Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Kevin O'Leary, cheap gas, and AI data centres

Do you recall ever voting for AI data centres? Me neither. Yet, they’re a really big thing and they’re coming whether you like it or not. According to Kevin O, there’s a $70 billion AI data centre in the works in Alberta. Alberta Preem Danielle Smith has put out the welcome mat for AI data centres. In case you’re wondering, as I am, why we suddenly need to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the electricity grid to power AI, let me bring you up to speed. AI is the future. AI can write shitty essays at all levels of the education system, and while they’re typically shitty as shit, they blend in seamlessly with the shit a typical social science or humanities student produces without the benefit of artificial intelligence. Needless to say, the entire education bureaucracy, from K to post-Doc, is all aboard for the next great thing! The drivers of AI, the big data barons who own the cloud(s), are staking claims on present and future electricity supplies to an extent that AI will impoverish the energy ecosystem regular folks count on to heat their homes and cook their meals, not to mention charging your EV so you can do your part to save the planet! All of that is irrelevant to Big Data. Our digital data universe needs to be properly harnessed so maximum profits can be harvested. So here’s the conundrum. We (ie the Western World led by USA) have been warring against the Chinese tech sector for at least ten years, ever since Obama’s famous pivot. That’s when we started seeing the never-ending yellow peril propaganda all over our media. That’s when we declared war on Huawei and started throwing sanctions at anything that might advance China’s tech sector. Well guess what? The country that graduates 10x more science and math students than the West is pulling ahead in spite of our best efforts. That’s why DeepSeek is excluded from Western tech infrastructure. Chinese tech could run better data centres with 90% less energy consumption. That’s why we have to put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. Without that tariff, we don’t have a chance to compete. Ya, if you look at the cold hard facts, you might think our Western way of life is doomed. But cheer up, at least we’ve got moral superiority!

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