The Diner Doomscroll

​When the economy goes to hell, and data centers can't make a profit, all the tax money spent to make the buildout possible is going to be wasted money. Taxpayers will be on the hook for bailouts and the endless years of austerity that follow.

America is going to have a stranded asset problem. It is not a matter of what can be done to stop it from happening. It won't be stopped.

American politicians have been paid well by industry to support data centers. Amazon spends $20M to $25M+ annually lobbying for data center tax incentives. Meta spends $18M to $22M a year to navigate local energy and zoning bottlenecks. Google spends $15M to $20M+ annually targeting energy regulations, and tax issues. Oracle spends $6M to $9M annually.

The list goes on. Americans think politics is a competitive sport. The focus is always on winning for the team and defeating enemies, and enemies are everyone not like you. Compromise achieved through a deliberate process intended to solve multifaceted problems for the greater common good is alien technology in America. Pay a politician enough money, they join your team.

Dominion Energy in Virginia and the Edison Electric Institute in Washington DC pour millions into lobbying to secure grid advantages and fast-track industrial buildout. Power companies sell power. Power companies are capitalist enterprises. Minimizing their costs they always try to do. Paying politicians to keep costs down and profits up is what they do.

Locally, Puget Sound Energy is running a public service announcement letting customers know, in a warm and friendly way, that rate hikes are necessary to better serve the community.

The reality is PSE intends to serve the community like a well grilled steak to investors. Puget Sound Energy is about corporate profits, and it is owned by a foreign consortium of international institutional asset managers and pension funds — AIMCo, BCI, OMERS, alongside the Dutch pension manager PGGM. Whoever they are, the affordability of my life is not their concern. I have to listen to their garbage at work every day.

American opposition to data centers is mostly about pollution and environmental concerns, and little else. The environmental objections are not wrong. The buildout is using water and electricity on a colossal scale. And this drives up ordinary people's bills, reviving coal plants.

But the critics miss why it's all happening. Understanding that the AI buildout is a bubble is beyond normal conversation. There is a vague belief that it may be a bubble, but that is not the same thing as actually knowing. The actual fact that the AI buildout frenzy is a bubble and it actually will burst is as right as rain.

The money fueling this monster didn't appear out of nowhere. Years of cheap low-interest-rate money. The legacy of DotCom, 2008, and COVID , swelled corporate balance sheets. The Magnificent Seven, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, did exceptionally well.

Piles of money are always looking for new profitable investments. The problem is that the real economy can't absorb all the money piles at an acceptable rate of return. So the piles gamble. America's skewed accumulation of excess money has nowhere else to go to get bigger, and bigger money always wants. If it does not get bigger people watching the piles are unhappy.

American income inequality is so bad that the median retirement account balance is only one-third the average balance. A ridiculous ration so much do the wealthy skew the curve. No amount of denial can change the fact that some Americans have too much money. So much that their money impugns the common good.

More data centers are being built than can be used. An overproduction of the means of production. And dedicating all the server racks in the largest data center being built to solving the overproduction problem is not going to produce an answer as to how overproduction can generate profit.

There did not have to be an AI bubble. Not at all. A massive buildout of data centers fueled by speculative money did not have to happen. It had to happen given America's current financial arrangements indeed, but other arrangements were possible. But they were kicked to the curb.

AI is useful. I use it on the computer I am on right now. I run AI models for a variety of reasons having to do with operating this website. But I do not connect to data centers.

It is not necessary to be part of the problem, I choose not to be. I do not have an Anthropic or Open AI 'key' by which I can connect to an AI provider. I download the LLMs I use and run them on dual video cards. A centralized, capital-intensive model isn't technically required. It is required if the point is to monopolize the technology and extract rent. But that's a business model, not an engineering necessity.

And while America has become all about collecting rents, Data Centers will be getting no profit from me.​​