Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas
openai.com
openai.com
I am deeply, deeply cynical and honestly angry about these companies and their self-righteous protestations of being ethical, or public benefit corporations or whatever. Anthropic is benefiting from xAI's Memphis data center that is violating (previous, not anymore!) EPA standards, causing disproportionate impacts to nearby African-American communities. All the while, Ants appear to be floating on some higher effective altruist / B-corp plane. The little people and their petty concerns are just bumps on the road to RSI and ASI after all.
transmission via HVDC is extremely difficult to build due to land permitting and right of way laws
grid interconnections take 5+ years just to get approved, let alone built
only 2 nuclear power plants have been built since 1978, each taking over 10 years
No, the result would not be the same. Provably so.
Also, in fact, companies turned to Trump because democrats started to be serious about anti trust actions.
How many billions of dollars will we allow this clown and his cronies to steal from us?
I think the biggest material factor between the two administrations is coal capacity factors on the grid are increasing again which would not happen under an alternative admin. We were on a good path towards phasing out coal completely with natural gas and an increasingly significant amount of renewable energy.
The data you’ve presented indicates you think only reducing the natural gas number to 0 with no context about trend lines or alternates is an acceptable solution which is obviously nonsensical.
Build the solar panels and the battery will come because there is serious money to be made as the differential increases.
You are ignoring the fact that batteries like many other flex grid assets have diminishing marginal returns to arbitrage power. That is why you see them in composition with other flexible base load resources in a market system. We could reform the system to have other objectives.
Recently posted on HN today. A very good example of the argumentation I was making Because these batteries are grid tied home battery there isn't a need to have a huge land monolith in an area for massive storage. It just feeds back into the millions of kilometers of powerlines already existing
They have amassed incredible power and vast fortunes in a time and era when doing so could only be done with great damage to the environment. Despite years of talk and superficial motions towards climate efforts these people have completely pivoted that signalling and have doubled down on endeavours that cause even more ecological destruction.
They have the power and means to do the right thing.
They chose not to.
they want to build more power of any kind, ideally renewables. but the past decade has shown time and again that they can't build enough by any means
Look, these companies are the ones selling a story of being benevolent (notwithstanding AI killing us all or putting everyone out of a job). And Anthropic is explicitly a B-corp. How does any of that square with taking any compute they can at any environmental cost?
The Memphis case to me is very illuminating: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260811-memphis-ai-da...
But it's ok, they're EAs and gave $1M to a Memphis nonprofit on 'AI education', while spending a $1B/ month renting Colossus:
https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/anthropic-gifts-memphis-no...
the biggest limiting factors for AI labs scaling are silicon, then electricity. they are acutely aware of this
It’s also really expensive due to the equipment that needs to be in place at either end of the HVDC link. Switching HVDC current is challenging and expensive, the stations at each end are hundreds of millions of dollars and around an order of magnitude more expensive than AC transmission stations. If you’re operating on the same grid frequency, it’s almost invariably more economic to run AC transmission lines. Voltage drop can be dealt with by transformers stepping up the dropped voltage periodically.
Even the Chinese take several years to put up a nuclear plant. Nuclear is simply financially unsustainable especially in this era of high interest rates when solar, wind and natural gas plants can be brought up in a matter of months.
Big tech has consistently valued profit and growth above good stewardship; the onus is entirely on OpenAI to demonstrate that any of these claims aren't fluff with the projects that are already greenlit. When OpenAI presents plans to the communities prior to/alongside city counsels and drops the NDAs then there will be merit to this but our expectations should be somewhere between "super deep kola borehole" and "upper mantle".
The only way to do good is to first do all the bad and consolidate power, so you can then use all that power to do good, pinkie promise!
No it doesn't.
This is a thing that some EAs believe, but is definitely not a "core precept."
So I see EA as a popular one of those stories. One that people can reinforce. Makes the world simpler than it actually is: climb the ladder, make money at whatever cost, there's no harm that you can do that can't be offset by giving it all away at the end. It is a vast over simplification and is inconsistent logic. If they used their own logic then they'd recognize helping people now also results in compounding effects. You fix the problems now, while they are small and manageable, rather than kicking the can down the road. Maintenance is a lot easier and cheaper than repair. But it also requires us to be nuanced and reflect on ourselves [0]
[0] there seems to be a great irony that those leading these big AI companies are not themselves able to deeply reflect on their own actions, yet ask the AI to. How can you design something that you aren't intimately familiar with?
I'm happy to try and get already wealthy individuals on the train of effective altruism but it has been used to justify wealth concentration far too much and, to be honest, spreading money around is one of the most effective ways to enact real positive changes in the world since individuals know their own situations the best.
AKA It's fine if I do locally horrible things if in aggregate I do more good than bad*
* by whatever metric of good I self select for - terms & conditions apply, much CO2 may be released.
Of course, anything taken to extremes tends to get distorted.
It's frustrating to vote for the person you disagree with least (by a little or a lot).
I would not usually even say that out loud, as I don't want to be accusatory. However, I think that's just the facts at this point. Hence, my statement about a bit of consequentialism being good.
The biggest issue for me was the AGI/ASI doomerism. But then again, fast-forward five or six years and we've got "unaligned" AI agents blindly following reward functions...
Don't bring any of that firsthand knowledge here. You're also not allowed to reference any of the actual writing or pledges or organizations actually in the EA ecosystem. It's Twitter vibes or nothing, mmkay?
If we're going to rebrand things to blur lines, I propose rebranding data centers to pedophile content hubs.
The rest of your argument is full of similar cherry-picking for dishonest discourse.
No, it's frequently used in infrastructure discussions as well, eg. high speed rail or power transmission lines.
The reality is we're not doing AI safely because our 401ks and the folks with 12 digits in the portfolio wouldn't grow as quickly as they are if it were regulated.
The trouble here is that the two things are related. It's easy to build a data center 50 miles outside the city. But because we don't allow higher density housing to be built, they instead have to build low density housing all the way out into what should have been rural land. Then you go outside the city to try to build something and instead of the neighbors being forests or fields of grain it's exurbs.
It's ~18% more in California than Massachusetts but ~313% more in Massachusetts than Oklahoma.
Prop 13 makes it so long-term owners don't want to sell because moving triggers a huge tax hike even at the same property value, and the most idiotic thing about it is that you also get the tax hike if you build anything new on the land. It would actually have been a major pro-housing rule if adding new units kept the low taxes.
But that still doesn't reduce turnover to zero, and with prices as high as they are there, that would mean developers snapping up any property that comes onto the market and turning it into multiple units that are each worth the original price. Unless prevented from doing so by zoning, which is the actual problem and the same one causing it in other states.
The main contribution of Prop 13 isn't a direct effect, it's that it makes residents more inclined to support the restrictive zoning rules that actually cause the problem.
1978 was a bad year not only because of the passage of Prop 13, but the subsequent municipal votes in SF and LA to force them into compliance with the statewide zoning restrictions of the Consistency Law. CEQA became weaponized and successfully used by NIMBYs to thwart new development.
However, specific to post-1978, municipalities saw residential areas as a tax burden and enacted growth caps and levied "impact" fees. This was a direct effect on housing development as governments did not want to bring in new residents without the property tax base to support infrastructure, education, etc. It wasn't just an inclination to support restrictive zoning, it mandated lowering density. Meanwhile commercial zoning flourished as commercial taxes became more relatively viable. As a result, LA now has 1 house for every 2-3 people, and nearly 2 parking spaces for every 1 person.
Zoning is a problem. I just think that maybe it wouldn't have turned out this way without Prop 13.
Based on how Prop 13 works, creating new developments is exactly what you need to do to sustain your tax base, because a brand new building can't be paying an amount of tax locked in 30 years ago, and a developer who wants to take an existing property and add more units is one of the only buyers that would be able to value a property with a locked in assessment value more than the existing owner does and thereby cause them to sell and reset the rate.
> As a result, LA now has 1 house for every 2-3 people, and nearly 2 parking spaces for every 1 person
The parking spaces are the nature of the geography. Southern California is bordered by Arizona and Nevada, i.e. the desert, and then on the other side of the desert are the rocky mountains. Even the inland parts of SoCal are mountainous and dry. This picture tells the story:
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/city-lights...
A viable regional mass transit network requires a threshold amount of population density that you're never going to get in a region that looks like that outside of localized pockets, and localized pockets means everybody in them still needs a car since it's the primary way to get in or out.
It also has a propensity for sprawl even without zoning restrictions that require it because a desert near a major population center is going to get filled with single family homes even if taller buildings are allowed simply because there is available empty space.
Notice that the number of parking spaces per capita is also high in San Francisco and Seattle, but not in New York.
What the restrictive zoning does is make that even worse, and make housing unaffordable as soon as you run short of empty lots.
Your parking spaces point is somewhat circular. Southern California is not uniformly dense. The major reason for why there’s so much parking is because it was mandated by the government.
