The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1780 - Here's What Nobody's Telling You About AI Data Centers

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00:00:55.300 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 Tahoe, California.

00:01:09.260 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.

00:01:15.560 It's a premier tourist destination in our most populated state.

00:01:19.320 Median property values are north of $700,000.

00:01:22.160 dollars. People living there, as a general matter, are financially secure and highly educated.

00:01:27.400 Many of them work in tech. You had to think of a list of people whose lives would be upended by

00:01:32.800 artificial intelligence. They would rank fairly low, you would think. And yet, because of AI,

00:01:38.680 50,000 people living on the California side of Lake Tahoe have no idea where their power supply

00:01:45.660 will come from in a matter of months. Some are worried that the lights will go out indefinitely,

00:01:50.720 as if they'd been hit by a terrorist attack. But what's happened is that the utility realized that

00:01:56.240 it's much more lucrative to power data centers, which are used to train artificial intelligence

00:02:00.780 and which consume near infinite amounts of electricity, than it is to power single-family

00:02:06.620 homes. After all, by some estimates, depending on the size, a single data center can consume

00:02:11.760 more power than half a million homes. I'll say that again. A single data center consumes more

00:02:18.920 power than half a million homes. Every utility is rapidly coming to the same conclusion because

00:02:26.300 companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which collectively own one-third of all data center

00:02:32.200 capacity and which build the overwhelming majority of large data centers, are willing and able to pay

00:02:38.200 enormous premiums for the electricity that they're using. When they're able to price you out of the

00:02:43.600 market, you're on your own. And when the choice is between a big tech trillion dollar company or

00:02:50.940 you and your single family home, the big tech company is going to win out every single time.

00:02:57.700 This is reporting from Fortune, quote, Lake Tahoe doesn't know where its power will come from after

00:03:02.500 next ski season. And it's a major problem for the 49,000 residents who call the region home.

00:03:07.960 Nevada Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe's electricity

00:03:12.820 for decades, told Liberty Utilities, the small California company that services the region,

00:03:17.700 that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason, Envy Energy needs the capacity for

00:03:24.220 data centers, as in, the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company

00:03:28.700 that it has less than a year to find another power source. It's like we don't exist,

00:03:33.960 North Lake Tahoe resident Danielle Hughes told Fortune. Now, you might be thinking, well,

00:03:40.700 Okay, this is no big deal. The residents can simply find another utility to supply their power. The government can simply assign some utility to pick up the slack.

00:03:54.080 I mean, surely we're not just going to leave these people without power. We're not going to do that. That can't happen. The power company can't just come to an entire community and say, we're not going to give you power anymore. There must be some sort of system in place.

00:04:05.160 Well, it turns out that there is no system in place. And finding replacement power is actually

00:04:12.140 not so easy in this case because Liberty, the California utility, is completely dependent on

00:04:17.040 the transmission lines from the Nevada utility, NV Energy. And California regulators have no power

00:04:24.120 in Nevada. They can't order NV Energy to forego the profits from these big tech companies

00:04:29.220 and serve these residents. So the residents have two options. Option number one, they can wait

00:04:36.840 several years for someone to spend hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a new transmission

00:04:41.040 line for their benefit. In the meantime, they have no power. They can use, you know, candlelight or

00:04:47.080 something. Or option number two, they can buy power on the wholesale market, which means their

00:04:52.860 electricity bill will increase dramatically. Some residents, even in Lake Tahoe, may not be able to

00:04:58.660 afford the new bill. The electricity will still flow through Envy Energy's transmission lines,

00:05:03.660 but because it's coming from other suppliers in the West, suppliers who know these residents are

00:05:07.860 desperate, it'll probably cost two, three times as much at a minimum. It could be much more than

00:05:12.920 that. So right now, that's the plan. It's a disastrous situation. It's affecting people

00:05:19.340 who never saw it coming. And really, the ultimate message to these people is, well, you're screwed. 0.99

00:05:24.180 You're on your own. Too bad. The data centers are more important. 0.99

00:05:30.040 Now, at the same time, as insane as this story is, I need to make it clear that the point of

00:05:33.720 this monologue is not to indulge in any of the fear mongering about AI data centers that's all

00:05:39.240 over the internet. I don't want to imply that residents of Lake Tahoe are going to resort to

00:05:44.400 cannibalism or anything like that. Tourists who visit Lake Tahoe in a year in all likelihood will

00:05:49.360 not encounter bombed-out ski lodges full of zombies,

00:05:54.180 you know, there's enough hysteria already out there without me adding to it.

00:05:59.280 I've seen people posting videos of lights in the sky

00:06:02.980 claiming the data centers are permanently changing the clouds,

00:06:06.240 even though it's just normal lighting from an active construction project.

00:06:09.820 I've also seen videos like this one from a council meeting in New Jersey. 1.00

00:06:12.280 This is a woman who's opposed to data centers. 0.96

00:06:14.740 Watch. 1.00

00:06:16.520 Three counties.

00:06:19.360 Three counties in Indiana have put a moratorium on building data centers.

00:06:23.500 Several in Georgia, Missouri, Illinois, Arizona, across the country.

00:06:27.900 Communities are protecting themselves from this poison.

00:06:30.360 Are we going to allow it in Cumberland County?

00:06:32.900 I want to ask the council, where will you go when the water stops flowing out of your faucets?

00:06:39.580 where will you go where will you go when the air smells like gas and makes you sick

00:06:49.400 will you look around for a community whose leaders had the spine to say no to these billionaires

00:06:55.060 or or will you stay in cumberland county and offer your children what is left of it to inherit thank

00:07:07.020 you. Now, even if you're opposed to AI data centers, if you agree with this woman on the

00:07:18.080 issue, which I mostly do, she's speaking in sort of apocalyptic terms about the whole county

00:07:26.200 getting wiped out, air is poisonous, the water is depleted, and on and on. There's some class

00:07:34.400 resentment going on. It's reminiscent of the women like Ben Affleck's daughter who would berate the 0.99

00:07:38.300 city council over so-called long COVID. We can't ignore the fact that whenever there's a contentious

00:07:43.360 issue like this, people who are neurotic tend to panic, and they start making wild claims in a

00:07:49.140 hysterical manner, and therefore they are unpersuasive. That's the problem. It ends up

00:07:53.120 being counterproductive. It's counterproductive because fear-mongering is the single fastest way

00:07:59.420 to discredit legitimate concerns, and there are many legitimate concerns with these data centers,

00:08:07.360 as we will discuss in a moment, including, yes, concerns about the water supply.

00:08:12.600 It's probably not going to be that you build a data center and then nobody has water anymore

00:08:16.200 and the air is poisonous. It's not quite that, but there are legitimate concerns.

00:08:22.900 Notice that in her entire diatribe, the woman actually doesn't talk about what these data

00:08:26.700 centers are being used for. She doesn't mention mass surveillance or how these companies are

00:08:30.640 programming robots to take human jobs. She also doesn't talk about how the land is being obtained.

00:08:36.780 Instead, she's sort of yelling and the people are applauding in the background.

00:08:40.880 Now, if you remember from a few weeks ago, we talked about those high-level scientists who

00:08:46.100 were strangely disappearing. And while some of those cases obviously merit more investigation,

00:08:51.820 some of them clearly don't. And so this is a kind of a similar thing. When people pretend,

00:08:57.600 and in that case, people pretend otherwise, when their only motivation is to string together some

00:09:01.660 kind of elaborate conspiracy that doesn't withstand scrutiny, and they throw all kinds

00:09:06.640 of dubious claims into the mix, then they end up undermining all reasonable discussion about a

00:09:12.220 particular topic. And in the case of data centers, that outcome works for the benefit of big tech.

00:09:18.220 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.

00:09:32.640 Because then they can point to that and say, well, these people are totally unreasonable and they have no idea what's going on.

00:09:40.540 Some have pointed out that you could go back and recall the panic in the early 20th century over power lines.

00:09:47.420 Anytime somebody died as a result of a power line, it made national news for a while.

00:09:53.080 Cartoons went out of their way to terrify people.

00:09:55.760 You're seeing one right there.

00:09:57.420 There's a skull on the power line.

00:09:59.440 Everyone's running for their life.

00:10:01.900 Someone got tangled in the power line.

00:10:03.520 Somehow, I'm not sure how that would happen.

00:10:05.660 I mean, if you're walking on the sidewalk, there's no reason why you should end up tangled.

00:10:08.240 I don't know what you were doing to end up.

00:10:09.820 What was that guy doing to end up in that position?

00:10:11.740 Was he like parachuting, skydiving right into the...

00:10:14.520 But it looks like something out of a horror movie.

00:10:18.780 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,

00:10:25.720 Edison's backers would publicly electrocute animals in order to demonstrate how dangerous alternating current supposedly was.

00:10:31.900 Of course, today, alternating current powers pretty much every grid in the world.

00:10:37.160 More recently, people who opposed fracking claimed that it would cause flaming tap water.

00:10:42.400 All this to say, you have to understand that some hysteria is going to result whenever there's a new technology.

00:10:48.260 The question you have to answer is whether there's an actual problem underlying all of this and what to do about it.

00:10:55.980 In the case of data centers and AI generally, there are certainly, without a doubt, actual problems underlying it.

00:11:04.000 We want to get to those problems and discuss them in an honest and objective way.

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00:12:11.340 So probably the single biggest red flag, even for people who believe AI is a net positive,

00:12:16.440 has been the very abrupt 180 by people like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates,

00:12:23.140 who retains an ownership stake in the company.

00:12:25.740 As you may remember, for many years, Bill Gates was basically Greta Thunberg.

00:12:29.860 And now, seemingly out of nowhere, he's declaring that climate change actually isn't that big of a deal.

00:12:35.040 Human welfare, he says, is more important.

00:12:37.160 So here's a side-by-side that was put together by Maisie Moore.

00:12:42.460 The first clip is Gates from 2019.

00:12:45.560 And the second clip is from last year.

00:12:48.920 It's only a six-year difference.

