The outrageous headlines day to day can distract us from the spread of AI and surveillance infrastructure. More and more data centers are being built, taxing power grids and water supplies, while surveillance systems creep into every corner of our lives. Examining recent developments will help us stay vigilant to Big Tech's harms.
In 2014, when the power plant was still operational, it was permitted to draw a maximum of about 245 million gallons of cool water from the lake per day, according to permits from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. After cooling the plant’s equipment, the system would release millions of gallons of heated water back into the lake. . . .The Environmental and Energy Study Institute writes in Data Centers and Water Consumption (June 25, 2025):
The proposed data center will use the plant’s existing water intake system to pull water from the lake to cool computers, but company representatives told town officials the facility does not plan to release warmed water back into the lake.
Instead, their plans currently call for the plant to use an evaporative cooling system, where water taken from the lake would dissipate into the atmosphere.
Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.Downsides:
But a still graver scandal of AI — like its hydra-head sibling, cryptocurrency — is the technology’s colossal wastefulness. The untold billions firehosed by investors into its development; the water-guzzling data centers draining the parched exurbs of Phoenix and Dallas; the yeti-size carbon footprint of the sector as a whole — and for what? A cankerous glut of racist memes and cardboard essays. Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.• From the Piedmont Environmental Council, Data Centers & Energy Demand reports that in the state of Virginia, “as of late 2022, data centers accounted for 21% of Dominion Energy’s electricity sales.” (Dominion Energy is the largest utility in the state.)
In 2021, Google’s global data centers consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons (16.2 billion litres) of water altogether. Though water-cooled data centers consume less energy to cool heating and emit roughly 10% less carbon emissions than air-cooled data centers, they still place immense stress on freshwater resources.(See also this report on data centers in the American west.)
Meta . . . is currently developing a facility in Louisiana that Mark Zuckerberg has promised to expand into a data center “supercluster” that will use almost twice as much energy as the entire city of New Orleans. Meanwhile, data centers in Virginia—home to Data Center Alley, which has one of the densest concentrations of such facilities in the world—consume more than a quarter of the electricity generated in the state. Researchers estimate that the diesel-powered generators used as backups there could already be causing 14,000 cases of asthma symptoms and imposing public health costs of $220 to $300 million per year. And in Memphis, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is powered by thirty-five methane gas turbines that belch smog-forming pollution....that is to say, the costs aren’t limited to water, electricity, and noise:
Two kinds of cooling systems are used to prevent the semiconductors and other electronic equipment stored in datacenters from overheating. Water cooling systems require huge volumes of water, and chemicals like nitrates, disinfectants, azoles and other compounds are potentially added and discharged in the environment.• These can be defeated. From Musk’s hellsite, this post by More Perfect Union (Sep 25, 2025) writes:
Many centers are now switching to a “two phase” system that uses f-gas as a refrigerant coolant that is run through copper tubing. In this scenario, f-gas is not intentionally released during use, though there may be leaks, and it must be disposed of at the end of its life.
Indianapolis residents have shut down a proposed Google data center.• Speaking of data centers, Ted Gioia writes in The Glorious Future of the Book (Aug 26, 2025):
The tech giant wanted to build a massive 500 acre facility, but people got organized and stopped them.
The $1 billion data center would've used one million gallons of water a day.
I have my own home data center. And it requires no water or electricity or any other scarce resource. It’s as renewable as they come....And to the point of my three dystopias episode (July 28, 2025), Gioia writes (emphasis mine)...
And that’s just for a start. There are many other advantages.
Can you imagine data storage that never needs an upgrade. Even better, there’s no subscription fee. And the system never crashes - there hasn’t been a single minute of down time in recorded history.
And there’s still more:
There are no terms of service.
No hidden fees.
No customer service bots to deal with.
No annoying follow-up spam emails and texts.
No privacy intrusions or surveillance of any sort.
No data incompatibility issues now or in the future.
No advertising or solicitations of any sort.
The list continues - no cookies, no credit cards, no come-ons, no conditions. None of that.
What a miracle!
I’m talking about my favorite handheld device, and I don’t need a cloud to hold its contents. Just a shelf.
You guessed it - I’m referring to books. They’re the greatest hard storage concept in human history, and nothing else comes close.
The book is the ultimate killer app.
Even more insidious, Amazon will update books on your Kindle — changing the text without the reader or author’s permission. That’s happened, for example, to books by Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie. If somebody in a position of power decides that an author’s work is problematic, your e-book gets cleansed.• Do AIs have minds? This Mastodon post, embedding a video by "aarongoldyboy," suggests an answer. (Thanks to Webhamster Henry for sharing.)
The Trump administration is closing in on a deal with the Chinese government to transfer TikTok into American hands. . . . The deal is the result of a bill that Congress passed last year, based on fears that China was collecting the user data of Americans and using the platform for surveillance and propaganda.• See also: Excerpt of Jane Goodall (1934 - Oct 1, 2025), primatologist and anthropologist, giving a message for posthumous broadcast on a show called Famous Last Words.
But while many Americans are celebrating the deal as a victory for user privacy rights and national security, some cybersecurity experts still have concerns. They contend that TikTok’s new structure, based on the scant details that have emerged about the deal, could open up users to surveillance and influence not from China - but the American government itself.
“Giving the government more power to surveil its own people or to do large data collections is not a good thing,” says David Kennedy, a cybersecurity expert and the founder of TrustedSec and Binary Defense. “We’re just basically switching one government for another.”