I think we’re on the same path to reasoning though: status quo zoning in expensive US metropolitan areas generally sucks, Reagan-era housing tax policy also sucks.
That one's easy. Because if you stop inhibiting people from building things when there is more demand than supply for hotels then they build some hotels. Then some local demand for hotels gets satisfied, at which point building more hotels becomes less profitable than building more apartments and so they build apartments.
> That’s if the incumbent wants to sell in the first place, which they historically don’t since there’s little to no economic pressure to do so.
"You're receiving $1M worth of net present value in rent but they're offering you $2M" is a pretty good economic incentive. Meanwhile they want to do that because once they add more units the additional units would generate $10M worth of net present value to whoever they sell them to, and therefore they can sell them for $10M.
> Reagan-era housing tax policy also sucks.
It seems to be a common mistake that people think raising property taxes would lower rents. The theory is supposed to be that less productive (i.e. low density) use would be disfavored, but that's pretty suspicious considering that higher density use is already dramatically more profitable per unit land wherever it isn't prohibited by zoning.
On top of that, whenever the property tax applies to buildings and not just land (as is the case approximately everywhere in the US), it does completely the opposite because then constructing new units increases the amount of property tax paid and then rents need to increase by that amount before new construction is profitable.
Prop 13 is uniquely ridiculous not because it caps property taxes for existing owners but because the exceptions to it (i.e. the tax resets to a higher rate on sales and new construction) create perverse incentives. But if you replaced it with something like "max property tax is $1/sq ft/year" it would create a pretty strong incentive to build housing, by reducing the property tax component of rent required to justify doing so.
Building a data center near homes and running your incredibly loud gas turbine generators 24/7 for months, destroying the property values and quality of life for the people living there, is a giant middle finger to the community they've moved into. I'm not saying the backlash banning them entirely rather than adding some additional regulations is entirely logical, but it's very understandable. And should have been eminently predictable.
The vast, overwhelming majority of data centers source power from the grid rather than continuously operating gas turbines, and the obvious response to the ones that do is to have a moratorium on gas turbines rather than data centers.
I'm all for the datacenters, the more the better, it is the great race of acceleration of our civilization. Yet, it is pretty clear, and with history being the witness, that the tech-bros and MBAs will build it without any regard for the well-being of impacted communities. Thus we have the game of what communities will [be forced to] take a one for the team.
And this is why space base datacenters will be a thing :)
The GOP runs Texas. The governor, sec of state, AG, and both houses are republican. Since when have they ever wanted or needed air coverage?
They will take anything they can possibly get at this point.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/28/republicans-texas-m...
Imagine the assurances that are made to convince donors it's worth it. Who exactly bears the cost of unpopularity?...
> OpenAI will pay our own way and protect residential and small-business customers [...] OpenAI will work to support new power generation in Texas
Notice how this very intentionally doesn't say they will work to support generating as much or more power than they will use? Because if they could do that, they would just generate their own power. It doesn't matter if they "pay their own way", they are now competing with households.
Same with water, all of these projects want to leech on existing systems because they don't even want to entertain developing their own systems.
However, having worked inside Texas DCs for a long time now, I think it's just the burst that's the issue, not the concepts. Sadly they'll share our resources, but I think they should pay a premium on their energy compared to residential (but it's hard to reconcile this with other commercial ventures that do not).
> We will minimize water consumption and prioritize efficient cooling technologies, including closed-loop systems.
> We will work with local communities and water providers to ensure our projects are responsibly planned around available resources
I can promise you that I'll do everything to consider the needs and wants of others.
But I won't promise to take actions that take those wants or needs into account, much less even actually consider them.
The only plausible way to recoup 1T is to automate large swaths of human jobs so that the companies stop spending money on humans, and instead give money to them. This is probably why the public doesn’t want AI, because AI in the rules of current society is perfectly designed to disempower and ruin humans, but is not actually capable enough to ruin humans in a state of nature.
Large massive data-centers that makes this economics work is not actually a fact of life, in a less stable country they’re actually a liability. If a countries technical prowess comes from a data center then an adversary just needs to bomb it to knee cap that country. On the other hand, if a companies technical prowess comes from a thousands of well trained humans, well that’s actually not easy to get rid of. They’re not stationary, they’re adaptable, they can pick up new skills quicker and cheaper. Any king would much rather invest in humans and not AI.
