In Boxtown, a neighbourhood on the southern edge of Memphis where the streets run flat toward the Mississippi and the air carries the metallic tang of the refinery, the noise arrived before anyone knew what it was. A low, continuous mechanical drone, the sound of dozens of gas turbines spinning around the clock. By the summer of 2025, residents of this predominantly Black community could stand in their gardens and watch the heat shimmer rising off a sprawling industrial site that had appeared, almost overnight, behind a chain of fences and non-disclosure agreements. The site was Colossus, the supercomputer built to train the artificial intelligence models of Elon Musk's company xAI. To power it, the company had installed as many as thirty-five portable methane gas turbines, most of them operating without the air permits that, as one veteran environmental lawyer put it, every set of turbines he had ever encountered was required to hold. It was the opening chapter of a fight that, by the spring of 2026, would harden into a federal lawsuit.

The people of Boxtown did not ask for a data centre. They were not consulted about it in any meaningful way. They derive almost none of the economic benefit from the chatbots and image generators that the facility's tens of thousands of graphics processors were assembled to produce. What they got instead was the exhaust: an estimated two thousand tonnes a year of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, according to filings cited by the Southern Environmental Law Center, layered onto a neighbourhood that the American Lung Association had already graded an F, in a part of Memphis that the local state representative Justin Pearson describes as hosting twenty-two of the thirty largest industrial polluters in the state of Tennessee. South Memphis has child asthma hospitalisation rates among the highest in the country and cancer rates that researchers have linked to its decades of accumulated industrial emissions. The turbines were simply the newest insult in a very long sentence.

Boxtown is not an aberration. It is a preview. As the AI boom collides with the physical limits of the electricity grid and the water table, the pattern visible in South Memphis is repeating across the United States with grim consistency. The communities absorbing the noise, the diesel particulates, the groundwater draw and the rising electricity bills of AI infrastructure are, again and again, the communities with the least political power to refuse it and the least access to the technology that demand is supposedly serving. The cloud, that weightless metaphor we use for the digital economy, turns out to have a very specific postcode, and it is rarely a wealthy one.

The Arithmetic of an Unequal Burden

Begin with the bills, because the bills are where the abstraction becomes a number on a household's kitchen table. In February 2026, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a non-partisan body founded by members of the United States Congress, published an analysis by its researcher Miguel Yañez-Barnuevo laying out the disparity in stark terms. Low-income residents, renters, and Black and Hispanic households in the United States can spend as much as twenty per cent of their income on energy, the institute found, against roughly three per cent for higher-income households. That is not a marginal gap. It is the difference between energy as a line item and energy as a recurring crisis, the kind that forces a choice between cooling the home and filling the fridge.

This is what researchers call energy burden, the share of household income consumed by keeping the lights on, the home warm in winter and survivable in summer. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which has tracked the metric for years, has found that one in four low-income households spends more than fifteen per cent of its income on energy, with the figure climbing far higher in particular cities. In Baltimore, the council reported, the most burdened quarter of low-income households pay an average of around a quarter of their income on energy bills alone. As of early 2026, roughly twenty-one million American households, about one in six, were behind on their utility payments.

Now layer the AI boom on top of that. The institute noted that utilities received requests in 2025 for at least seven hundred gigawatts of new power connections, a figure that exceeds the entire electricity consumption of the United States in 2023. Data centres are the engine of that demand. They do not simply consume electricity; by competing for scarce generation and transmission capacity, they push the wholesale price of power upward for everyone connected to the same grid. The national average electricity price had climbed to nineteen cents per kilowatt-hour by the end of 2025, a twenty-seven per cent jump from 2019, and the institute projected residential prices could rise by up to forty per cent by 2030 against 2025 levels. Utilities filed for more than twenty-nine billion dollars in rate increases in just the first half of 2025.

The crucial point is who pays. When a utility builds a transmission line or a gas plant to serve a hyperscale data centre, the cost is frequently socialised across the entire ratepayer base rather than borne by the company that triggered the spending. The household already spending a fifth of its income on energy has no buffer to absorb the increase. The trillion-dollar corporation behind the data centre does. The burden flows, predictably, downhill.

