this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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Isn't living next to a golf course.
Yeah, people have materialistic views and materialistic concerns. If it's out of sight, it can easily be out of mind.
But the thing about these mega-projects that pop up in your backyard practically overnight and immediately jack up the cost of living in your rural township is that they are highly visible.
I don't care, because I don't live next to an almond grove. But I do care when I live next to an AI prompts factory.
Even then, we're rapidly approaching parity. You're weighing 1 trillion almonds/year against 100 trillion tokens consumed per year. And the number of tokens being consumed is rising rapidly, while the volume of almonds being produced are in decline.
The other thing to consider is that token usage is hopefully at its highest cost/token. As the market matures, it should stand to reason that efficiency for both data center structure and hardware should improve.
We're looking at an extremely unregulated, poorly thought out, gold-rush type market that is trying to cash in as much as possible before reality comes in to smash it in the face. As long as we keep pushing, regulations should be able to mitigate a lot of the biggest issues we see with data centers.
With the price of energy skyrocketing and a chip shortage constricting supplies? Doubtful.
But, like with the financial crisis, nobody really expects the Tech Giants to be the ones that feel the pain. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei will die richer than the Pharaohs, no matter what happens next. It's the hillbilly schlubs in Jackson, Mississippi and Bastrop, Texas who are going to be eating shit when the turd pile finally tips over.