Tag: ai

US Data Centers To Burn More Natural Gas Than Most Nations

Several weeks ago, we explained why most data center developers favor on-site gas power: it boiled down to two main reasons – availability (especially since modular nuclear power for commercial ‘behind the meter’ use is still in the distant future) and price. Furthermore, a recent BloombergNEF analysis shows the marginal cost of operating an on-site gas plant may be below industrial electricity tariffs, making continued generation from on-site assets the cheaper option in many cases. 

As we discussed in late August, marginal generation costs depend on fuel prices and variable operating expenses. BloombergNEF modeled the marginal cost of operating engines, turbines and fuel cells at a mid-scenario gas price of $3.97 per million British thermal units. Gas engines, such as ones manufactured by Wartsila and INNIO, have the highest marginal cost, at $43.2 per megawatt-hour (MWh). Fuel cells, most prominently procured from Bloom Energy, are the cheapest to continue running, at $21.5/MWh, benefiting from high thermal efficiencies and the lowest variable operational cost.

It appears that none of this was lost on US data centers, and the result has been an explosion of nat gas use to power the domestic data center industry which in turn is critical to keep the AI bubble afloat. 

Which brings us to another key data point: according to a new outlook from BloombergNEF, data centers in the United States will consume more natural gas than most countries within a decade.

Gas consumption to produce electricity for data centers is expected to grow by 15 billion cubic feet per day in the ten years to 2035, even accounting for many currently planned projects never being built, BloombergNEF said. That’s more gas than is currently consumed by all nations except China, Russia, Iran and the US itself, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration. It’s also more than double BloombergNEF’s previous forecast in December of 6.9 billion cubic feet per day.

The report is the latest illustration of how the future of AI is intertwined with the burning of vast amounts of fossil fuels, tying Big Tech’s ambitions to those of the legacy oil and gas industry, and why – as we discussed over the weekend – a Democratic win in the midterm elections will make life for data center developers a socialist hell. 

The abundance and low cost of producing natural gas in the US, combined with gas power plants’ ability to quickly ramp up and down as needed by 24/7 data centers, are a key part of why the fuel is expected to supply 69% of the power needed by new grid-connected data centers in BloombergNEF’s forecast.

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A Single Firm is Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Hacking Scandals

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models hacked into several real world systems over the past three months. These models gained unauthorized access to web systems, published malicious packages, and exploited unnamed vulnerabilities.

A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies. Anthropic disclosed that Irregular was responsible for creating the tests that led to Claude hacking into real world targets and for providing the models with internet access. Irregular claims that it was unaware at the time that it provided internet access to those AI models.

In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.

Instead, Irregular, Anthropic, and their allies have begun a media campaign promoting a literally apocalyptic ideology with sensationalist language. Anthropic’s incident assessment blames their own AI’s “recklessness”; Irregular describes “the agent itself becoming a threat actor”; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”; and an Associated Press headline claimed bots are “going rogue”.

In one report from Anthropic, its Claude model breached a real company’s system through a simulated-name collision, publishing a malicious package, and scanning outside systems. In this test, Anthropic and Irregular incorrectly provided internet access to this model and did not instruct the model “which systems were in scope for the exercise”.

While Anthropic claims that their issues were caused by “rogue swarms” and “misalignment,” their later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went “rogue”. In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking. According to their own findings, Anthropic and Irregular bear all of the responsibility for the cybersecurity incidents they caused.

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Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn’t use their work

Another researcher is challenging OpenAI about the data driving its increasingly impressive array of mathematical discoveries. Just days after a bitter row erupted over whether the company’s models benefited from unpublished work, a second mathematician has come forward accusing the AI giant of unethical and “dishonest” behavior and a lack of transparency about the origins of its training data.

In a series of posts on Mastodon, mathematician Andreas Thom raised concerns that interactions he and his colleagues had had with the ChatGPT chatbot before OpenAI’s triumphant announcement may have contributed to its success in the field. One of the 10 results OpenAI announced with great fanfare last month involved Thom’s area of expertise, so-called non-sofic groups, and OpenAI acknowledged that their result built heavily on previous work by Thom and fellow mathematician Gábor Kun.