Two Hundred and Sixty-Seven Per Cent

The clearest single illustration of this dynamic came from a Bloomberg analysis published in 2025. Its reporters examined wholesale electricity prices across tens of thousands of locations on the American grid, using monthly nodal data aggregated by the energy analytics platform Grid Status. The finding was arresting: in some areas near significant data centre activity, wholesale electricity cost as much as two hundred and sixty-seven per cent more for a single month than five years earlier. More than seventy per cent of the nodes recording the steepest increases sat within fifty miles of major data centre clusters.

Those wholesale costs do not stay wholesale. They are passed through to households and businesses, padded with the charges utilities levy to maintain and expand the network. The Bloomberg figure and the energy-burden figure are two ends of the same wire: the data centre boom raises the price of the commodity, and the people least able to absorb a rise pay the largest share of their income for it.

Virginia offers the textbook case, because Virginia is where the modern data centre industry was effectively born. The corridor running through Loudoun, Prince William and Fairfax counties in the state's north, known to the industry as Data Center Alley, hosts around four-fifths of Virginia's data centre capacity and a substantial fraction of the world's internet traffic. In December 2024, the state's own Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, a non-partisan watchdog known as JLARC, delivered a sober assessment to legislators. If the industry continued to grow at an unconstrained pace, the commission warned, Virginia would struggle to supply enough power, and ratepayers would help foot the bill for the infrastructure the buildout required. The average residential customer of Dominion Energy, the report estimated, could see generation and transmission costs rise by between fourteen and thirty-seven dollars a month by 2040, independent of inflation. Virginia, unsurprisingly, was among the regions Bloomberg identified as having seen wholesale increases of up to two hundred and sixty-seven per cent over five years.

The same pressure shows up in the wholesale capacity markets that keep the grid reliable. PJM Interconnection, the operator responsible for the grid across thirteen states and the District of Columbia, ran its most recent capacity auction in December 2025. Prices hit a record high of 16.4 billion dollars, the third record-setting auction in a row. PJM's independent market monitor calculated that data centre load accounted for around 6.5 billion dollars of that total, roughly forty per cent, much of it relating to data centres not yet built. The bill for that demand lands on every household in the region, including the one already a payment behind.

The Squeeze on Time and Steel

There is a second, less visible mechanism through which the AI boom inflates bills, and it has to do with the physics of building power plants faster than the world can supply the parts. The surge in demand has collided with a supply chain that simply cannot keep pace, and the resulting scarcity radiates outward as cost. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute's analysis traced the squeeze in unsettling detail. The cost of constructing a new natural gas plant, it reported, had roughly tripled since 2022, to around two thousand dollars per kilowatt of capacity. Refurbishing an ageing coal plant to keep it running could now run to as much as 1.3 billion dollars. The wait for a single large gas turbine, the workhorse component of new fossil generation, had stretched to as long as seven years, and the time needed to build a gas plant from start to finish had grown from roughly four and a half years to at least six.

Each of those numbers is, in effect, a tax on every household sharing the grid. When utilities must pay triple the price for new generation and wait years longer to bring it online, they recover those costs through the rates they charge, spread across the broad base of customers rather than the data centres whose appetite created the shortage. The household already spending a fifth of its income on energy does not get to opt out. It pays the premium embedded in every kilowatt-hour, one it had no hand in creating and draws no benefit from.

The timing dimension matters because it converts a temporary surge in demand into a long-lived cost. Generation built today at inflated prices will sit on the rate base for decades, its expense amortised across a generation of bills. A community that absorbs a data centre in 2026 is not signing up for a one-year inconvenience; it is committing its children to paying down the infrastructure for years. The asymmetry between the speed at which AI demand materialises and the slowness with which the grid can answer it guarantees that the gap will be filled, in the interim, by the cheapest and dirtiest expedient to hand. In Memphis, that expedient was a field of unpermitted gas turbines. Elsewhere it is the deferral of coal-plant retirements that public-health advocates had spent years fighting to secure. The machines need power now, and now is precisely when clean power is hardest to build.

A Map of Old Wounds

Here is where the story turns from arithmetic to geography, and the geography is not random. The single most revealing document of the past year is a report published in December 2025 by the Kapor Foundation, an Oakland-based organisation focused on equity in technology. Titled The Unequal Burden of Data Centers, it mapped California's operational and planned data centres against the state's environmental health data and produced figures that ought to be impossible to ignore.