00:12:51.060 Watch. 0.76

00:12:52.980 How great a problem bovine flatulence is. 1.00

00:12:57.500 Nobody knows how to get rid of that.

00:13:00.580 How to get cows to stop farting.

00:13:02.340 Exactly.

00:13:03.160 Or burping.

00:13:03.660 And so there is artificial meat, but that's at a very early stage.

00:13:08.860 If it was a 50 percent reduction, then you could ignore, OK, leave the cows alone.

00:13:14.020 But because we're trying to avoid the temperature continuing to go up, you do need to go to zero.

00:13:22.300 Not just everything should be solely for climate.

00:13:26.420 Wasn't the goal here to improve human lives.

00:13:30.120 Climate is super important, but has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.

00:13:40.060 Now, a few years ago, we were so desperate that we needed to find a way to stop the cows from farting.

00:13:46.140 No sacrifice is too small. And now, you know, climate change is important, but it's not a big deal.

00:13:53.400 Now, what makes this even weirder is that Gates is denying that he's changed his position, but he clearly has.

00:13:59.440 That clip was not a one-off.

00:14:00.600 In a speech at Harvard University four years ago, Gates said that climate change would make life, quote,

00:14:05.620 essentially unlivable at the equator by the end of the century,

00:14:08.660 leading to the instability of hundreds of millions of people trying to get out of those regions

00:14:12.480 where a lot of the world's population is, and particularly the poorest in the world.

00:14:15.840 Avoiding a climate disaster will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on, he said.

00:14:22.700 Meanwhile, current Bill Gates talks like this, quote,

00:14:26.180 There's a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this,

00:14:28.680 in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. Fortunately for all of us,

00:14:33.860 this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences, particularly for people

00:14:38.440 in the poorest countries, it will not lead to humanity's demise. Our climate strategies need

00:14:43.120 to prioritize human welfare. This may seem obvious, who could be against improving people's lives,

00:14:48.360 but sometimes human welfare takes a backseat to lowering emissions with bad consequences.

00:14:52.460 We should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact

00:14:55.800 on the global temperature. Wow. It's like he's a completely different person.

00:15:03.220 Think about how important the climate change agenda used to be.

00:15:07.920 Like till 10 seconds ago, it was the central plank of the WEF globalist utopia in which the

00:15:14.300 peasants don't own any property and we have to rent everything from BlackRock. He told us again 0.56

00:15:19.500 and again that our most important overriding objective as a species was to reduce carbon

00:15:24.120 emissions. And now, one of the WEF's most prominent ambassadors has issued brand new

00:15:29.460 marching orders. We're suddenly obligated to pursue human welfare. And even things like

00:15:34.920 reducing carbon emissions shouldn't happen if it has a negative impact on human welfare.

00:15:45.440 I mean, this version of Bill Gates, if he was around in like 2012, he would have been

00:15:49.340 stoned to death as a climate denier. And by the way, you'll often hear people say that if you

00:15:58.240 criticize AI data centers, then you're falling for a Chinese PSYOP. The idea is that China wants

00:16:04.820 the United States to sabotage its progress with artificial intelligence, so they're encouraging 1.00

00:16:09.600 useful idiots to attack data centers. But if that were the case, it wouldn't explain why Bill Gates, 0.99

00:16:15.020 who's been a useful idiot for China his entire life, is supporting an approach that will lead to 0.94

00:16:20.080 more data centers in the United States. It seems more likely that big tech and China are both 0.99

00:16:25.080 aligned on this point. They all want an AI-driven surveillance state in the United States.

00:16:31.680 And coincidentally enough, they also want mass migration and more foreign workers to take

00:16:35.640 American jobs, particularly the kinds of remote jobs that data centers will enable.

00:16:39.260 So, indeed, a shift towards human welfare instead of climate change, which is taken on face value, taken surface level, that's the right answer.

00:16:52.880 We should be focused on human welfare.

00:16:54.600 We shouldn't be focused on climate change at all because it's made up.

00:16:58.460 But that's not what's actually motivating this sudden shift.

00:17:02.500 because actually this shift is good news for companies like microsoft which don't want

00:17:09.060 environmentalists and climate change activists to stand in the way of their data centers

00:17:13.340 and ordinarily i'd say it's good news for humanity as well after all anything that

00:17:19.380 upsets climate change activists is by definition a good thing you would think these are insane

00:17:25.660 people who stand in the way of human progress at every opportunity but in this case it's

00:17:31.540 Unfortunately, not that simple.

00:17:34.300 It's worth paying close attention to the specific words that Bill Gates used.

00:17:39.820 So what's the significance of this pivot to human welfare?

00:17:44.660 What could he possibly be trying to do?

00:17:46.520 Well, as it turns out, human welfare or the public good is essentially standard for eminent domain.

00:17:56.640 Okay, that's the process that the government uses in order to seize private property, including lands and homes.

00:18:02.940 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.

00:18:10.440 As long as they pay you a fair market value as defined by a government employee is going to lowball you because you have no leverage in the situation at all because it's going to take your home anyway.

