What Exactly Are All These Data Centers For?
There’s a strange backlash building against AI data centers.
People don’t like them.
Not because they’ve all suddenly become experts on AI. They just look around and see these giant buildings showing up, using enormous amounts of electricity, humming away all night, and nobody can really explain what the benefit is to the people who live nearby.
Doug’s take was that they feel “potentially Orwellian.”
That seems about right.
There’s also the small matter of the money.
Trillions of dollars are being poured into this stuff.
Doug said:
“Whenever that much money is being spent so quickly in one place... you’re looking for a financial catastrophe.”
That may be the bigger story.
AI may be incredibly useful.
That does not mean the current investment boom makes any economic sense.
We saw the same thing with fiber optics. The infrastructure turned out to be useful. A lot of the people who financed it still went broke.
Now multiply that by a very large number.
And while Wall Street is busy calling it the next industrial revolution, the average person looks at the cameras, the data collection, the data centers and the general direction of technology and thinks:
What exactly are you building?
And who is it for?
We got into that, Iran, the Falklands, gold stocks, Rome, and the fact that 89% of Americans now say government corruption is widespread.
Doug’s response to that number was probably the best line of the show:
“It’s almost impossible to get that number of people agreeing on one thing.”
He’s right.
Americans can’t agree on lunch.
But apparently they can agree the government is corrupt.
That probably tells you something.
Watch the full episode of Doug Casey’s Take.
There’s a lot more in it.
— Matt