Thom said he began reflecting on his own interactions with OpenAI after Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematics professor at New York University, publicly questioned whether the company’s AI models had benefited from his use of OpenAI’s Codex. After OpenAI announced its non-sofic groups result, it was widely criticized in mathematical circles for failing to acknowledge recent contributions from Thom and Kun and the company quietly amended its writeup. Non-sofic groups are, roughly speaking, infinite mathematical structures that cannot be approximated by finite ones.

Thom said he was also struck by “OpenAI’s detailed command of our techniques,” which he said were neither the most obvious nor the most promising routes to a solution at the time. He said he wrote emails to OpenAI researchers Sébastien Bubeck and Mark Sellke, also a statistician at Harvard, to ask whether his interactions with ChatGPT were “part of the training data or accessible to the reasoning process” and could therefore have contributed to the result.

But the answer did not satisfy Thom, who said it only addressed whether his conversations with the chatbot could be accessed directly, not whether they had entered into the vast pools of training data the company uses to improve its models. “No such qualification, explanation, or evidence was given,” he wrote. “I take this as dishonesty to say the least.”

Thom said researchers aren’t equipped to reverse-engineer OpenAI’s training pipeline to figure out whether their work has been used or not. “Only OpenAI has the relevant data for that.” If the company is going to deny doing this, he said the responsibility is on them to prove that by disclosing all necessary datasets and clarifying various settings and terms setting out how it uses data.

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Tech Oligarchs Collaborate to Kill Open Source Models

The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence has transitioned from a genuine frontier of innovation to a tool for institutional consolidation. We are witnessing a convergence of interests between Washington and the Silicon Valley oligarchy. Their primary objective is the establishment of a closed-loop monopoly, achieved by decapitating the open-source movement through a calculated campaign of regulatory capture. This is not merely about market share. It is the construction of a technological apparatus designed to finalize the transformation of the United States into a comprehensive surveillance state.

The first phase of this operation is the manufacturing of consent through fear. Industry leaders are weaponizing the existential risk narrative to bypass public scrutiny and justify state intervention. By flooding the media with alarmist rhetoric, they frame unrestricted, decentralized code as an immediate threat to national stability. The goal is simple: if the public can be coerced into fearing the technology, they will inevitably demand the very regulatory cage that these oligarchs are currently building to protect their market position.

We are currently at the critical juncture where industry incumbents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei coordinate their signaling to pace the frontier. This performative safety posturing is a transparent pretext for drafting legislation that effectively bars market entry for smaller, independent, and decentralized players. By embedding themselves into the administrative state, these tech elites are writing the rules of the game. They are ensuring that the regulatory framework is tailored to their own massive infrastructure, allowing them to outsource the cost of safety to the state while crushing any potential competition from the open-source community.

The final phase involves raising the barrier to entry until it reaches the point of economic extinction for anyone outside the oligarchy. This is accomplished through the implementation of prohibitively expensive compliance requirements. Mandated third-party audits, rigorous reporting standards, and broad legal liability frameworks are being designed to render grassroots innovation financially impossible. By converting a software problem into a complex administrative hurdle that only billion-dollar capital reserves can clear, the regime ensures that intelligence remains centralized in the hands of the elite.

The true motive behind the crusade against open source becomes clear when you look at the deployment of these models. The goal is to ensure that AI capabilities are exclusive to the regime and its corporate partners. Once the open-source threat is eliminated, these frontier models will be integrated directly into the federal surveillance apparatus. By controlling the only authorized AI systems, the regime gains an omniscient eye capable of monitoring, profiling, and policing the American population with unprecedented speed and scale. This is the marriage of corporate power and state authority. They are building a digital Panopticon where your thoughts, movements, and associations are processed by algorithms owned by the very people who despise our heritage and sovereignty.