Eighty-two per cent of California's data centres, the foundation found, are sited in communities already classified as facing poor air quality, as measured by diesel particulate levels. Sixty-five per cent sit in areas with the highest level of groundwater threat. Seventy-nine per cent are in census tracts carrying the greatest burden of hazardous waste. These facilities are not being dropped into pristine landscapes. They are being stacked on top of communities that have already been designated, by the state's own screening tools, as the places carrying the most pollution.

The report's three case studies read like a tour through the history of American environmental racism. Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco, scoring in the seventy-fifth to ninety-second percentiles on California's CalEnviroScreen tool, hosts a colocated forty-five-megawatt data centre and a thirty-six-megawatt standalone facility. This is a neighbourhood whose Black population grew during the Second Great Migration to work the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a site so contaminated by chemical and radiological waste that the federal government designated it a Superfund site in 1989. Generations of redlining concentrated Black residents there, in what historians and residents alike describe as a sacrifice zone, with cancer rates and chronic-disease hospitalisations running well above regional averages. Now the cloud has come to Bayview, and it has come because Bayview was already deemed a place where industry goes.

Del Paso Heights in Sacramento, scoring in the eighty-fourth to ninety-fourth percentiles, sits near two data centre campuses. Hawthorne, in Los Angeles County, hosts a twenty-eight-megawatt facility in a community scoring as high as the ninety-fifth percentile. The pattern across all three is the same: the infrastructure of the most futuristic industry on earth is being routed, with near-mechanical precision, into the neighbourhoods that an earlier century's discriminatory policies already hollowed out. The Kapor Foundation projected that diesel-generator emissions from these facilities could contribute to a meaningful share of asthma deaths in affected communities by 2030, and noted that California's data centres consumed around seventeen billion gallons of water in 2023, roughly the annual usage of more than four hundred thousand residents.

This is the heart of the matter. The decisions about where to build AI infrastructure are not being made on a blank map, but on one already scarred by a century of choices about whose neighbourhoods could be sacrificed. Land is cheaper where the air is already bad. Political resistance is weaker where residents have been told for generations that their objections do not count. The cold logic of site selection, optimising for cheap land, available power and minimal friction, reliably points the bulldozers toward the communities with the least power to say no. The industry does not have to be malicious to produce this outcome. It only has to be efficient.

The Thirst of the Machines

Electricity is the burden that makes headlines, but water may be the one that bites hardest where it can least be spared. Cooling tens of thousands of densely packed processors generates enormous heat, and the cheapest way to shed it has long been evaporative cooling, which consumes water directly. Estimates across the industry suggest a single large data centre can draw up to five million gallons a day, the equivalent of a town of tens of thousands. Loudoun County, the heart of Virginia's Data Center Alley, used around nine hundred million gallons across its roughly two hundred facilities in 2023.

The xAI Colossus facility in Memphis was reported to draw up to a million gallons a day for cooling. Memphis sits atop the Memphis Sand aquifer, a source of unusually pure drinking water that residents have long regarded as a civic birthright. The prospect of a supercomputer drinking from it, alongside the gas turbines fouling the air above it, sharpened the sense among residents that something they held in common was being quietly enclosed for a purpose that served someone else.

The scale of the coming water demand is only beginning to be understood. A research team at the University of California, Riverside, working with Caltech and led by the associate professor Shaolei Ren, modelled the additional water infrastructure that American communities will need to absorb the peaks in data centre cooling demand. Without significant efficiency gains, the team projected, data centre cooling within four years could require between 697 million and 1.45 billion gallons of additional peak water capacity per day, a figure roughly equivalent to the entire daily water supply of New York City. The cost of building that capacity, the researchers estimated, could run anywhere from ten to fifty-eight billion dollars. As with electricity, the question is not only how much, but who pays, and the answer once again tends toward the ratepayers rather than the corporations driving the demand.

The cruelty of the geography compounds here too. Many of the communities targeted for new data centres sit in water-stressed regions of the American South and West, where drought is a recurring fact of life and the residents competing with the machines for the aquifer are, disproportionately, the ones with the least. To draw down a community's water for cooling, where that water is already scarce and unequally distributed, is to convert a shared resource into a private input in precisely the places least able to absorb the loss.

