The Machine that Is Eating the Earth
AI data centers and their supercomputers are consuming rural America.
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As retail stock investors continue to gush over AI stocks (while insiders start to flee them), AI is taking over small communities in ways that are a more proximate threat than the possibility of rogue AIs banding together to use control over our technical infrastructure to control us people. A more practical concern is rising up in the corn fields and other vast undeveloped lands of America.
AI is overwhelming our already overused electrical grid. The grid was strained enough by our many smart devices, but now we have these enormous superbrains that so many of us are turning to. (I even use what is probably some form of AI built into Substack to create my comic-book-style apocalyptic illustrations where I state key details of the concept, and the computer draws it, inputting its own interpretation into what I’m saying, and we work back and forth with word changes on my part until we get something that makes both of us happy.) And these superbrains are already sucking the life blood out of small communities.
The big AI war fears are now happening
One of the stories carried in the headlines that follow talks about North Korea turning to AI to control its drones and nukes:
The General Staff Department (GSD) of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) ordered the entire military early this month to make plans to build AI-based manned and unmanned combat systems.
Every division of the NK military was tasked with implementing AI into its command and control, but this one stood out most:
The Strategic Force was tasked with developing a four-stage “leap” strategy to integrate AI-based unified management systems for storing, operating, and commanding nuclear weapons, as well as launching nuclear counterattacks.
Who could imagine that AI trained by Kim Jung Un and his ilk might go rogue and decide that destroying as many people preemptively as possible was a good way to rid the world of its most notorious termites?
“In the military, they hope to create a structure that can respond much faster to various situations using AI-based manned and unmanned multipurpose combat systems, but working-level commanders in low-tier units and officers responsible for executing the order feel pressure because they have so little time to prepare,” the source said.
Comforting, to be sure, to know NK’s implementation of AI military command and control rests in the hands of overworked underlings pressed to rush through the implementation of AI with NK’s nuclear arsenal so that it can make more instantaneous defensive launch decisions, cutting out that literal middleman known as simply “man.” (Or woman.)
Yet, while humanity’s best futuristic holocaust stories are often built around fears of a computer system starting and running a global war against humanity, which may not be far away, smaller wars closer to home are brewing in local communities that AI is taking away from humans already.
AI invades country
I’m not talking national invasion or a musical invasion. That’s country as in rural communities that never saw it coming. It’s really a case of the billionaires who own the AI companies taking over farm communities because they need the open space to create power and massive complexes, so they are sucking the communities dry of life that the land once produced and of the human culture built around deriving life off the land:
The farms that once produced food for humans are being repurposed as land to build AI data centers and solar farms that produce no food at all.
The water supplies that once ran your showers, dishwashers and toilets are being redirected to AI data center cooling systems, leaving humans with water scarcity and little remaining irrigation for growing food.
However, it is not just the farm communities where vast acreage can be put to more profitable use than growing corn for people to eat of even for livestock. It’s corn grown to feed fuel to the world’s biggest, energy-ravenous supercomputers or to lay out acres of solar panels, sucking the life off the landscape and turning the earth around us into a big, shiny energy-producing machine for nourish the other big machines mankind is striving to create.
And it is not just hitting rural communities. Energy is distributed nationally, so raising the load on an overtaxed system that requires rapid upgrading increases the cost for everyone:
The power grid that once supplied affordable energy to run your home computers, cook stoves and lights is being redirected to power AI data center servers.
At the same time that our drive to create AI all over the nation is sucking energy away from the average person and raising its cost, it is also taking away their jobs, as we’ve all heard:
AI is on the verge of replacing 80% of white collar jobs. A few years later, AI robots will replace the vast majority of human labor.
Is the following a covert, AI-designed op against humans:
Meanwhile, humans in 34 U.S. states are about to be mailed nasal "flu vaccines" for self-extermination at home. They shed toxic fragments for up to 28 days, infecting those around you, while potentially causing side effects like Bells Palsy, vomiting and mitochondrial shutdown. Those most at risk from these self-administered bioweapons are the elderly... the very people who are also costing the U.S. government the most in social security, Medicare and pension benefits. Eliminating them gives the Treasury a few more years of runway before the inevitable debt default.
Maybe not, but I digress. Let’s get back to the countryside where my interest particularly lies … and where even the most city-centric person should be concerned if she likes to be able to afford the food she eats:
The food supply infrastructure is being dismantled because machines don't need food, and the future has no plans for large human populations that need feeding. This is why Canada is nuking its own forests with glyphosate, rendering the land unusable for growing food, but perfectly sterile for use by data centers and machines.
Taking out farm and forest land to create the massive supply of energy these starving machines require is certainly going to raise the cost of food and the risk of food shortages.
It's also why Americans are being priced out of quality, nutritious food, so that few people will be able to afford to eat anything other than nutritionally-depleted ultra processed foods.
Lovely. I’ll take one of those slow-cooked, country meals, instead, please. Bacon and eggs for breakfast, a nice casserole later in the day, and finish it all of with apple pie in the late afternoon that has been cooling on the windowsill. Yeah, that’s getting shoved aside so we can have our electricity-gobbling machines. You might say the machine ate your piece of the pie. Heck, the whole pie and all pies to come.
Of course, the machines that are helping to plan their own creation now, as we’ve been reading about the exponential growth of the next Gen. of AI as it helps create itself, might be thinking this way:
… the rapid extermination of 100 - 200 million Americans, which will also reduce power grid demand by an estimated 1,500 TeraWatt hours, making that power available to AI data centers to power the tech race toward superintelligence.
Fewer humans, more space and “food” for the machines.
Actually, I am not so worried that AI is plotting this against us, as I am that billionaires are. They are making land purchases and changing communities to feed their dreams, and the rest of us are letting them do it and helping them pay for it because, “Just think of all AI can do for us. AI can cure cancer.” Sure, but who wants to live in the tumor of a world AI is creating?
Gridding up our loins
I warned a couple of years ago that Biden’s push to go all electric with cars by approximately the present year was completely unrealistic and hell-bent on disaster because the electrical grid was already turning baking insulation brown from overheating in many parts of the nation. Where were we going to get all this electricity to just suddenly turn from gasoline engines to electric motors? No one in the Biden admin seemed to be thinking ahead about that.
Nothing against electric cars; they can perform quite nicely, but where do you get the energy when governors like Jay Inslee were also blowing up five hydro plants in Washington State to make room for restored salmon runs. The Blue dream of a green America did not add up. It was a fantasy.
Sure, over time we might invent other forms of electricity generation, but I rail against covering the beautiful majesty of America with endless windmills (bird choppers) and solar panels (high-tech ground cover to prevent plant growth). Do I really want to see the world I live in turned more and more into a great, barely breathing machine so I can have better cell coverage than I have now or faster internet? When is enough enough?
Now we add to Biden's follies the AI mania that is sweeping the stock market, which means it is also sweeping the landscape to find ways to harness enough electricity. A single datacenter requires as much electricity as a fairly large city. For example, one datacenter now consumes 1/3 the electricity that a major city like Dallas consumes.
That information is already becoming dated, as the power hunger is already growing beyond what you imagine:
The scale of demand has exploded beyond what the industry has ever seen. Just a few years ago, most data centers needed 200 to 300 megawatts on roughly 300 acres. Now, Andy Cvengros, the executive managing director and co-lead of JLL's US data center markets team, said hyperscalers are requesting sites with 1,000 acres and multiple gigawatts of power.
"The amount of power being requested is like all of New York's power in one single site," Cvengros said.
With so little space available, companies are now forced to reserve capacity in data centers that haven't even been built yet, sometimes waiting over a year for construction to finish before they can actually use the space.
The financial stakes are enormous. JLL estimates that North America could see $1 trillion in data center development between 2025 and 2030, with more than 100 gigawatts of capacity potentially breaking ground. The construction pipeline of 8 gigawatts is already 73% preleased, a rate that JLL says signals that vacancy will remain restrictive for years.
And, so, all of this fuels the huge run-up in stocks related to AI and its energy needs, and the money going into those stocks supposedly fuels more such ventures, as mankind pours its economic power into this vicious AI circle.
AI wars
Some small communities are fighting back:
While the video ends by saying “we need to have [AI],” do we? We didn’t have AI ten years ago, and I like just about everything in that world better than the world today. Sure, those were still the Obama years—not that splendid—but when I consider where four years of divisive Trump followed by four of Bitter Biden, all combined with Covid, and now more of Tariff Trump, I could live just fine in the world that existed before all of that. As AI accelerates change exponentially, even for itself by creating smarter computers on its own in the next Gen of AI and supercomputers, I’m not convinced I will like the world better. Are you?
Meanwhile,
Trump’s AI Action Plan … demands more of them be built all over the country, as the President’s executive action strips states the power to regulate AI, while allowing the federal government to sanction (steal) more land to build these datacenters and other AI-related enterprises.
According to the plan, “By stabilizing the grid of today, optimizing existing grid resources, and growing the grid for the future, the United States can rise to the challenge of winning the AI race while also delivering a reliable and affordable power grid for all Americans.”
When the AI Action Plan was announced last month, it was accompanied with an executive order, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure.
