with Nuke watching. And they were like, have you talked to these data center guys? They're doing something very interesting. And that's kind of how I got onto this. And I was interested because, like Jason, I think data center and resistance to data center is going to be a pretty big story this year.

19:32And I wrote this at the end of the year without super thinking about a very hard talk to the guys. And I came back and I had so many emails and messages from people that were like, they're building a data center here. like this thing is going up and like it just like any kind of anytime I write about this stuff it really people are paying attention and it really like you know I always get a lot of ton of messages so it just again it tells me that like this is something that people really care about so as I continue to like carve out a data center beat this year I think this is going to be a resource for me for sure.

20:15Hell yeah. Yeah that sounds great and you're right people do People do care about it. Jason? I have a very quick update on the Microsoft data centers. Very funny. The underwater ones. So in 2020, soon after they were launched, the headline on a Microsoft press release is Microsoft finds underwater data centers are reliable, practical, and use energy sustainably. And then it says, more than half the world's population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting data centers underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance of travel, leading to fast and smooth web surfing, video streaming, and game playing.

20:51Here is a headline from ITPro, which is a trade publication that writes about data centers and other things from July 19, 2024. Microsoft scrapped its ProjectNatic, which is what this was called. Underwater data center trial. Here's why it was never going to work. It's basically like they had all sorts of issues with it. They're not running it anymore. The main issue was that it was like hundreds of feet under the ocean. And so if they needed to do any sort of maintenance on it, they needed either scuba divers or to haul the entire data center back up to the surface, which was extremely expensive and did not work.

21:31So perhaps underwater, maybe not the best. Which makes you think it's also quite expensive to go up to space, as far as I know. Like it's not super cheap, you know? So... As I recall, when we had to service the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, that was like quite an undertaking. Right, right. Why didn't they call it Project Atlantis? Like that would have made way more sense. Too on the nose. Yeah, I guess so. All right, we'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to be talking about, frankly, the complete shit show that's happening with Grok and its AI image generation.

22:10We'll be right back after this.

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25:47All right, and we are back. Jason, this is one you wrote by I Know Everybody here has thoughts on this so please jump in but just to get it started the headline was Grok's AI CSAM shit show referring to child sexual abuse imagery or material sorry Jason to get going what did people realize over the holiday that they could have Grok do yeah so I mean hey at Grok has become a big thing on X like, hey, at Grok, respond to this person, blah, blah, blah. And people realized that they could ask Grok to put women in bikinis who had posted their photos on Twitter, on X, or to do all sorts of things like spread her legs, take her clothes off, so on and so forth.

26:43And it became a meme for the last, I don't know, like two weeks at this point. It still happening to some degree where anytime you see an image on Twitter, there's often someone under it asking Grok to manipulate the image in some way. And what was happening was people were doing this to images of underage girls. And so there was a Stranger Things actress who I think is 14, who was put in a bikini and people just doing really fucked up things to underage people, which is crazy. It's very, very bad. You don't even need to explain why it's bad. It's child sexual abuse material being generated on one of the biggest social media platforms owned by the richest man in the world.

27:36And this started another round of discussion about why X is a bad place and why it's an irresponsible place. And I mean, I feel like we have entered a period where I think it is important to sort of point out what is happening, but it's not like, it doesn't seem like there's any sort of hope that there's going to be some meaningful regulation of this by the US government, of course. And there certainly doesn't seem to be much self-regulation occurring by Elon Musk. It is like, by and large, in anything goes, shitshow cesspool. Have they even released a statement or said anything at all? I mean, I think that Twitter public relations has updated its autoresponder, the press autoresponder.