When the Lawsuit Becomes the Only Voice

The communities on the receiving end of this are not passive. Boxtown organised. By mid-2025, residents had submitted more than two thousand comments to the Shelby County Health Department, the great majority opposing the gas turbines and demanding that xAI power its facility with something cleaner. The Southern Environmental Law Center, acting on behalf of the NAACP, issued a sixty-day notice of intent to sue over the original Colossus facility, alleging that xAI had violated the Clean Air Act by installing and operating turbines that, under the law's Prevention of Significant Deterioration requirements, should have been treated as a major source of pollution requiring full permitting and public oversight. That notice, it turned out, was only the opening move. In response, xAI removed the unpermitted turbines at Colossus and obtained permits for the fifteen that remained, and for a moment the pressure appeared to have worked.

It had not. Rather than abandon the strategy that had drawn the legal fire, xAI exported it. The company built a second facility, Colossus 2, to power its Grok chatbot, and this time installed the gas turbines across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, while the data centre itself sat in South Memphis, Tennessee. Twenty-seven turbines went up, capable of as much as four hundred and ninety-five megawatts, and once again they were switched on before any air permit had been obtained, the same copy-and-paste approach carried one jurisdiction over. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality granted a permit for them in March 2026, but only after they had already been running. By then xAI had added six more unpermitted turbines, bringing the total to thirty-three and the estimated emissions to around two thousand five hundred and eight tons a year of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, which the plaintiffs call potentially the single largest industrial source of NOx in the greater Memphis area.

So the litigation escalated to match. In February 2026, the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, acting on behalf of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP and the national NAACP, sent a fresh notice of intent to sue over Colossus 2. On the fourteenth of April 2026, the NAACP filed an actual lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, naming xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech and alleging Clean Air Act violations for installing and operating the turbines before any permit was granted. On the sixth of May, the plaintiffs asked the court for a preliminary injunction to halt the unpermitted pollution at once. “A data center should not be a potential death sentence,” said Abre' Conner, the NAACP's director of environmental and climate justice, accusing the company of “a blatant disregard for the law” in expanding an unpermitted power plant despite decades of clear direction for permitting. Laura Thoms, an enforcement director at Earthjustice, put the emergency motion plainly: “We're asking the judge to halt all unpermitted pollution and make sure xAI follows the law.”

The voices in that fight are worth recording precisely, because they belong to real people speaking for a real place. KeShaun Pearson, who directs the group Memphis Community Against Pollution, framed the failure as one of accountability: “Our local leaders are entrusted with protecting us from corporations violating our right to clean air, but we are witnessing their failure.” Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, captured the absurdity of the permitting claim plainly: “Every single time I've ever seen turbines anywhere, they have an air permit.” His colleague Amanda Garcia put the equity stakes in a single sentence: “No one should be above the law, and it is Memphis communities who have been paying the price for xAI's unpermitted pollution.” Dorthy Seawood, a resident whose mother died of cancer, reduced it to the human floor beneath all the legal argument: “It's not fair to us that we have to deal with whatever comes out of this plant.”

There is something telling in the fact that litigation became the community's primary instrument of voice. A neighbourhood excluded from the planning, bound out of the conversation by non-disclosure agreements, that learned of the turbines from the noise and the satellite imagery rather than any public process, was left with the courts as its main avenue of objection, and the live federal case now pending in Mississippi is the measure of how far that avenue has had to be pushed. That is a symptom of a deeper failure, not a sign the system is working. When the only way a community can register its interests is to sue after the fact, and then to sue again when the same company relocates the same conduct over a state line, the decision-making process has already failed the test of fairness. The harm was done first, and the process invoked afterwards.

The same script is playing in dozens of other places. Across the country, residents show up to county zoning meetings, file public-records requests, form coalitions and discover, often, that the deals were struck before they were ever told. The asymmetry is structural. On one side sit corporations with effectively unlimited legal and lobbying budgets, the promise of jobs and tax revenue, and the ear of local officials eager to land a marquee investment. On the other sit residents with day jobs, a folding table of leaflets and the slow machinery of administrative complaint.

The Vocabulary of Energy Justice

To name what is happening here, it helps to borrow a framework that scholars have spent the past decade refining. The energy researcher Benjamin Sovacool and his colleagues have argued that questions of energy can be assessed through the lens of energy justice, which they break into distinct components. There is distributive justice, concerning how the benefits and burdens of the energy system are spread across society. There is procedural justice, concerning whether the people affected by energy decisions get a genuine say in making them. And there is recognition justice, concerning whether marginalised and vulnerable communities are seen and given special consideration rather than treated as invisible or expendable.

