Harnessing AI's Power Without Sapping Resources

The Artificial Intelligence arms race between nations dwarfs the nuclear weapons competition of decades past.  Investments in AI are estimated to eclipse $7 trillion worldwide by 2030.  The capital intensive technology will require massive amounts of resources, including electricity, water and land.

Many countries are waking up to the perils of the explosive growth of generative AI and the rapid deployment of the technology.  It is dawning on leaders at the national, state and local level that there are unprecedented challenges fueled by the AI gold rush with little time to adapt.

At the birth of AI,  experts worried the technology would replace millions of jobs. That issue temporarily has been taken a backseat as the world watches the relentless building boom of data centers. A new AI data center is expected to come online every day this year, totaling 504 by year's end.

Capital required to finance this rapid expansion in AI data centers is expected to hit $6.7 trillion by 2030, according to a study by McKinsey & Company.  The price tag includes money for land, site development, power and cooling generators, hardware and human capital.

Private sector investment in AI topped $100 billion in the U.S. last year, nearly 10 times as much as China.  During the period from 2013 to 2023, private sector firms spent $470 billion, four times more than China. The government, mostly defense, spent $5.2 billion during the same ten year period.

Amazon leads the tech titans with a cap ex investment this year projected to top $100 billion and potentially could reach $118 billion. The corporate behemoth operates more than 100 data centers worldwide, each of which houses about 50,000 servers to support cloud computing services.

This insatiable demand for capital is stressing corporate balance sheets and forcing a recalibration of the financial resources needed to build the backbone of the new economy.  For perspective, that $7 trillion figure represents more than the Gross Domestic Product of every country but two: the U.S. and China.

Although data centers have been around since the 1940's, training and using AI requires enormous amounts of computing power in data centers.   AI centers consume seven to eight times more energy than a typical computing workload, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  study.

AI data centers house advanced computing, network and storage architectures, buttressed by energy and cooling systems to handle high density workloads. AI centers are crammed with graphics processing units (GPU) that generate intense heat.    

A unique feature of generative AI is the increased fluctuations in energy use which occur over different phases in training machine learning.  One study estimated the training process to deploy a recent Open AI model consumed 1,287 megawatt hours of electricity, enough to power 120 average homes. 

Scientists estimate the power requirements for data centers nearly doubled just between 2022 and the end of 2023.  MIT researchers calculated that by 2026 the electricity consumption of all data centers will approach 1,050 terawatt hours. Each terawatt equals one trillion watts of electricity.  

A major new International Energy Agency (IEA) report calculates that data centers worldwide are expected to more than double by 2030, requiring around 945 terawatt hours of electricity, less than the MIT estimate by still a hefty amount.  That is more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan.

An already taxed electricity grid has prompted major technology companies to invest in their own energy facilities and to strike agreements for  dedicated electricity resources. Microsoft, for instance, has agreed to purchase  $16 billion in energy from the restarted Three Mile Island nuclear facility. 

Goggle is collaborating with Karios Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority to deploy advanced nuclear energy to supplement the electricity grid to power its data centers in Tennessee and Alabama. Amazon is partnering with Talen Energy to secure nuclear power from the Susquehanna power station.

Current data centers are already contributing to rising consumer electricity rates. The 13-state region served by PJM Interconnection is home to the largest concentration of data centers. Residential consumers were hit with a 20% spike in rates this summer as PJM's costs soared $9 billion.

Today's hyper scale AI data centers require as much as 1,200 acres or more to build.  To accommodate those acreage requirements, data centers are being constructed farther and farther away from cities. Currently, data centers have gobbled up 282.8 million square feet of land in the U.S.   

Northern Virginia, home to a high concentration of data centers, reports 51 million square feet of land dedicated to the facilities.  Operators require large tracts of land to develop multiple buildings over time. The acreage includes buffer zones for cooling plants, backup generators and electrical substations. 

Water consumption is often an overlooked issue when it comes to AI data centers. Training AI models generates significant heat, increasing the need for water to cool and to keep the humidity low. One study found that as much as 720 billion gallons of water annually will be needed by 2028 for AI data centers.

Googles's data center in Henderson, Nevada, consumed 352 million gallons of water in 2024, according to data obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  Goggle reported using more than 6 billion gallons of water in 2023 for all of its data centers.

The water and power resource drain is already causing some cities to rethink support for construction of massive data center projects. Tucson's city council recently defeated a proposal for a 290-acre data center in Pima County over concerns about water and electricity consumption.

The project would have generated $250 million in tax revenue and created 3,000 temporary construction jobs and provided 180 permanent positions.  Local officials identified the company as Amazon, but the firm declined to comment on the proposed Henderson facility.

This litany of thorny issues facing AI should not detract from its enormous potential.  Goldman Sachs predicts AI will boost the global GDP by $7 trillion over ten years.  McKinsey projects generative AI will add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually to the world's economy. 

The winner in the AI race will be those countries that encourage industry to address the requirements for power, water, acreage and financing before it's too late. The good news is the AI transformation is already fueling cutting edge solutions that will help fulfill the promise of the technological revolution.    