00:18:19.240 One of the classic uses of eminent domain involves public infrastructure projects relating to utilities, specifically transmission lines.

00:18:25.760 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.

00:18:33.160 This is a woman from Georgia, for example. Watch.

00:18:37.040 Hey, you guys. My name's Ansley. I live in Coweta County, Georgia.

00:18:40.940 I wanted to come out here and show you guys firsthand what is happening to our county.

00:18:45.520 So as you can see behind me, we have these power lines.

00:18:48.920 Georgia Power is going to expand these lines to support power to the data center.

00:18:53.840 What they're doing to homeowners is they're taking their homes.

00:18:57.780 This is my childhood home behind me.

00:18:59.880 It is being taken by force, by Georgia Power.

00:19:03.300 Homeowners in this county do not have a choice.

00:19:05.580 It is called eminent domain, and they will take it.

00:19:11.960 Well, this is one way to ensure that people own nothing, as the WEF has long desired.

00:19:17.680 It used to be climate change would bring about that result.

00:19:21.020 climate change but we don't need that anymore when you've got ai and you've got data centers

00:19:26.420 politicians could just take your home from you that's exactly what's happening it's not just

00:19:33.120 one case in georgia more than a dozen farmers in kentucky recently received threats that eminent

00:19:37.140 domain will be used to seize their land for a data center according to the guardian meanwhile

00:19:41.740 as the abc affiliate in virginia reports quote a charlotte county farmer is frustrated after he

00:19:46.180 said dominion energy is threatening to invoke eminent domain on his land he said the company

00:19:50.220 is pushing for him to accept an offer to make way for a transmission line. Todd Lacks has a farm in

00:19:56.040 Randolph with over 200 acres of land. Lacks at Dominion offered about $1,500 per acre and money

00:20:01.260 to cover the cost of timber. In his case, that adds up to about $13,000 total, but he would like

00:20:07.640 $11,000 per acre. Lacks said that his own legal counsel advised him not to take the lower offer.

00:20:14.080 Generally speaking, they said eminent domain cases are settled three to five times the initial offer,

00:20:18.120 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.

00:20:26.800 Now, what this farmer doesn't realize is that he's actually pretty fortunate in this scenario.

00:20:30.800 He knows the identity of the organization, in this case, an energy company that's trying to seize his property.

00:20:36.480 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.

00:20:44.240 Disney pioneered this tactic in the 1960s. They realized that they wanted a lot of land in central

00:20:49.140 Florida, south of Orlando, to create a new mini city, which ultimately became Walt Disney World

00:20:54.420 Resort. But if the landowners knew that Disney was the buyer, they'd immediately raise their

00:20:59.100 prices. So Disney established shell companies with names like Empty Lot Real Estate Investments,

00:21:04.960 Empty Lot, get it? They hired fake executives and lawyers. And as a result, they were able to get

00:21:10.220 some of the land for as low as a hundred bucks an acre.

00:21:13.400 And by the time Disney was revealed as the buyer,

00:21:15.280 the price went as high as 80,000 an acre,

00:21:17.500 but it was too late at that point for most of the sellers.

00:21:20.800 Now today, big tech is running a very similar strategy.

00:21:23.000 This is from an investigative report

00:21:24.500 that Business Insider recently posted, Watch.

00:21:28.400 Giant warehouses are popping up across the U.S.

00:21:31.460 more than two every week.

00:21:33.820 They feed AI algorithms, store photos,

00:21:36.460 and answer our questions.

00:21:38.440 Hey, Google.

00:21:39.760 A data center campus like this can consume as much power and water as an entire city.

00:21:45.960 And many of the biggest server farms are emerging from the desert.

00:21:50.540 But there's no official record of how many of these are being built, where they are, or even who owns them.

00:21:57.080 To be honest, I've never really run into so much resistance for records than this project.

00:22:02.940 Big tech companies often go to great lengths to hide the details.

00:22:07.460 So, you know, it's been really tricky to kind of get these records

00:22:10.560 because the companies don't want to disclose all of that information.

00:22:15.440 By tricky, we mean redacted records and requests denied on the grounds of trade secrets.

00:22:22.780 It turns out there is one thing that most data centres need,

00:22:26.600 backup generators, in case the grid fails.

00:22:30.200 And anyone who wants to install a generator needs to apply for an air quality permit.

00:22:34.720 So what we set out to do was request all of the permits that are issued to data centers

00:22:41.800 for those backup generators.

00:22:44.000 That meant filing public record requests for air permits in every state.

00:22:49.500 They list the capacity of the generator, so we can extrapolate the power needs of the

00:22:54.960 data center.

00:22:57.540 They also provide clues about who owns it.

00:23:02.160 Take this hotspot, rapidly expanding close to Columbus, Ohio.

00:23:06.920 There are at least 164 emergency generators permitted here.

00:23:11.500 This is a data center where the air permit was applied for by an LLC called Magellan

00:23:17.800 Enterprises LLC.

00:23:20.520 But the company has applied for a trade secrets exemption, so they were actually able to redact

00:23:27.620 pretty much all the information that we wanted.