Map the data centre boom onto that framework and the failures line up with uncomfortable neatness. Distributively, the benefits of AI, the productivity gains, the valuations, the convenience of the tools, accrue overwhelmingly to affluent users and shareholders, while the burdens, the particulates, the noise, the water draw, the higher bills, settle on low-income communities of colour. Procedurally, those communities are routinely excluded from the decisions, sometimes literally bound to silence by non-disclosure agreements, and left to litigate after the fact. And in terms of recognition, the entire logic of siting depends on these neighbourhoods having already been classified, by an earlier era's policies, as places where pollution is acceptable. All three forms of justice fail at once, and they fail in the same direction.

This is not an argument against artificial intelligence, nor the infrastructure that runs it. The grid will be built; the demand is real. The argument is about whose interests sit at the centre of the decisions about where and how it goes up. At present, the answer is plainly the companies building the facilities and the officials competing to host them. The residents who breathe the air and drink the water are, at best, an afterthought to be managed, and at worst an obstacle to be routed around. Taking the burden seriously means inverting that order of priority, and it is worth being concrete about what that would require.

What Taking It Seriously Would Look Like

The first and most obvious lever is who pays. If a data centre triggers new generation, transmission or water infrastructure, the cost should fall on the company that caused it rather than being smeared across every household in the region. Regulators call this cost causation, and it is not a radical idea; it is simply the principle that the party generating a cost should bear it. Several states have begun moving this way, creating special rate classes for very large electricity users designed to insulate ordinary ratepayers from the AI buildout. The household spending a fifth of its income on energy should not be subsidising the cooling of a supercomputer. That single reform, applied consistently, would change the economics of siting overnight, because much of the appeal of a given location lies precisely in the ability to externalise these costs onto others.

The second lever is procedural, and it goes to the heart of the recognition failure. Communities asked to host this infrastructure should have a genuine, early and binding voice in the decision. That means an end to the non-disclosure agreements that kept Boxtown in the dark until the turbines were already running. It means meaningful public hearings before permits are issued rather than litigation after harm is done. It means transparency about water draw, emissions and grid impact as a condition of approval, not a fact prised loose by journalists and lawyers months later. A process in which the affected community learns of the project from the noise in their gardens is no process at all.

The third lever is distributive, and it asks a harder question: if a community is going to bear the burden, what does it get in return? Genuine community benefit agreements, legally enforceable rather than rhetorical, could direct a share of the value back to the host neighbourhood, as funded energy efficiency and weatherisation, rooftop solar, lowered bills, clean-up of legacy contamination, or direct investment in the schools and clinics that sit in the turbines' shadow. There is a particular logic to using the infrastructure to reduce the host community's own energy burden, closing the loop between the demand the facility creates and the bills the neighbours pay.

The fourth lever is recognition itself, the most demanding because it requires looking at the map differently. The screening tools California and other states already use, the very tools that revealed eighty-two per cent of the state's data centres sitting in poor-air-quality communities, could be turned from a diagnosis into a constraint. A siting regime serious about justice would treat a high cumulative pollution burden not as a green light, a sign of cheap land and weak resistance, but as a red one, a reason to look elsewhere or demand far more in return. The communities that have already given the most to a century of industry are precisely the ones that should be asked to give the least to the next.

None of this is technically difficult. The water can be recycled; xAI itself proposed an eighty-million-dollar grey-water reclamation plant in Memphis once the pressure mounted, which rather proves the point that cleaner approaches were available all along and simply not chosen until someone forced the question. Cooling can be made far more efficient. Clean generation can be built ahead of demand rather than gas turbines bolted on in a hurry. The obstacles are not engineering ones. They are obstacles of cost, speed and political will, resolved at present in favour of whoever is building fastest and against whoever is breathing hardest.

The Postcode and the Promise

Return, at the end, to Boxtown, and to the woman standing in her garden listening to a sound she did not invite, breathing air made worse by a machine she will likely never use to produce intelligence she will likely never own. Her postcode was poisoned long before xAI arrived; the shipyards and refineries and gas plants saw to that, decade by decade, decision by decision. The data centre is only the latest layer, but it is a revealing one, because it shows that the most advanced industry humanity has yet built is reproducing the oldest pattern of harm rather than escaping it. And the fight has not ended with the first turbines; it has followed the company across a state line into Mississippi, where a federal judge is now being asked whether the law still means what it says.