A Perspective On Removing Illegal Immigrants

Removing illegal immigrants from the country is not a new idea hatched by the Trump Administration. You wouldn't know it, judging by today's news coverage. Few, if any, Americans know a 1995 law signed by Democrat President Bill Clinton paved the way for millions of deportations and removals.  

Bipartisan legislation known as The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act green lighted the removal of illegals. Under Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Barrack Obama there were 27 million illegal immigrants ushered out of the United States.  

Likely, you are shaking your head.  That number--27 million--can't be accurate.  You won't find it in reporting by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and MSNBC.  Those media hide behind bogus fact-checkers to claim the number is inflated.  But it's not.

The legacy media cabal claim the past "removals" data cannot be equated with Trump's deportations.  Fact checkers parse the word "due process" to argue previous administrations did not ignore the Constitution to send illegal immigrants out of the country.  

The truth is illegal immigrants were deported under previous presidents, regularly without hearings.  Whether you use the term "removals" or "deportations," the outcome was the same. Semantics aside, illegals were sent out of the country at the border and from the country's interior.   

Also, illegal immigrants who lived in the U.S. for 365 days or more were required to remain outside the country for ten years, unless they obtained a waiver. The act allowed the deportation of illegal immigrants who committed a misdemeanor or a felony. Those who overstayed visas could be removed.

Raise your hand if you knew about these provisions. Even fewer Americans know that many of the bill's provisions remain in force today. The Biden Administration chose to ignore the law, inviting in at least 10 million illegal immigrants to waltz into the country, while lying that the border was secure. 

Other Democrat presidents and President Bush viewed illegal immigration differently than Biden. 

Under Clinton, 12 million illegals were either deported, removed or returned during his two terms. The terminology doesn't matter. The fact is 11.4 million of those illegals were apprehended at the border and were given the choice: return to Mexico or face formal deportation hearings.  Most returned to Mexico. 

During the Bush Administration, more than 10 million illegals were sent out of the country. A large majority of those immigrants--8.3 million--were stopped at the border and returned to Mexico. About 1.6 million were deported over eight years.  

The data for Bush and Clinton removals and deportations comes from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The number of deportations ratcheted up during President Obama's eight years in office. Between 2009 and 2012 the administration deported 1.6 million illegal immigrants, according to Pew Research. Of those, Pew found that 690,000 had criminal records. The final tally under Obama was 5 million. 

Obama defenders prefer to point out that as president he signed an executive order in 2012 protecting certain young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from temporarily being deported.  However, Obama's action was at least partly in response to criticism from some in his party.

Immigration activists labeled Obama the "Deporter In Chief" for his rapid removal of illegal immigrants.  

For the record,  Obama officials deportation priorities were national security threats; noncitizens convicted of three or more misdemeanors or one serious crime; those who abused visa or visa waiver programs. DHS also targeted illegals who had a pending removal issue on or before January 1, 2014, but had remained in the country.  

A Democrat untruth is that every illegal immigrant received their day in court under Obama. Not according to the American Civil Liberties Union.  Here's what the ACLU posted on its website during the Obama years:

"The reality is that this (Obama) Administration has increasingly relied on methods, such as expedited removal and reinstatements of old decisions, which bypass a judicial hearing where a judge can consider U.S. ties and individuals circumstances and also fail to offer basic protections like notice to counsel."

Obama also had the cooperation of local police in cities.  His DHS department asked local police to hold an immigrant already in custody for forty-eight hours to give the feds can opportunity to place the migrant into deportation proceedings or take the individual into custody.

Given recent history, the Democrat hysterics and borderline delirium over current Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations are hypocrisy.  There is very little daylight between the Trump Administration's deportation priorities and those of Obama. 

What's changed is the name of the president.  Obama deported more noncitizens than any president in U.S. history. Mayors didn't threaten DHS agents. No Congressmen or women demanded to peek inside detention centers. No federal judges halted deportations for lack of due process. There were no riots.

Moreover, the Border Patrol under Obama put children in detention centers , encircled by razor-wire fences.  Here's what the Arizona Republic wrote at the time:

"But they are still children in cages, not delinquents.  Just children, 900 of them, in a makeshift border town center that is longer than a football field." Similar articles appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.  When Trump later used the same detention centers, he was skewered.

Criticize President Trump's deportations if you wish. But what the administration is doing is not beyond the norm of previous Democrat presidents. Some may suggest that the Trump plan includes deporting non-criminals or individuals who have been in the country for years but are not citizens.

It is beyond naive to claim that under Obama there were no such instances.  There was no oversight by Congress or the media.   

What America is dealing with today goes beyond what Obama faced.   Former President Biden created a nightmare immigration scenario that undid decades of immigration policies aimed at protecting the country. He and his administration deserve the blame for the current chaos.

The immigration issue was at least partly responsible for Americans voting for Donald Trump.  Democrats ceded the high ground on illegal immigration during the last four years.  Their current faux outrage and performative protests are nothing more than political theater.