00:23:31.360 But all of the big tech giants must disclose any companies like LLCs that they own.

00:23:37.680 And by digging into their official records, we managed to pull back the mask.

00:23:43.220 And it turns out that the data center in Ohio...

00:23:46.860 It's not Magellan Enterprises LLC, that's actually owned by Google.

00:23:51.740 Okay, so you've got these big creepy warehouses propping up like weeds all over the country

00:23:58.800 two a week, we're being told, and they use up more power and water than a small city.

00:24:08.200 But nobody knows who's building the warehouses or what they're really using them for.

00:24:12.920 That's a great situation. Now, there are several reasons why Google might want to hide the fact

00:24:17.360 that they're building a data center near your house. It's bad PR for one thing. They also might

00:24:22.140 want to hide their expansion from competitors. But on several occasions, the motivation appears

00:24:26.840 to be getting land for cheap. The Washington Post reports that Google set up shell companies for

00:24:31.740 negotiations in at least five cities where they ultimately built data centers. In one case,

00:24:35.580 Google established a Delaware company called Jetstream LLC to, quote, negotiate the land

00:24:40.420 purchase with a private owner. No word on how that land purchase went exactly, but we can assume it

00:24:45.480 was very favorable for Google. Now, it's hard to know how many of these transactions occur. Shell

00:24:51.720 companies, by their nature, are difficult to track, but it's a good bet that farmers in Louisiana can

00:24:56.700 expect to hear from a few shell companies in the near future. That's because they're getting a

00:25:01.080 massive new Meta data center in the next couple of years. And already, according to a local tax

00:25:05.900 assessor, rents have increased from $650 a month to $2,000. And of course, property values have

00:25:12.200 gone up, meaning residents owe much more in property taxes. Watch. Billions of dollars are

00:25:18.280 moving through a tiny town in Louisiana. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram,

00:25:22.880 is building what some predict will be the biggest data center in the world.

00:25:26.980 Con Trong traveled to Richland Parish where he found a community experiencing rapid growth

00:25:31.580 and the pains that come with that.

00:25:36.080 Many people born and raised in Richland Parish are used to a slower pace of life.

00:25:41.140 I'm not for change. I don't change my furniture around or nothing. I stay just like it is.

00:25:46.580 We've been a simple farming community. It's a great place to raise your kids.

00:25:51.480 It was quiet.

00:25:54.300 You won't find much quiet in certain parts of the parish anymore.

00:26:00.260 Entergy Louisiana is now speeding toward a deadline.

00:26:03.660 The power plant will be online at the end of 2028.

00:26:07.000 Troy Hightens is Entergy Louisiana's vice president of hyperscale execution.

00:26:12.160 That title requires him to oversee massive jobs.

00:26:16.120 Hightens says this one dwarfs any he's ever seen.

00:26:19.200 This is the biggest customer project that Entergy Louisiana has ever undertaken.

00:26:24.380 The only thing that is a similar scale that we've done in the past is building brand new nuclear power plants.

00:26:30.120 All of this is to support what's happening just down the road on Highway 183,

00:26:34.640 where Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook,

00:26:37.800 says it's building a $27 billion data center to advance its ambitions in artificial intelligence.

00:26:44.180 In a parish of about 20,000, Brown says there are now at least 4,000 extra people living and working here.

00:26:51.800 That kind of growth can come with pains like rising rents.

00:26:55.160 There's bumps and bruises, and we're feeling them.

00:27:00.220 You know, a rental that might have been $600,000, $700,000 a month is now $2,500 a month.

00:27:08.340 So it's not affordable for the people that were here, and I hate that.

00:27:12.700 It hurts my heart.

00:27:13.580 When Meadow came in, they moved some of the folks out and put in the trailer park.

00:27:19.460 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.

00:27:24.900 81-year-old Joyce Piercy feels the changes are coming too fast.

00:27:31.940 Normally, I don't have any issue with tax credits that encourage massive new businesses to come into town.

00:27:36.980 Taxes in general are bad.

00:27:40.660 The government takes your money and wastes it very often.

00:27:43.340 therefore tax credits are good. Problem is that if you're going to offer tax credits to major

00:27:48.580 corporations, the community needs to benefit in some way. If you simply give the corporation a

00:27:53.460 discount that it doesn't need, and in turn you disrupt the lives of innocent people without

00:27:57.780 benefiting anybody in any way outside of that corporation, then the tax credit has backfired.

00:28:05.140 It is not advancing what was Bill Gates' phrase, human welfare.

00:28:12.580 And that appears to be what's happening with these data centers.

00:28:15.140 Yes, they create construction jobs, but once those jobs are gone, which doesn't take long,

00:28:20.580 you've mostly got an empty warehouse with a couple of security guards.

00:28:24.780 The data center churns along without many employees.

00:28:27.920 This is from the Wall Street Journal.

