Justin Pearson, a Tennessee lawmaker, has become one of the loudest voices amid a growing national backlash against the pollution and politics of America's AI buildout.

When Justin Pearson sits at his desk, he looks at a polluted orange sky.
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A 10 minute drive to the northwest is Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 data center. A 15 minute drive to the southeast is Colossus 2 and the army of 69 methane gas turbines located just over the state line in Mississippi that currently power the supercomputing hub — most without any of the pollution controls typically required by federal rules. Multiple environmental groups who are now suing xAI have estimated that the machines could emit more than 2,500 tons of smog-forming pollution annually into an area that already leads Tennessee in rates of emergency room visits for asthma.

A national day of protest against data centers is planned across the U.S. for July 18, as community backlash over the development of artificial intelligence (AI) centers continues to grow.

Humans First, a conservative advocacy group, says the demonstrations are intended to pressure local, state and federal officials to protect communities from rising utility costs, water demand, noise, land-use changes and what it describes as national security risks tied to rapid AI expansion.

Maps Show 40 Cities Taking Stand Against AI Data Centers Draining Resources.

No protests scheduled in Tennessee. Nashvillian's are fighting against a data center next to the Nashville Zoo.

AI Bubble Burst: Meta Admits 'Excess Compute Capacity.

Meta has to monetize this excess capacity - and that's why Meta is forced to enter the cloud computing business, directly competing with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, and also neocloud companies.

Meta, like SpaceX, looks to turn excess AI compute into cash

Meta’s decision to sell off excess compute comes weeks after SpaceX, via xAI, announced similar plans. In early May, SpaceX signed a deal with Anthropic to buy out all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center. SpaceX has signed similar leases since with Google and Reflection AI.

Could this mean there is not the demand for data centers as expected?

AI Data Centers & Our Communities
An initiative by Erin Brockovich · Environmental Advocate

"The RACE to build AI infrastructures is unfolding town by town across America. In some places, data centers are welcomed. In others, they are delayed, contested or abandoned altogether. This MAP captures the real-world footprint of that race — revealing patterns of growth, conflict and uncertainty.

I am watching as YOU, the communities show up and speak out. In the famous words of Mark Twain … “The secret of getting ahead is getting started,” so let’s go!

— Erin"

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Monday sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the company marketed ChatGPT to the public without sufficiently warning of its dangers.

I'm not that wild about Florida's government. However, I do think they might have something in this lawsuit. It's amazing how many people don't understand Googling for information much less using AI to get answers.

Oh No The Capital Allocation System Allocated Capital Badly Again

Large banks including JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and SMBC are looking to offload risks linked to a glut of debt related to AI data centres, as they reach financing limits, the Financial Times reported.
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Banks are reportedly approaching risk limits that restrict their exposure to individual borrowers or sectors, and are seeking to free up their balance sheets for further lending.

Brings back fond memories of the 1980s savings and loan crisis and the 2008 financial crisis.

Yeehaw!

Five major publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

The lawsuit asserts that Meta’s engineers relied on pirated books and journal articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites like Anna’s Archive, an open source search engine for piracy sites including LibGen and Sci-Hub. The suit also claims that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”
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The plaintiffs argue that Meta’s A.I. program poses a threat to the livelihoods of writers and publishers because the technology can be used to quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books and to summarize the plot and themes of copyrighted books in such great detail that readers don’t have to buy them.

Be careful out there. Be ethical and respectful.

Seven bills introduced to control data center uncontrolled usage of water, electricity, and fuel. Only one bill passed, stipulating that the owners of data centers (requiring at least 50 megawatts of power) must pay for any infrastructure upgrades needed to produce the electricity that the data center demands.

Tennessee lawmakers this year introduced seven bills aiming to set up guardrails for data centers in the state, but only one crossed the finish line.

Data centers house the computers, networking equipment and cooling systems used to manage digital data. As data centers proliferate across the nation and electricity demand rises, some states have taken steps to control the resource-intensive industry’s impact on their infrastructure.

Not Tennessee. The majority of our elected representatives don't seem to care about rising electricity costs, air pollution, or strains on water usage. Why would they? They don't care about public schools, Healthcare, or even if the less fortunate have food. Bah.

Excessive use of limited resources. Yes that puts us in danger.

Developers plan to build six sprawling data center campuses in Archbald, Pennsylvania, covering about 14 percent of the town’s land. Residents are fighting back. A town of 7,000 planned so many data centers, it’s like adding 51 Walmarts.
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...as word began circulating last year about borough council zoning changes to allow for the development, residents rebelled and have launched one of the most contentious grassroots campaigns in local history. They are organizing on social media, overwhelming community meetings and calling for the ouster of some key local officials.