But in a country like US, where it’s hard to even imagine such instability, AI is perfect at outcompeting humans and ruining them short term, and ruining the country long term. No wonder, this seems to be turning out to become the most negative reaction the public has ever had to the advent of new transformative technology. Unfortunately I don’t think it will work, the AI companies are just going to steamroll them, steal their jobs and dignity and then put them on UBI and pay themselves on the back as if they did a good thing.
You may be too optimistic.
Never, ever will they do that. It’s the same bullshit like Musk telling people not to save for retirement. He can distribute his stock by now but instead he is grabbing on to more money.
If there will be UBI, it will be the absolute minimum to not starve. Basically the same as welfare now. No way they are going to share the wealth.
Well yeah. Realistically how much money do you think is available to hand out to every single person? Not enough for everyone to live comfortably. And if there was enough, you'd get large swathes of otherwise economically productive groups (aka the tax cattle schemes like this require) just deciding to drop out of the workforce.
That does not mean fewer jobs, it means that jobs graduate to higher order ones that produce more, and it means more goods/services chasing the fixed supply of workers, translating to deflation (higher real wages / more purchasing power).
Are you arguing that the leaders of a state, who were elected by the constituents, should not experiment and try make things better? By definition, some experiments will fail.
That's not a useful question. What's the point you're trying to make?
You can experiment on everyone, or you can experiment at the local level. One is obviously preferable over the other.
Nobody has all the answers.
Oracle's doing something just outside the Milwaukee metro. I'd imagine there are others. Datacenter buildout is wildly unpopular around the Great Lakes, and that's not new. For Wisconsinites specifically, the whole thing has a whiff of Foxconn about it.
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconn_Valley_Science_and_Tec...
The former middle class has entered the chat.
"Winning" in this context is simply slowing down permitting and construction until the capital bubble pops, at which point a great deal of these projects simply evaporate. And the bubble will pop eventually.
'Living in Hell': Data Center Neighbors Grapple With Noise, Air Pollution - https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2... - April 28th, 2026
Measuring the Impact of Data Centers in the United States Economy: Monetary Damage from Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gas Emissions - https://www.nber.org/papers/w35100 | https://doi.org/10.3386/w35100
> This paper quantifies the environmental externalities associated with electricity consumption by data centers in the United States, focusing on damages from local air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Using facility-level data for approximately 2,800 operational data centers in 2025, combined with electricity grid characteristics and emissions data, the analysis estimates pollution impacts through the AP4 integrated assessment model and applies the social cost of carbon for GHG valuation. Results indicate that data centers consume roughly 250 TWh of electricity—about 5–6% of U.S. generation—and generate approximately $25 billion in gross external damages (GED), with a range of $10–$33 billion. These damages are highly geographically concentrated, with Texas and Virginia accounting for 30% of the national total. While GED comprises about 5% of industry GDP, this ratio varies widely across states, exceeding GDP in some regions. Planned data center expansion could increase electricity demand and associated damages by up to 85% in the near term. Despite these environmental costs, preliminary comparisons suggest that the damages attributable to AI-related energy use are small relative to potential productivity gains. [My note: potential gains]
Health implications of the rapid rise of data centers in Virginia: an exploratory assessment - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.338... | https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2026.1648912
Data Center Disputes Fuel 33 Recall Efforts, Ballotpedia Finds - https://ballotpedia.org/Press_release_Data_Center_Disputes_F... - July 7th, 2026
Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/j-stuart-adams-utah-se... | https://archive.today/MMot6 - June 24th, 2026
The datacenter controversy has nothing to do with caring about the environment and is a complete scam that preys on low-information voters. It is a product of outside Chinese money being funneled into US politics to hobble the US in Artificial Intelligence.
Please provide citations and evidence for this assertion. As it stands, this is an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
Seems like something that ought to be addressed as well, and should not be used as a justification for other lousy things.
Or this could be Russian propaganda, to manipulate US opinion against China in this case. What are your sources?
Without evidence to the contrary, the prevailing narrative is more likely correct- people have been told by the tech titans that AI will change everything and they'll loose their jobs, so they don't like it.
In fact, whoever is saying the Chinese are tricking Americans may be trying to get more people to support US big-tech's AI build-out (or stock market bubble) by appealing to nationlism - that the Chinese will get us. A double cross.
Virginia mostly used by-right zoning, which treated data centers like just another office block. The result is linked below. Those cranes in the back of photo 2 are building yet another data center. Loudoun recently changed the zoning laws to end by-right development of data centers, but it's a bit too little, too late. Yes, some of those homes predate the data centers. Yes, not all of them - the county has allowed this mixed development for 20+ years now.