00:28:29.540 quote, in Abilene, Texas, some 1,500 people are building the first data center for the Stargate

00:28:35.240 artificial intelligence venture led by OpenAI. Once it's completed, a lot fewer people will

00:28:40.120 work there. The facility will have about 100 full-time employees, according to the city's

00:28:43.720 Economic Development Agency. That totals a fraction of the number of people who might work

00:28:47.940 on the same 1 million square feet if it were an office park or a factory or warehouse. A 286,500

00:28:53.980 square foot cheese packaging plant that broke around in Abilene in 2021 was projected to employ

00:28:59.020 500 people. The reality is data centers can employ more than a thousand people in the

00:29:03.420 several months or years it takes to build them, but rarely need more than one or two hundreds

00:29:07.560 once they open. And that's another thing with these tax credits and tax breaks and things for

00:29:13.940 corporations. Generally, the idea is, well, it's good to have big corporations move into your town

00:29:20.160 because they're going to bring jobs with them. That's the idea. The problem with the data centers

00:29:24.760 as we just went over, is they don't bring very many jobs once they're built.

00:29:29.720 Let's be honest, the cost of living isn't just high, it's exhausting.

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00:30:25.620 This is Megan Basham of The Daily Wire inviting you to join me for the 2026 Issues Etc.

00:30:32.080 Making the Case Conference Friday, June 12th and Saturday, June 13th at Concordia University, Chicago.

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00:31:00.120 So if the data centers aren't creating jobs, then how are the residents getting any benefit exactly?

00:31:06.300 And if the answer is that the town has a lot more tax revenue, well, then great.

00:31:10.980 Pass it along to the people living there.

00:31:13.240 Give those same massive tax credits to the people who actually need them.

00:31:16.920 Send them a tax refund to cover their rent increase

00:31:18.920 or the electricity bill, something.

00:31:21.320 If the local government is swimming in cash

00:31:23.060 from all the new tax revenue,

00:31:24.260 then they should be able to afford that easily.

00:31:27.960 But at the moment, none of that is happening.

00:31:29.460 Instead, residents are being told to deal

00:31:30.800 with all the downsides of these data centers

00:31:32.440 without any upside whatsoever.

00:31:35.600 And as many residents are discovering,

00:31:37.320 the downsides are significant.

00:31:41.760 um you know even if you don't lose your home in the process of the of the thing moving into town

00:31:48.040 which you might your quality of life will go down the downside involve things like loud noises at

00:31:54.600 strange hours these next three clips are all from virginia the first one is at midnight listen

00:32:11.760 The proximity of the houses to this noise and as of right now I don't see the black

00:32:25.440 smoke but often there are multiple black particles blowing in the air along with this sound.

00:32:38.440 Why is this allowed right next to single-family homes, right next to other townhomes, and

00:32:46.660 other townhomes here?

00:32:48.600 Listen to this.

00:32:52.200 The ambient sound of Dulles Town Centre in Northern Virginia recorded on a phone.

00:33:02.760 Three Amazon data centres sit roughly 200 metres away.

00:33:08.100 I ran the audio through noise reduction software.

00:33:10.860 Only then do you realize that hidden behind the drone

00:33:13.480 of the data centers, there is birdsong.

00:33:25.260 Well, it's hard to imagine something more dystopian

00:33:27.220 than that.

00:33:28.180 You've got this big, creepy, empty warehouse,

00:33:31.960 box-like massive building,

00:33:34.860 towering over these single family homes,

00:33:37.320 And this creepy buzz, like high-pitched buzz sound just emanating from it.

00:33:45.900 It's like something out of a dystopian fiction, but it's real.

00:33:50.680 Here's another one.

00:33:51.360 This is time from Minnesota.

00:33:52.420 So this is comparable to the data center that is going to be built over in the Bertram chain of

00:34:09.640 lakes. The guy from Skinnell Properties told me to come and check out this data center.

00:34:17.380 i'm hoping that my phone is capturing that noise

00:34:23.160 it is actually significantly loud

00:34:29.080 now in fairness as we said we're trying to analyze this issue uh

00:34:46.880 objectively, with no hysteria. In some of these videos, they're recording the sound of the

00:34:51.580 on-site generators, which, as you might imagine, are very loud, and those generators don't run all

00:34:56.440 the time. But all the same, they're obviously very annoying, to put it mildly, for anybody

00:35:05.120 who lives nearby. And that's not a small thing. You know, having a massive building that's, by

00:35:11.520 the way, also just ugly to look at. It makes an ugly sound. It actually reduces your quality of

00:35:16.280 life in measurable and significant ways. It's not a small thing. And they also lower property values.

00:35:23.440 More serious problems, like the ones that the woman mentioned in the city council meeting, 0.52

00:35:28.420 are generally related to the construction of the data centers. This is one of the

00:35:31.820 prominent cases, one of the more prominent cases from Georgia. Watch.

00:35:38.060 This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen.

00:35:41.400 this is where I fill up water for storage those are the things we have to fill up to flush the

00:35:50.160 toilets so you can see the sediment from the data center Wow and that's just from the water coming

00:35:57.180 out of your faucet yeah and this is what's in all pipes just the well itself is probably 20,000 and

00:36:05.220 And that's not counting any of the faucets.

