{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"One Wants 9 Gigawatts. The Other Wants What the Mill Already Used.","description":"This is the most useful thing Craig has said about data centers, and it comes down to two sets of numbers that get filed under the same word. Kevin O'Leary is pushing a $100 billion data center in northwestern Utah. It would cover twice the area of Manhattan and draw about 9 gigawatts \u2014 more than twice what the entire state of Utah uses on its heaviest day. The power plan is to spend half a billion finishing an idle gas pipeline and run gas turbines. The waste heat is the part people underestimate: Craig cites an estimate equivalent to roughly twenty nuclear detonations going off continuously, and notes that data centers of this class have been measured raising local temperatures four degrees year-round. Then the water, in high desert, with the Great Salt Lake dropping every year and the Colorado already stretched. Around 56% of Utahns oppose it. The Androscoggin Mill project in Maine asks for 82 megawatts \u2014 roughly a hundredth of O'Leary's figure, and, crucially, the same amount the site already drew when it ran as a mill. It is not new load on the Maine grid. It uses closed-loop cooling, so rather than pulling water continuously to cool the machines, its 300,000 gallons recirculate. There is no heat island effect in the area at all. And the people it would employ are in some cases the people who lost their jobs when the mill closed. Craig's conclusion is the line to take away: you cannot mix these up, they are very different projects, and when people picture "a data center" most of them are picturing the O'Leary version. It is also why Maine can be first in the nation on restricting data centers while its governor supports this particular one without contradiction. Also in this segment: China's approach to AI displacement, with the first prosecution under it this week: if a business displaces an employee by using AI, it must compensate them \u2014 usually by finding them another role in the organisation. Craig finds the source of that rule genuinely surprising, and sets it against the universal basic income proposals being floated here The water argument in perspective \u2014 comparable to what California uses growing almonds \u2014 and Matt's point that scale comparisons belong in the conversation SpaceX's IPO filing, which has already lifted space stocks on rumour alone, and the version three mega rocket configuration that appears to have its bugs worked out What a moon base is actually for: mining materials that cannot be processed here, helium-3, and eventually asteroids. Craig's aside that rare earth minerals are not especially rare \u2014 the difficulty is processing them Free newsletter: CraigPeterson.com ","author_name":"Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity","author_url":"https:\/\/cptt.libsyn.com\/podcast","html":"