Yeah I guess I'm not the target audience for this because I assumed that "the power problem" was "massive increase in electricity costs for people despite virtually unchanged usage on their part", not "AI companies have to wait too long to be able to start using even more power than they already are":

> Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. “You look at that and think, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. She has now become the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights and unplugging her daughter’s cellphone chargers.

> And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor people struggling with their own power bills. “It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...

And the air quality around these plants is poor, leading to health problems for the neighbors.

This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.

I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.

https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...

The word 'pollution' appears exactly one time in this entire thing, the word 'community' or 'communities' never.

The natural gas turbines used are relatively efficient as far as engines go. Having them on-site makes transmission losses basically negligible.

Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced without any difficult to mine elements will make some people happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.

Yeah, that headline made me think "Oh good, there's some solution on the horizon that won't require absurd amounts of electricity."

Not so.

And imagine all this poorly located, overpriced, haphazardly thrown together and polluting infrastructure will basically get flushed down the toilet once either the AI bubble pops, or they figure out a new way of doing AI that doesn't require terawatts of power.

Coincidentally the USA is more than self sufficient in natural gas and is a net exporter. Drill baby drill!