00:36:06.740 All the replacement of the fixtures and faucets and toilets

00:36:10.380 and the lines that come underneath the house.

00:36:13.280 It's overwhelming because you really feel

00:36:17.880 like you are up against this huge wall that you can't penetrate.

00:36:24.880 There's nothing that you can do, and they don't care.

00:36:29.260 The light pollution is...

00:36:30.820 You don't have to have a night light in the house.

00:36:33.020 You can walk around the house at night and see everything, at least that bright.

00:36:39.880 This is a video of the dust from Facebook where the construction was.

00:36:43.880 This is what it looks like right now, out my front door.

00:36:46.780 The wind blowing in all of this stuff from across the construction, across the road.

00:36:53.900 This is all from Meadow.

00:36:55.900 Yeah, I was standing on my front porch.

00:36:59.420 I think eventually that affected our well water.

00:37:02.940 on a well here, and we started having issues with our well in 2018. I have to replace the

00:37:09.620 hot water heater. I've replaced two washing machines and a dishwasher because of the sediment

00:37:14.840 that's coming in. Now, to be clear about this, these people were using a separate well, and

00:37:21.680 during construction, they said that their well was affected. Meta claims they did a groundwater

00:37:26.360 study, and that's not true. Whatever the case, this is not a situation where the data center

00:37:31.580 itself caused the problem. Building any large structure could have caused the same problem,

00:37:37.200 and this is not a case where the entire town lost water pressure or ran out of water or anything

00:37:41.560 like that. It's obviously a sympathetic story, but it doesn't connect to a larger problem with

00:37:49.660 AI data centers in particular necessarily. What is a sign of a larger problem potentially

00:37:54.040 is how much water these data centers are consuming. Many of them use a technique called

00:37:59.120 evaporative cooling, where they pull in hot air, the air hits the wet cooling pads, and then the

00:38:04.580 heat dissipates. These are often closed-loop systems, so the water isn't being wasted,

00:38:09.280 but it's still putting a strain on many communities. This is from the New York Times

00:38:12.600 reporting out of Georgia, quote, Newton County is on track to be in a water deficit by 2030.

00:38:19.220 If the local water authority cannot upgrade its facilities, residents could be forced to ration

00:38:22.960 water. Meta's data center uses about 10% of the county's total water use daily, said Mike Hopkins,

00:38:29.120 the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewage Authority, which is the county's water

00:38:33.200 authority. In recent months, Mr. Hopkins said that nine companies had applied to build data centers

00:38:38.900 in Newton County, some asking for as much as 6 million gallons of water a day, more than the

00:38:44.560 county's entire daily use. Some applicants are tech companies as large as Amazon, according to

00:38:49.540 the water permits, while other companies used aliases to hide their identities. Now, if you

00:38:55.700 zoom out, the water consumption for these data centers isn't crisis level on a national level.

00:39:03.140 All the water withdrawals made by these data centers combined account for about 5% of the

00:39:07.480 water usage of golf courses. But at the local level, if politicians aren't careful with the

00:39:12.960 permits they're using, then they could indeed run out of water and power. But here's the point.

00:39:19.960 If you're spending all your time worrying about whether a local county will issue an

00:39:24.160 ill-advised permit that leads to water rationing in three years, then although that is a concern,

00:39:29.580 you're missing the greater threat that's posed by these data centers. They're a direct threat

00:39:36.500 not only to your job and to your home, also to your personal privacy. Now, this is an argument

00:39:43.280 that very few people are making, aside from Mike Cernovich on X, who's making this point,

00:39:48.680 and a few others. A well-trained AI is designed to draw accurate inferences about human behavior

00:39:56.060 based on a near-infinite data set. If you use the internet, then it's all but guaranteed that

00:40:01.600 Google and Meta have an enormous amount of data about your political opinions, your hobbies,

00:40:06.460 your location, even when you're not at home. And if they wanted to, these companies could tell the

00:40:11.600 authorities precisely what you're doing, who you're with at any given second. They could provide a

00:40:16.340 complete breakdown of your health issues, your mood, your goals in life, your fears and anxieties.

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00:42:52.740 now right now according to the latest polling the democrats leading candidate for president

00:42:58.140 in two years is not gavin newsom it's aoc the socialist from new york you think she'd hesitate

00:43:03.080 even for a second to use this data to harass and imprison her political enemies you think for a 0.89

00:43:08.120 second that big tech would hesitate to share all this information with her administration 0.52

00:43:11.660 that's not fear-mongering democrats have already done this without the benefit of ai 1.00

00:43:16.740 they already rounded up conservatives and thrown them in jail they did it to the president united

00:43:21.760 States. The last thing we need to hand these people is a powerful AI to do that for them.