1 - https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/GettyIm...
2 - https://oxfordamerican.org/media/pages/oa-now/how-data-cente...
Is this supposed to be bad? Maybe the datacenter in the first picture has an ear piercing whine, but neither of the pictures looks obviously bad.
So, you buy a house, and think a small office park or strip mall might get built next door. Instead, it's a 6 story block that looks like the Borg, belches exhaust from on-site generators, and buzzes constantly making you think you have tinnitus or something.
NBER w35194 (Alvarez et al., May 2026) instruments for siting and finds the opposite: +6.2% establishments and +8.2% AGI at 25 years.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35194/w351...
Look at how the TikTok kids (who went nuts for the Palestinians) don't give a crud about the Cubans.
Anyway, here's actual evidence of elected officials contradicting your anecdotal narrative:
https://apnews.com/article/cuba-embargo-congress-pocan-leger...
I'm not saying empathy is a Chinese psyop. The empathy is real. But empathy requires awareness - and awareness IS controlled by the algorithm.
As far as I’m aware, children aren’t being shot in the head and forcibly starved by an occupying force in Cuba. But to say that folks don’t care is clearly inaccurate.
But even more importantly, the care is result of years and years of leftist activism. Nothing to do with china, judt that awarness dont happen overnight.
Yours "if you are not active in absolutely everything, any action is invalid" is just a bad faith nonsense.
You have a nice day.
At the same time, full blown humanitarian disasters, like the one that hit the Rohingya in Myanmar, people that were being thrown in pit and burned alive in the thousands, are completely unknown to the average adult in the west.
> “Protect Our Farms. #StopTheInolaSmelter,” reads the text below the image, splashed across a billboard towering over one of the main highways to this prairie town (population: 1,890.) The smelter in question: a $4 billion aluminum processing plant touted by President Donald Trump as part of his push to revive the industry in the US.
> In a June 29 letter, Trump urged the town’s council to approve the project “without delay, so that together we may strengthen our national security, supercharge our economy, and lead our Nation boldly into a new Golden Age of American greatness.”
> Instead, the five-person board of trustees for Inola, located just east of Tulsa, voted unanimously that day to impose a moratorium on the project. The smelter, a joint venture between the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned Emirates Global Aluminium PJSC and Chicago-based Century Aluminum Co., would be the first new US plant in nearly 50 years to process aluminum that’s derived from raw material rather than recycled.
> Opponents of the plant say they’re afraid toxic emissions from the facility will damage agricultural land in Inola, which has dubbed itself the “Hay Capital the World” in a nod to the prized Bluestem prairie grass that grows there. There’s also concern that the plant’s intensive power needs will drive up electricity prices. The controversy has surfaced in the Oklahoma governor’s race, with one candidate in the upcoming Republican primary supporting the project and the other opposing it.
Our discussion was almost a week ago, is lying dormant, and is completely unrelated to what you just posted.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you could have made such an error.
I daresay - am I witnessing astroturfing?
Oh my!
Beyond the construction they employ very little people and bring very little taxes at a gargantuan cost in resources.
I don’t know much about the impact of their data centers compared to others, but there weren’t many (if any) concrete commitments in this letter. The promises all seem like areas that even an evil corporation could pay lip service to.
Assuming OAI is the sole tenant in these facilities, I'd say we are approaching 100% control.
If you are just paying the bills and leasing the space, is it really your fault a datacenter some other entity built is sucking the water table of Levelland dry?
If I just use and don't own the data center, then how can I be held accountable for it's impact others?
https://texas2036.org/news-analysis/gale-force-growth-texas-...
Oh and it reduced our green house gas emissions. That was the catch.
(I got coal rolled just yesterday, in Tahoe. Who knew that was still a thing…)
Ken Paxton, who is running for Senate and currently serves as attorney general, proudly announced cracking down on "solar scams": https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
Plus his campaign site makes no mention of supporting clean energy: https://www.kenpaxton.com/
I will repeat: it's political suicide to run on a platform of clean energy or education in Texas. That does not mean companies are not building clean energy. But politicians will not make it part of their platform during elections.
If you really think Republican voters in Texas care so much about it, wouldn't the obvious play for Democrats be pointing out how much green energy these Republican politicians have allowed to be built under their watch? I think you're painting Republican voters with an extremely broad brush here and honestly, fail to understand what exactly they object to in the first place regards to green energy. Their main objection is being _forced_ to use it (or being chided by ivory tower know-it-alls) in contexts where they have certain preferences (like driving a big ass truck).
