Cheyenne and its residents will soon be inevitably remade as a mysteriously unclaimed — but enormous, and enormously expensive — data center begins construction in the small Wyoming city. It’s estimated that the installation will consume twice the electrical power presently pulled down by the entire state of Wyoming. Without elaborate recycling and efficiency measures, it could consume as much as 124 billion gallons of water per year.
One wonders how that is going to be squared with the perennial water scarcity, rights, and related ranching issues natural to Western states.
A curiously parallel set of circumstances is played out in “Eddington,” Ari Aster’s new film, which forces viewers to grapple with a host of tragicomic plotlines played out in a spiraling COVID-era narrative driven by the arrival of … a huge, unclaimed, anonymous data center in the heart of a small and arid Western town.
Isn’t that an odd coincidence?
While Aster’s film pivots on the psychological meat grinder of the lockdowns — and the impressively timed eruption of the BLM riots and protests — the auteur, by placing the data center’s construction at the center of the maelstrom, seems to be pointing his audience toward even greater forces at play. Like your average New Mexican depicted in Eddington, your average Wyomingite in reality is unlikely to have the time, interest, or wherewithal to really understand — much less manage — the extent of the planetary and human terraforming that tech, banking, and government have set in motion.
An age of terraforming
These data centers are something new. Many are adding their own power plants. The whole operation is contingent on water, of which they need a great deal, in a constant supply. Today, aggregate usage is about 560 billion gallons per year. Extrapolating the math from combined estimates of the Guardian and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, by 2030, these installations could demand up to 25 trillion gallons. This is about what the entire country of Australia uses per year.
The additional social terraforming is tough to grapple with, especially given the uncertainty around immigration/remigration reforms under Trump: boosts of status and capital into otherwise economically decimated areas of the country might be embraced either way. Of course, our data-hungry tech overlords are historically not given to any great charity, so local wealth hikes may be short-lived. The desperate drive to build these data centers, after all, is driven by a need to constantly expand the hypothetical value of numbers on screen or on paper.
Terraforming isn’t going to happen without its drawbacks for locals. Remaking the terrain in the image of AI is going to include the rerouting, application, and control of energy. Families should expect correlative hikes in the electric and gas bills. The data center in Cheyenne will rely on Wyoming natural gas, evidently packaged into the deal somewhere. Anecdotal reports from truckers indicate at least one new pipeline going into the ground already between Pinedale and Lander.
Projections are that nearly $10 trillion will be invested in the construction of data centers in the next five years around the globe. X is building in Tennessee, OpenAI in Texas, Meta in Louisiana, Google in Ohio. The Trump administration has promised a $500 billion investment of government cash.
It’s all indicative of a multilateral institutional agreement that artificial intelligence must 1) make number go up, 2) make number go up, and, a somewhat distant third, perpetuate some semblance of the current global geopolitical order. How that gets worked out between the international global elite composing what David Rothkopf calls the superclass is yet to be seen.
Man-made horrors
Consider that Ari Aster is primarily a director of smart horror films. What is he suggesting with his “Eddington” data-center plot point? With regard to the terraforming theme, we have to factor in one more aspect: electromagnetic disturbance. The COVID era was, above all else, simply bizarre. The uncertainty was vast, the anxiety pervasive, and the onrush of untested technology in its various forms was tough to keep up with in any serious way. We were, you’ll recall, trying to feed our families. Disturbance, indeed.
You may have more faith in the teleological strength of financial incentivization than I do, or in the creative adaptation of humanity, but hear me out: The addition of colossal quantities of electromagnetics concentrated in our rural spaces, where whole biosystems are already under burden, doesn’t sit well.
Unseen forces are unique this way. In fact, if you were, say, a talented director/writer of neo-intellectual horror films, you could get pretty far down the roads of objective correlative, symbolism, and atmospheric plausibility with the insertion of vast and unquantified amounts of electricity into American deserts. Cap it off by anonymizing the owners of the force, and you’ve got a bona fide spectral invasion. Well played, Mr. Aster.
The ownership of the Cheyenne data center is for now “unknown,” although local rumor suggests Sam Altman’s OpenAI is the likely future occupant. We shall see.
We’re told, even by its creators, that the size and impact of artificial intelligence are beyond measure. We know little of the oncoming impact on human-level well-being, socio-political or financial. Even less do we know about the basic ecological sustainability of the project. Then we add the government contribution (which means commitment) of half a trillion dollars. All this piling on — can we even see what’s being taken away?
It starts to sound like the stuff horror films are made of.
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