‘Hyperscale’ data center project in Utah — expected to generate and consume more power than entire state — nears final approval.
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Still, questions remain about the broader impact. Experts emphasize that water use tied to electricity generation often overlooked can be substantial.

>em>“It’s great that we’re seeing less water use at the data center itself,” Hungerford added. “But we have to follow it upstream and ask what water use looks like in terms of power generation.”

Transparency has also been a concern. A nearby data center built in 2018 is not required to disclose its water usage, leaving gaps in public knowledge. That could change going forward.

Congress is working on the No Fakes Act, which aligns with the White House’s call for a federal standard to shield individuals from digital impersonation. This legislation would establish a first-of-its-kind federal property right to your voice and likeness, making it illegal to publicly host unauthorized AI replicas

CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, said that fear over the future of AI is “healthy and necessary”, adding: “I honestly think that if you’re not a little bit afraid at this moment then you’re not paying attention.”

He later added: “If we can’t control it, it isn’t going to be on our side. It’s going to overwhelm us”.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and tycoon, whose com­pany is invest­ing heav­ily in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, said it was “the greatest solu­tion that man­kind has ever cre­ated”.

He singled out AI’s poten­tial to revolu­tion­ise health­care pro­vi­sion within the next dec­ade.

But he also pre­dicted it would cre­ate huge upheavals, and urged gov­ern­ment to tax tech titans con­trolling the tech­no­logy more heav­ily.

Mr Gates said: “AI at the same time is the greatest solu­tion that man­kind’s ever cre­ated, and yet such an amaz­ing change agent, that in the hands of people with bad intent it cre­ates lots of scary scen­arios.”

Artificial intelligence assistants such as ChatGPT made errors about half the time when asked about news events, according to a vast study by European public broadcasters released Wednesday.

The mistakes included confusing news with parody, getting dates wrong or simply inventing events.
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Overall, 45 percent of all AI answers had "at least one significant issue", regardless of language or country of origin, the report said.

Of the four assistants, "Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76 percent of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance".

I hope you already knew this. It seems like we have to explain to people more and more that data found on the Internet is not always reliable. Now that AI is becoming more mainstream, more people are being fooled by bad data.

Merriam-Webster is thrilled to announce that their NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Louisiana Public Service Commissioners voted four to one to approve Entergy’s three new gas plants to power Meta’s largest-ever data center coming to Northeast Louisiana.
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The 70 football field-sized AI powerhouse in Richland Parish will need around 2,500 megawatts of power. The facility will use roughly three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans annually, according to the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

Wasteful, wasteful, wasteful.

The use cases for AI have gone from "cure cancer, invent new concrete" to "fake girlfriend" to "text your wife for you" to "something, like, cool, man."

Heh.

An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city’s mayor.
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this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources...

I wonder how these data centers affect residential electricity prices. As mentioned in a previous post, why is Tennessee in the top 10 states with electricity rate increases?

With the increase in energy costs, residential insurance, and food, will any middle income citizen this new society?

I am being driven slowly insane by this continuing "surprise" about the fact that "AI" can't possibly do what people expect it to do because that is not what it is designed to do. It doesn't know anything! It doesn't reason! It really is just "spicy autocomplete."

...the US Food and Drug Administration, the division of HHS that oversees vast portions of the American pharmaceutical and food system, had unveiled Elsa, an artificial intelligence tool intended to dramatically speed up drug and medical device approvals.
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Six current and former FDA officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal work told CNN that Elsa [AI] can be useful for generating meeting notes and summaries, or email and communique templates.

Oh, and don't say please and thank you when asking AI questions. That just takes up more bandwidth, energy, water to analyze the request.

AI results have taken over my initial Google search results. Can it be turned off? I only want the original content provider search results.

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools.
Chatbots are replacing Google’s traditional search, devastating traffic for some publishers.

AI search results are theoretically using the content of the original provider of the data. However, there is not payment for using that data. In addition, there is not determination that the AI bot is using the data in a valid manner.

As has been mentioned here previously,

"crypto has a dirty little secret that is very relevant to the real world: it uses a lot of energy. How much energy? Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, currently consumes an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — more than the entire country of Argentina, population 45 million.

Now it is becoming known that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also an energy hog.

..."the voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use — including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants."
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As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world’s most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source.
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A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 million laptops running eight hours every day, based on data shared publicly by the company.

Hmmm... What now? Should the Bitcoin and AI companies be allowed to use so much of our energy resources? Will our electricity rates go up in order to support these efforts?