u/bullcitytarheel

"Outrage started bubbling up last year when residents of an affluent subdivision named Annelise Park in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed their water pressure was unusually low.

When the county utility investigated, officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.

All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water. That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process...

While the utility charged the data center a higher construction rate for the unapproved water consumption, Tigert confirmed the utility did not penalize or fine the data center."

I live in the South and the drought we're all going through is awful. That a data center would intentionally attempt to steal water from the people of its state--and get away with it without so much as a fine for illegally siphoning water from residents--is fucking infuriating.

We need a moratorium on data centers, immediately, everywhere. Call your congresspeople as often as you can, or this is what we all can expect.

"The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever, and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now."

Amazon has opened internal investigations into workers for publicly supporting regulations on AI data centers. The company, in an obvious attempt to end-around their employees' rights, is claiming they were representing themselves as "spokespeople" for Amazon--Amazon's PR rep said they were speaking as "Amazonians" which is just the weirdest phrasing--and that, therefore, their speech shouldn't be considered a "personal political belief" protected under Seattle law. The staffers responded by filing a complaint with the Seattle Office of Civil Rights.

"Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company's software.

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Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.

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The discovery of NameTag in the live Meta AI app shows that Meta had begun shipping face-recognition code to users' phones while publicly describing it as something the company was still “thinking through.” In April, Meta said if it were to utilize face recognition, it wouldn't be rolled out without first taking "a very thoughtful approach." But WIRED found that as early as January, core components of the system had been integrated into software distributed to millions of people."

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Whenever I see stories like this it further my belief that the number one reason AI continues to not only survive, but be force-fed to us through every digital avenue of consumption, is because of its value to the surveillance state.