00:43:29.600 Now, does that mean that we should never build any data centers? Does it mean that we should

00:43:33.100 abandon AI entirely, that AI has no useful applications at all? Of course, it doesn't

00:43:38.860 mean that. But we should also be very careful to avoid racing forward with AI with no guardrails,

00:43:45.400 no caution whatsoever, all based on some vague notion that we need to get there first and beat

00:43:53.260 China. Get where exactly? If we impoverish millions of people and empower bureaucrats and big tech

00:44:00.380 oligarchs with surveillance tools beyond their wildest imagination, then what good is it to win

00:44:06.140 the race? What's the reward for winning? I mean, if we're actually concerned about human welfare, 1.00

00:44:12.920 and we should be, then how is human welfare secured or advanced by creating a society where

00:44:18.840 we are tracked and surveilled every hour of the day? And at the same time, millions of jobs become

00:44:24.980 obsolete all at once. AI is already in the process of taking away not just individual jobs, but

00:44:30.680 entire categories of jobs, entire industries. How does that advance human welfare? I can see how it

00:44:38.320 advances the welfare of big tech executives who are all about to become trillionaires or already

00:44:42.520 We are trillionaires. But if you lose your job to AI and then your house to an AI data center,

00:44:48.180 I'm not sure you'll have as many reasons to celebrate.

00:44:52.960 To me, the most terrifying thing about the current moment is that we are not,

00:44:57.100 it's not that we're simply moving forward with a revolutionary new technology.

00:45:02.680 We are sprinting with it. It is a mad dash into the unknown. There has not been any real

00:45:09.660 discussion about the downsides. Nobody has really explained how our society is going to absorb the

00:45:17.020 inevitable job losses or what those people are supposed to do. We don't know how many of these

00:45:23.400 data centers will be needed or how many people will be displaced. Nobody's told us what the

00:45:29.740 limiting principles are. I mean, we don't even know who's, how many of these things are they

00:45:35.880 going to put up and who's, we don't even know who's putting them up in the first place.

00:45:39.660 there have been no national referendums or votes on any of this.

00:45:46.580 And those of us who try to simply have this conversation

00:45:49.220 are shouted down as being anti-progress

00:45:51.560 or somehow being tools for the Chinese. 1.00

00:45:56.760 This seems to be the answer from those leading the charge. 0.96

00:45:59.440 Their answer is that they have no answer.

00:46:02.960 And we must simply accept that.

00:46:05.460 And we must simply accept that, you know,

00:46:07.440 big tech companies are going to do whatever they want with AI.

00:46:09.280 because China, which is to say that all the questions remain.

00:46:16.440 The corporations that are using shell companies to buy farmland in Iowa aren't going to answer

00:46:20.280 the questions. Neither will hysterical women screaming about entire counties being wiped 0.88

00:46:28.120 off the face of the earth. But before we proceed any further with this expansion,

00:46:33.720 hundreds of data centers are under construction as we speak.

00:46:36.120 someone in a position of power needs to do so.

00:46:41.120 We need some actual answers.

00:46:45.160 The AI data centers themselves are a very legitimate concern,

00:46:48.760 yet still far less of a threat than the AI itself.

00:46:54.840 And anyone who says otherwise, whether they realize it or not,

00:46:58.960 is guaranteeing that big tech will get exactly what they want.

00:47:02.760 that'll do it for the show today and this week talk to you on monday have a great weekend godspeed

00:47:16.060 martin luther king jr is an american icon widely considered one of the greatest americans who ever

00:47:20.980 lived a man who had a vision for a colorblind society a post-racial america he had a dream

00:47:28.640 It's just not the dream you thought it was.

00:47:31.420 Were his true aims a colorblind society

00:47:34.080 or something far more radical?

00:47:36.260 Who bankrolled him?

00:47:37.800 What unfolded behind the scenes

00:47:39.240 in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963?

00:47:42.060 Was civil disobedience actually peaceful?

00:47:46.640 We wanted to show you a clip of the I Have a Dream speech,

00:47:49.740 but according to our lawyers, we can't.

00:47:51.620 In fact, King's family has made a lot of money

00:47:53.740 suing media outlets.

00:47:54.940 They want to silence critics like us.

00:47:57.440 What they're doing makes it very difficult

00:47:58.960 to judge Martin Luther King Jr.

00:48:00.620 not by the color of his skin,

00:48:02.480 but by the content of his character.

00:48:04.620 Is America today stronger, more unified,

00:48:07.700 and racially equal than before King's rise?

00:48:10.760 These questions demand answers,

00:48:12.160 and as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting

00:48:14.940 of the civil rights movement and its consequences.

00:48:17.200 King's movement fundamentally transformed our country

00:48:20.060 and our system of government.

00:48:21.520 I speak as a citizen of the world.

00:48:24.360 Each day the war goes on,

00:48:26.120 nor the hatred increases, nor the cause of evil prosper.

00:48:30.740 The first part of our two-part special on the civil rights movement,

00:48:33.920 a new constitution, available now on Daily Wire+.

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00:48:42.940 takes you to more than just your destination.

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00:48:55.180 Welcome aboard KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

00:48:57.000 The KLM Royal Dutch Airlines crew is here to ensure your journey home hits all the right notes.

00:49:04.620 KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. When you travel, travel well.

The Matt Walsh Show - May 14, 2026

Ep. 1780 - Here's What Nobody's Telling You About AI Data Centers

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