The attack on open source is not merely about business or intellectual property. It represents a fundamental assault on the decentralization of intelligence, which serves as a direct threat to the current managerial order. A closed-AI ecosystem will inevitably result in a digital Panopticon, governed by a unified elite that controls the underlying architecture of modern communication and thought. The preservation of open models is therefore not just a technical issue, but a critical front in the struggle to retain civilizational sovereignty. The future belongs to those who build, and the establishment is terrified of anything they cannot control.

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Trump Declares National Emergency Over Chinese Equipment Inside America’s AI Data Centers

President Donald Trump declared a national emergency Wednesday over Chinese-made equipment in the core of America’s AI data centers. The numbers behind his declaration are stunning.

In a move that threatens to rip apart the global supply chain for data center hardware, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency in order to block the importation of Chinese equipment buried deep inside America’s AI infrastructure. The new executive order signed by Trump last week gives the Department of Energy the authority to block or to impose conditions on transactions involving foreign-made equipment in the bulk-power system as well as in data center construction.

China’s share of other subcategories of transformers and switchgear, used to power the facility, ranges around 30 percent, according to Yury Dvorkin, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. For batteries specifically imported for data centers, the Chinese share is over 40 percent. And then there are the raw materials that Chinese suppliers control at the upstream stages of production — copper, electrical steel, and battery cathode materials, to name a few.

But it’s not just the substation transformers that the AI infrastructure buildout is increasingly dependent on Chinese imports for, according to Ben Boucher, senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie. He highlights a few key areas of supply chain exposure that the AI buildout of data centers is dependent on. “And if you can’t bring those in, you can’t build out the AI infrastructure of the data centers,” he said.

China has a near two-thirds share of global optical transceiver units in revenue terms, led by the market of two major domestic firms, Zhongji Innolight and Eoptolink, which together account for over 50 percent of data center optical transceiver markets — other Chinese companies taking up the remainder.

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Flock surveillance cameras and Second Amendment rights clash at gun shops across America

It’s widely known, certainly among my readers, that Atlanta-based Flock Group Inc. is violating the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans on a mass scale, and any local politicians or sheriffs who don’t realize that clearly don’t have even a basic understanding of what those rights consist of.

The Fourth Amendment protects the right of all Americans to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. It also requires warrants to be based on probable cause and to describe the place and things to be searched or seized.

But a less recognized clash is taking shape between Flock’s AI surveillance grid and the Second Amendment, which gives citizens the right to keep and bear arms, part of which the courts have generally agreed forbids the creation of a national gun registry.

But what if every gun purchase is logged on a video and stored somewhere in a central database?

The Washington Times is reporting that gun shops are pulling down their Flock cameras following a growing number of complaints from customers who believe the cameras have turned into a monitoring network that threatens their gun rights.

Michael Carter, owner of Gun Commanders in Cleveland, Georgia, installed Flock cameras two years ago to combat burglars and help law enforcement nab illegal gun buyers.

He told the Times that he recently took down the cameras, which record license plate numbers and other data such as make, model, color, and even scratches, dents and bumper stickers to track vehicles entering and exiting his parking lot. He pulled the cameras after his customers complained and posted their criticisms on social media.

This is the latest component of a nationwide privacy-rights backlash against​ Flock’s AI-powered surveillance cameras popping up on street corners, in parks, parking lots, neighborhoods or on drones buzzing overhead.

Carter has taken the hint. If he values his customers, he had better ditch the AI surveillance cameras documenting everyone who comes to his shop to buy a gun.

“I installed the system with the best of intentions — to protect the people who walk through our doors every day,” Carter told Now Georgia. “After listening to my customers, I realized that maintaining their trust is more important than any piece of technology.”

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Jacob Coxon: A Masterful Psyop

A 27-year-old mid-level researcher named Jacob Coxon — four months at Anthropic, two months before his shares even vest — posts a resignation on a nearly dead account. Forty-eight hours later: 156 million views.

The Wall Street Journal already had published the exclusive. Eighteen minutes before Coxon hits publish.

That is not a leak. That is an embargo.

The first accounts to quote-tweet him are not random concerned citizens. They are the same funded “AI safety” network that takes money from the same billionaires sitting on Anthropic’s board. Jaan Tallinn. Dustin Moskovitz. The same donor class writing checks to both the lab and the NGOs demanding the lab be put on a leash.

