The heat output doesn’t bother me. It’s the use of fresh water and fossil fuels. This monstrosity is going to be entirely powered with natural gas and dump CO2 into the atmosphere - after all of us plebs have paid our carbon taxes and been told to cut our carbon emissions for the past several decades.

All AI datacenters should be required to use air cooling and renewable CO2-free energy sources such as nuclear, solar, or hydroelectric power. No exceptions.

If we had competent, sane leadership these rules would have already been put into place. Instead we have insane, perverted, psychopathic hypocrites in power who have created a two tiered legal system. The bottom 99% have to bear the burden of green energy and carbon emissions while the AI cult gets to pollute the planet to a psychotically insane degree of “two atom bombs per day” and somehow that’s okay because it’s for the AI?

I use AI and even I recognize that this is fucking insane. Bomb this fucking datacenter from orbit. Jesus Christ.

A proposed data center in northwestern Alberta will reportedly emit a staggering amount of waste heat.

According to an analysis conducted by Utah State University physicist Robert Davies, the Wonder Valley facility will dump “about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day” into the surrounding landscape.

“The effect will almost certainly be large, if not extreme,” Davies told the CBC.

Davies conducted the preliminary analysis earlier this year for the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation (SLCN). The $70 billion project, backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary, is set to be built 80 miles southwest of SLCN’s reserve. While it does not sit inside the reserve, the reporting notes, it does lie in a patch of land that’s considered the First Nation’s traditional territory.

In April, the Alberta government said it would exempt the Wonder Valley project from a more rigorous provincial environmental impact assessment due to its use of standard power and water systems — a move that disappointed, but perhaps didn’t surprise, legal and environmental experts.

Davies echoed the disappointment. “I can’t imagine allowing it to go forward without those full assessments,” he told CBC, adding that it could be the “largest single-site heat source on the entire planet.”

In all, the data center project will use about nine gigawatts of power using on-site natural gas generators per day, instead of drawing power from an energy grid. All that burning fuel, paired with the heat being generated by the data center operations themselves, totals a daily thermal load of between 16 and 18 gigawatts, Davies calculated — the equivalent of roughly two dozen atomic bombs. (If this line sounds familiar, it’s because Davies used the same analogy when he analyzed another O’Leary-backed data center project in Utah with a similar thermal load.)

It’s a sensational reference point, but it captures the unprecedented concentration of heat that the data center will purportedly pose. Since the power is being generated on site and going straight into the data center, the heat isn’t being spread out the way that a typical power plant’s output would, through the various homes and businesses it’s supplying across an entire region. In other words, the gas turbines are spewing heat as they generate electricity, and the racks upon racks of AI chips are generating heat as they use that electricity to perform calculations, all in the same spot.

The facility will also spew about 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the analysis — which is more than four percent of Canada’s total emissions.

“When people talk about environmental regulations that these projects have to adhere to, those regulations were not created with anything of this scale in mind,” Davies said.

In September, the SLCN filed an application for a judicial review on the Wonder Valley’s project exemption from an environmental impact assessment, and requested another review last month.

Responding to the request, Alberta’s Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas stressed in an October 30 statement that the project will still have to obtain “all required permits, provide detailed technical assessments on impacts to air, land, and water, and demonstrate the project can be built and operated safely before any project can proceed.”

But the permitting process doesn’t gauge the big picture, Davies argued.

“Permits check the parts. An assessment checks the whole,” he told the CBC. “A project this size is exactly what assessments are for.”

Maybe I am wrong but 16 gigawatts in a day doesn’t mean anything? A watt is a joulle per second so shouldn’t it be gigawatts hour per day?

Local construction crews need to be made afraid to show up at AI DCs. Because gunfire. But whatever, we American’s can’t summon the courage to shoot armed, masked kidnappers in our streets.

AI will not save us, it will destroy us.