Georgia homeowners are being forced from their homes to power AI data centers
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
It's a transmission line. The power company is building a transmission line.
These are the kinds of infrastructure upgrades that America has needed but been afraid to do for a while, and data center investment is forcing it. The AI involvement is tangential.
I imagine nearly zero people are fine with their home being demolished for an infrastructure project. Unless they hated where they lived already. But how else would you ever build infrastructure projects? Sometimes, by nature of where the infrastructure needs to go, properties need to be acquired and buildings demolished.
A question is whether infrastructure needs to be built. Unfortunately, yes. Because we live in an economy that only works if things grow, we can expect life to be worse if things don’t grow. And the only way to avoid new infrastructure projects (in general) is to avoid growth so that what you have today works for all future needs.
We can dislike that all we want but I think it is true about how the US economy works.
The infinite growth beast cannot be sated. If we keep feeding our communities, populace and resources into its maw, it will still eat us all in the end.
I agree that infrastructure buildout is important, but the incentive is backwards: we need to build infrastructure for communities, not for the quarterly-growth ouroboros.