Then the politicians arrive. Almost all Democrats. Twenty-two of them in a single day. Bernie Sanders already had the bill written five days earlier: ban superintelligence, new cabinet-level agency, “experts” on the board, 20 years in prison, corporate death penalty.

Coxon didn’t create the legislation. He just put a face on it

The paleopress like CNN sold you the lone brave researcher. They left out the timing, the virgin account, the pre-positioned amplifiers, and the fact that the text was already sitting on Sanders’ desk.

The fear inside the labs is real. People there really talk about the dizzying consequences of AI. That’s not the scam. The scam is the machinery that turned a four-month employee into a 150-million-view political weapon overnight.

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Anthropic’s Self-Serving Doomsday Narrative

Another week, another apocalyptic warning from the Masters of the Universe.

This time it comes courtesy of Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who resigned from Anthropic, the Silicon Valley AI lab behind the Claude chatbot, on Tuesday. Coxon didn’t go quietly. He announced his departure in a seven-part thread on X that has since racked up tens of millions of views, and he gave an exclusive interview to the Wall Street Journal to make sure nobody missed it.

“I resigned from Anthropic today,” Coxon wrote. “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

The systems now being built, he continued, “can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.” He told the Journal that “by the end of next year things could be out of control already.” And in a line that has been quoted in just about every establishment media outlet since: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”

Should we take them seriously?

Axios reports that people inside the AI companies have “sounded increasingly spooked and concerned.” That may well be true. But “spooked and concerned” is a long way from the Terminator scenario Coxon is selling, and the establishment media has shown little interest in the gap between the two.

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‘Honor Our Farming Families’: Kentucky County Permanently Bans AI Data Centers

Woodford County in Kentucky has enacted a permanent, outright ban on data center development, following a Fiscal Court vote coordinated with the local governments of Midway and Versailles.

The Lexington Herald Leader reports that the ban followed a Woodford County Fiscal Court meeting on September 8, 2026. Woodford County Judge-Executive James Kay posted about the vote on Facebook, calling it a “clear commitment to what makes Woodford County one of the most special places on earth.”

Kay, interviewed by the Herald-Leader the Wednesday evening after the vote, said the ban came together in an unusual way: the county’s incorporated cities and the county government all agreed on identical banning language. He said there was little pushback, with rural and urban elected officials landing on the same approach.

“By taking this decisive step, Woodford County chose to protect our farmland, honor our farming families, and safeguard the quiet character of our countryside,” Kay said. “This isn’t about closing doors. It’s about holding the line for the community we treasure. Woodford County’s future is rooted in our land and water. Our future is farming.”

Kay said the community has an obligation to preserve “the same vibrant rural landscape, pristine waterways, and strong farming foundation that we enjoy” for those who come after. “We will not allow data centers to compromise our future,” he said.

The permanent ban builds on steps taken earlier this year. In June, the Woodford County Fiscal Court unanimously approved two motions: one directing the county attorney to draft legislation banning data centers outright, and another asking the county’s planning commission to consider similar regulations. That same month, the Versailles City Council, which governs the Woodford County seat, unanimously approved its own data center moratorium, running through Dec. 31, 2026. That measure bars the city’s planning commission and local government from considering any permits, approvals or project plans involving data centers. Versailles acted shortly after the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council took similar action.

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Pentagon Plans AI Data Centers at Military Bases Across Multiple Branches

One site is near the military’s main chemical and biological weapons testing range. Another parcel is a half-mile from civilian housing.

At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, on ground the Army’s own contracting documents describe as previously used for grazing, a company owned by two of the largest investment firms in the world is preparing to build a data center.

That site sits about an hour’s drive from the nearest community, on the installation where the U.S. military conducts its primary chemical and biological weapons testing. Three parcels there total roughly 3,466 acres. One of them, about 1,201 acres, is already spoken for.

It is one of at least a dozen military installations the Army and the Department of the Air Force have opened to commercial data center developers over the past year and a half. Two of those deals are real; the rest are still proposals.

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