So, AI and its rapacious power demands may just steamroll right over you and your tidy, little community; but the steam won’t be generated by old gas or coal turbines, or you’d be smogged out of existence by so much generation. It will have to be nuclear-fusion turbines in order to keep up with this demand without damaging the earth, and AI hasn’t helped us invent practical, working models for nuclear-fusion-driven steam … yet.
At the same time as we are turning rural landscapes into sprawling machines for our computerized future, our beneficent billionaires are also filling the upper levels of our Earth’s atom-thin atmosphere with numerous drifting rocket stages and tons of chemical smoke from exhausted propellant that will NEVER rinse away with the rain. We’ll be stuck with the cloud of debris in which we are enwrapping our world, almost for time eternal because much of it will take that long to gravitate back to earth. When do we stop creating the need for Elon to build an arc to take an elite few of us to an inhospitable, red rock rather than living on the blue and green, life-creating, life-sustaining gem we already have?
Says Trump,
“My Administration has inaugurated a golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance. We will pursue bold, large-scale industrial plans to vault the United States further into the lead on critical manufacturing processes and technologies that are essential to national security, economic prosperity, and scientific leadership.
“These plans include artificial intelligence (AI) data centers and infrastructure that powers them, including high‑voltage transmission lines and other equipment. It will be a priority of my Administration to facilitate the rapid and efficient buildout of this infrastructure by easing Federal regulatory burdens.
“In addition, my Administration will utilize federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers. This usage will be done in a manner consistent with the land’s intended purpose — to be used in service of the prosperity and security of the American people.”
There more years of Trump’s colossal AI dreams, and the vast damage to national lands will be done. Biden’s electric-car, power-consumption mania was nothing compared to this roaring monster. We may soon be stripped of our jobs but enslaved by AI and starved for food and water to drink, since all that power generation requires a lot of water for cooling. And if you think this is actually bringing jobs to those communities, think again:
Yet, as the video explains very well, YOU are the one paying to have your job stripped away and your community turned into machines. You’re paying with electricity rate increases now to make room for power infrastructure for the billionaires. (It’s such an insightful video about the billionaire welfare bought by average Joe and Jolene, I decided I had to put it above the line here for everyone. Worth a watch as a wake-up video.)
I hate to be backward, but a farm and a horse are sounding preferable right now to world slathered in hot data centers. Maybe something in between the AI world that turns earth into a giant machine and a horse and plow … like a farm with a good ol’ green tractor that doesn’t even require GPS; but Trump is troubling that right now, too, with his tariff wars, to which here is a little segue to the next episode in a saga we have been following all year.
Deere John, you’re gone
Legacy tractor maker John Deere has announced layoffs at three Midwestern facilities as the company grapples with declining sales and the effects of tariffs on its bottom line.
John Deere is being impacted two ways by tariffs: Most of its small tractors are imports that see final assembly in the US. Its large tractors are made from heavy parts manufactured here, but still use a lot of imported parts. So, its costs are rising, meaning its prices are also rising. At the same time farmers are losing markets to retaliatory tariffs, just as happened during the Trump 1.0 tariff wars where US farmers lost market share for their exports, which they never fully recovered. As a result, farmers are holding off on buying JD farm equipment some of which ranges from a quarter-million to half-a-million dollars now that the price is rising even more in the face of shrinking export markets.
"The struggling ag economy continues to impact orders for John Deere equipment," the company said in a media statement regarding the layoffs. "This is a challenging time for many farmers, growers and producers, and directly impacts our business in the near term."
While the full implications of tariffs on the U.S. economy are still being established by economists and lawmakers, representatives of the agricultural sector have warned that the new duties could increase their costs and threaten footholds in key export markets….
John Deere told Newsweek the workforce reductions were the result of "decreased demand and lower order volumes."
That means most of the layoffs have less to do with JD’s rising costs under import tariffs and more to do with farmers losing market share in other nations due to counter-tariffs imposed by other nations on US Ag. exports. Therefore, farmers are not buying as much farm equipment. Retaliatory tariffs are nearly a certainty whenever you start a tariff war; but Trump has started tariff wars with the entire world all at once. Always a brilliant plan to fight the whole world all at once.
Nevertheless, JD’s tariff-based cost increases are far from insignificant:
"Tariff costs in the quarter were approximately $200 million, which brings us to roughly $300 million in tariff expense year to date based on tariff rates in effect as of today," said Director of Investor Relations Josh Beale.
And that has been under less than half a year of the new high tariffs. By the end of a full year, it could be near a billion dollars. Yet, that is less significant than JD’s loss of demand for its equipment due to the troubles farmers are facing.
Well, that should help incentivize those farmers into selling their land to Amazon for data centers and incentivize John Deere into switching over from making farm equipment to manufacturing super-sized power-generation equipment.
(Headlines in boldface in the collection below present the quotes used above:)