The social media lately is full of A. I. Generated graphics posted by people denouncing the construction of artifical intelligence data centers, or at least marked as such by the speculators. They note the enormous size of some of the proposed and often speculative data centers, being proposed by those who want to cash into the insane valuations of businesses that have artificial intelligence in their names.

The way I feel about it is most of it is fake, most of it is speculation. I don’t believe most of the claims about artifical intelligence, if anything it just feels like an enormous bubble of hype, completely unreal but the money and politicians are chasing it, because maybe there is money and votes through the promises of jobs attached to it. But color my skeptical. I don’t dispute AI produces some useful content and has some interesting and useful outputs, but much of it is just hype.

It’s not bad that people are aware of concerns of an over build out of data centers, but we also need some place to store the enormous amounts of data we are generating and processing on the internet both for artificial intelligence and otherwise. Not all proposals are good ones, and many are speculative, but we should not rule out a whole class of economic development and infrastructure building, just because some of the proposals are real stinkers.