Today I learned that there are only three English cities with an electrical consumption greater than 200 megawatts: London, Manchester and Birmingham. By comparison, the people who want to build AI data centres here, which nobody asked for, want a supply of up to 1 gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) for each one. That’s how skewed this whole nonsense is.
And that’s before we discuss the precious cooling water they’ll use once and dump. Maybe if each data centre provided a city-wide district heating system from their waste heat…

OpenAI wants to build the next era of the web, and it’s shelling out billions to do it
OpenAI was an artificial intelligence research lab little known outside of Silicon Valley before ChatGPT debuted in November 2022.
CNN@soletan @christineburns Counterpoint: this will *never* happen