Above the Waterline: ‘Digital gold rush’ threatens air, land, and water

My daughter-in-law Meredith is practical and victim She s my go-to person for the things I can t figure out how to do of which there are a growing number Among dozens of other tasks she s shown me how to open my grandson s baby stroller operate my wireless music speaker and inflate my camping pad Greater part of all I rely on Meredith to help me with the electronic instrument that baffles and frustrates me on a regular basis When I decided to write about the proliferation of evidence centers in metro Atlanta Meredith suggested ironically as she noted that I check out ChatGPT the artificial intelligence AI chatbot that you can talk to as though it were another person It generates human-like text and can answer questions about virtually any topic It can also generate incorrect responses or hallucinations There are biases in the human-created system as well Critical thinking is essential With Meredith s assistance I opened the ChatGPT App and required my question What should I include in a story about content centers the buildings filled with equipment to process internet traffic facilitate AI and store massive amounts of digital evidence The answer wasn t revolutionary but I received a useful outline in a nanosecond Notably a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search An admission I am addicted to Googling various subjects on my smartphone The digital world of the internet is a great improvement over the Ouija boards and Magic -Balls of my teenage years in the s again as long as critical thinking is employed Dozens of times each day I ask my phone random questions that pop into my ADHD-addled brain Until in recent months however I had not thought about the cost of my queries in terms of potential water use and group impact Like millions of other people I ve used the magic of the internet assuming that its infrastructure was located somewhere else That somewhere else is now Georgia with the explosion of proposed details centers The environmental impacts lack of authorities oversight and corporate secrecy are alarming Adobe Stock Credit Adobe Stock Adobe Credit Adobe Stock Adobe Credit Adobe Stock Adobe Hot Arena for Content Centers Once the booming epicenter of the South s railroad grid Atlanta is again a crossroads for huge financial resources and advance this time related to the digital industry According to an excellent series in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the region is the country s hottest evidence center realm playing host to a digital gold rush by tech giants real estate speculators and private equity firms There appear to be about existing centers and several dozen proposed locations primarily in the Atlanta region but no one knows for sure Atlanta s expansive fiber optic infrastructure offers a solid backbone for information centers coupled with available land inexpensive water supplies and an electric utility Georgia Power salivating at the thought of new business State and local functionaries are providing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars as incentives to attract developers despite the highly speculative nature of the AI boom Business analysts are already comparing the rapacious industry advance to the infamous dot-com bubble of the late s when a similar speculative frenzy and overvaluation resulted in a plunge in stock values and bankruptcies They also note that the U S economic activity is being bolstered by the extraordinary boom in AI a precarious situation At What Cost The deluge of material centers may place metro Atlanta in the vanguard of the next technological revolution but at what cost One large facts center can demand as much power and water as a small city Will the guidance allocated to centers preclude future local growth Will electricity and water rates increase for all customers If water is rationed during droughts will the centers have priority over other water users Critically none of these questions and various more have been answered There are scant ruling body guardrails No state office is charged with identifying all the proposed centers There are no regulations to require tracking of their power and water use Several state legislators are working on laws to protect communities and the circumstances as the AI boom accelerates however their efforts have been rebuffed by lobbyists for Big Tech and Big Power Local governments are rezoning sites for industrial use that are hundreds of acres in size several a thousand acres with minimal information about facts center necessities The speculators promoting these hyperscale projects refuse or are unable to divulge details about their electricity and water requirements Why the secrecy if these projects are harmless cash-cow opportunities for communities How will a neighborhood cope with the evidence center projects that inevitably go bust after land is cleared and starts to erode after the power grid expands with more polluting coal and gas plants and rates increase for all customers and after permits have been issued for withdrawals from limited water sources In metro Atlanta water supplies are highly vulnerable to droughts In fact we re in a severe drought now Importantly a vital amount of the water used to cool the bulk content facilities is consumed through evaporation it is not returned to its source thereby depleting downstream flows Evidence center proposals across metro Atlanta have faced protests and packed local meetings as residents rightfully fear their locality wealth will be seized for corporate profits From the city of Atlanta to small communities in the metro region and statewide people are demanding answers and successfully securing moratoriums and bans on the centers Minimizing Harm There is little doubt that more records centers are needed to power digital services While I m not planning to stop my daily Google searches I am thinking more about my personal digital footprint The question and it s a really vital one is whether or not state and local functionaries are going to take any actions to protect citizens and natural tools from exploitation by the speculative AI industry Statistics center progress must be tracked to understand the cumulative impact of these facilities Actual water and power use information must be collected These metrics must be made available to the residents Developers must fund their own installations rather than relying on taxpayer or ratepayer help Alternative power and water sources must be considered e g reuse wastewater and rainwater for cooling efficient waterless closed-loop cooling systems and renewable vitality sources On Nov citizens have the opportunity to elect two new members of the Georgia Society Institution Commission psc ga gov which regulates electric utility rates and services including details centers Read about the candidates by searching Inhabitants Facility Commission at RoughDraftAtlanta news then vote The post Above the Waterline Digital gold rush threatens air land and water appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta