The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you’ve heard recently about the 40,000 acre data center just approved in Utah. Sure, it’s huge, a black hole going to suck water and power for Northern Utah. If you’re like me, data centers and the protests against them are fairly new to my radar. When I searched, probably with unasked for AI assist that seems to be ubiquitous now, I discovered there are over 5000 data centers in this country, more than the total of the next top ten combined, ten times more than the closest two, Germany and the UK who each have a little more than 500. China, in case you were wondering, was next with over 400.

How is it we missed these things? Well, for one thing, they’re being built in primarily rural areas, places that might think jobs are coming to save the day. And maybe didn’t realize the amount of water and power they’ll be consuming. Their water and power that will soon cost a helluva lot more than before the Center went online. Lately, tho, the public is waking up, if belatedly, to the proliferation of these things. AI is here and where did we think all that computation was being done?

Utah is, or at least was, trying to conserve water. The Great Salt Lake is drying up after years of drought. But 3 county commissioners approved the application anyway. When two podcasters threw themselves into the scrimmage, those commissioners accused them of being spies for the Chinese. No doubt the People’s Republic has plenty of espionage teams in the Mormon State, keeping an eye on polygamy maybe.

It looks like this genie is definitely out of its bottle. AI has seeped into our everyday lives without most of us noticing. College and high school students use it for a little more than research. Forget Cliff Notes, they can pop out a research paper in less than a minute. Amazon just limited the number of new books by any one author to three. A day! Writer’s block? I don’t think so. One musician I read about in this morning’s fake news had 7 albums out this year already. He was not one bit or byte embarrassed to let us know he used AI. Just another tool in the box.

It’s a brave new world. Just not our world anymore….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026 at 2:22 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.