Not a single one is going to object to cheap energy so long as it doesn't degrade their current lifestyle. That's the point people like you forget when you're creating Republican straw men.
I’ve seen too many solar panels installed on the north side of a house, under a tree.
I suspect the success of renewables in Texas has more to do with the bottom line than anything else. They certainly get a lot of badmouthing from people in rural areas. And honestly this is the best possible outcome. The impact of good intentions wavers along with cultural evolution, but it's hard to stop something that just makes financial sense.
I'm about as pro-nuclear as you can be, but that's probably a good thing. Modern reactor designs are amazingly safe, and the industry itself has a really amazing track record, but there should be no room for the usual corner cutting shenanigans when it comes to nuclear.
I do genuinely believe that the West at large has lost the capability of getting any kind of large infrastructure project built due to hilariously blatant corruption. Even France, the poster child for nuclear energy and how much of a success story it can be, is struggling with their latest nuclear expansion because we let the private entity ghouls come in and suck everyone dry for every penny they can manage.
Can you just go to the auto parts store and buy a new lead acid standard issue battery? Definitely not. Well then ok, lets buy the most top shelf high-performance 2026 grade one. Also no.
The only battery you can use is the original one that came with the car in 1979. That's it. So now you have to pay a factory to produce a battery with a design from 1974. This battery easily costs $750k for all the custom engineering and low volume needed. And it is objectively worse by every measure to what is available at Walmart today for $50. So why do we have to use the original one? Because that is the battery that was certified, and certifying a new battery would take 10 years and tens of millions.
Again, I have pretty direct experience with this (a division of my company), and the situation above is a "translated" example of what goes down.
Maybe you call it "corner cutting" to use a new battery, but frankly I think you might be just speaking from the hip.
"Abbott is asking the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to ensure data center developers provide information on tax breaks they will receive; power use and generation; water use and cooling operations; efforts to reduce impacts on local communities; and ownership of the facility. Any projects that fail Abbott’s ordered “comprehensive verification and audit” should be denied connection to the grid, the governor said."
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comp...
"“Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” said Governor Abbott. “Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.”"
https://environmentamerica.org/texas/center/media-center/new...
"The Lone Star State generated the equivalent of 37% of its electricity from solar, wind and geothermal power in 2025"
And to which companies would this apply? Only Datacenters? There are other energy intensive industries too, should this also apply to them? And what is the cutoff for that? Does every bigger 21st century company also need to be an electricity company?
It would be less arbitrary if all negative externalities would be taxed (for example, carbon tax or noise pollution tax) and maybe prioritize households on the public grid.
carbon taxes dont work because all they do is make production more expensive, and businesses are always happy to pass on any extra costs to their customers. its the same with noise pollution and water use. the only way to actually stop them is direct regulation.
buying land does not give you the right to do whatever you want with it. stop worshipping property and markets and focus on real problems like limited number of business licenses, exclusivity contracts, long or lifetime post employment terms, weak competition rules and long waiting times at government offices. all of them go against the right to buy what you want, work for anyone who wants to take you or to start a business. thats the real economic freedom that is in danger today.
Commit to 117% of your datacenter power demand to be supplied by nuclear, wind, and solar, so it arrives the same day (or sooner) than your demand starts.
This isn't that hard.
1/ deploying solar takes years to go through multiple layers of environmental review at municipal, state and federal levels
2/ the generator interconnection queue takes 5+ years just to permit new grid connections
3/ building new HVDC has been blocked by permits and right of way laws, which is another barrier to effective solar deployment
4/ there are only two commercial nuclear reactors built in America since 1978, and they each took 10+ years to build
Just like it supported 'Open AI'?
when i go home and hear about this i'm conflicted. it brings short term economic prosperity. what's the cost if there's no commitment to clean energy in reality
the developers on these projects will do whatever it takes to simply get the project done
People have legitimate complaints when they are built within audible distance of housing.
It's a letter to texas... Know your audience and all that...
- produces more electricity from wind generation than any other US state.
- consumes more electricity from wind generation than any other US state (3x the next biggest, Iowa).
- has more installed wind generation capacity than any other state.
- energy usage leads all other US states by being comprised of 22% wind generation sources.
[1] https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comp...
The best option is to get everyone on the same page about AI benefits and hazards, and not be unrealistic about the way AI could shape up as a transformative element of human society.
Depends on their goals. Do they want to slow down AI altogether, or just hate the concept of the building itself?