The promise of artificial intelligence is routinely framed in the language of universal benefit, a rising tide of productivity and discovery that will lift everyone. But a tide does not arrive everywhere at once, and the physical foundation of this one is being laid in specific places, on specific people, who are absorbing the costs of a future from which they have been largely excluded. The defining question of the AI build-out is not whether the machines will think. It is whose lungs, whose water table and whose electricity bill will pay for the thinking, and whether the people answering that question can be persuaded that a community's powerlessness is not the same thing as its consent.

There is nothing inevitable about the geography of the cloud. It was chosen, node by node, permit by permit, and what was chosen can be chosen differently. To take the burden seriously is, in the end, a simple proposition: to insist that the people who breathe the exhaust of the AI economy be treated as something more than the terrain on which it is built. Boxtown, and now Southaven, are asking that question already, in courtrooms and council chambers and comment letters. The rest of the country will be asking it soon enough, because the turbines are coming, and the only thing still undecided is whose garden they will hum behind next.

References

1. Yañez-Barnuevo, Miguel. “Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills.” Environmental and Energy Study Institute, 24 February 2026. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-power-demands-are-contributing-to-higher-energy-bills
2. Kapor Foundation. “The Unequal Burden of Data Centers: An Examination of the Environmental and Public Health Impacts on Communities in California.” December 2025. https://kaporfoundation.org/datacenters-envt-health/
3. Bloomberg. “How AI Data Centers Are Sending Your Power Bill Soaring.” 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/
4. American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “Study: One in Four Low-Income Households Spend Over 15% of Income on Energy Bills.” September 2024. https://www.aceee.org/press-release/2024/09/study-one-four-low-income-households-spend-over-15-income-energy-bills
5. Ugwa, Jennifer. “In South Memphis, Elon Musk's Colossus Operated Gas Turbines Without Appropriate Permits, Residents and Activists Claim.” Inside Climate News, 17 July 2025. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-data-center-gas-turbines-memphis/
6. Southern Environmental Law Center. “xAI Built an Illegal Power Plant to Power Its Data Center.” 2025. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-to-power-its-data-center/
7. NAACP. “Elon Musk's xAI Threatened with Lawsuit Over Air Pollution from Memphis Data Center.” 2025. https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit-over-air-pollution-memphis-data-center-filed-behalf
8. Southern Environmental Law Center. “Civil Rights Group Sues xAI for Illegal Pollution from Data Center Power Plant.” April 2026. https://www.selc.org/press-release/civil-rights-group-sues-xai-for-illegal-pollution-from-data-center-power-plant/
9. Earthjustice. “NAACP Sues xAI for Illegal Pollution from Data Center Power Plant.” April 2026. https://earthjustice.org/press/2026/xai-sued-for-illegal-power-plant
10. Earthjustice. “NAACP Asks Court for Emergency Action to Stop Illegal Air Pollution from xAI's Data Center Power Plant.” May 2026. https://earthjustice.org/press/2026/naacp-asks-court-for-emergency-action-to-stop-illegal-air-pollution-from-xais-data-center-power-plant
11. Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. “Data Centers in Virginia.” Commonwealth of Virginia, December 2024. https://jlarc.virginia.gov/pdfs/reports/Rpt598-2.pdf
12. Utility Dive. “Data Centers Were 40% of PJM Capacity Costs in Last Auction: Market Monitor.” December 2025. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/data-centers-pjm-capacity-auction/808951/
13. UC Riverside News. “Data Center Water Spikes Could Cost Billions.” University of California, Riverside, 9 March 2026. https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2026/03/09/data-center-water-spikes-could-cost-billions
14. Sovacool, Benjamin K., and Michael H. Dworkin. “Energy Justice: Conceptual Insights and Practical Applications.” Applied Energy, 2015. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261915000082
15. Carleton College. “History and Legacy of Environmental Racism in the Bayview Hunters Point Neighborhood.” https://www.carleton.edu/chemistry/diversity-equity-inclusion-and-respect/our-actions-as-chemists-have-consequences/history-and-legacy-of-environmental-racism-in-the-bayview-hunters-point-neighborhood/
16. World Resources Institute. “From Energy Use to Air Quality, the Many Ways Data Centers Affect US Communities.” https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts
17. TechPolicy.Press. “Data Center Boom Risks Health of Already Vulnerable Communities.” https://www.techpolicy.press/data-center-boom-risks-health-of-already-vulnerable-communities/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Health Metrics: * bw= 234.24 lbs. * bp= 139/82 (71)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:10 – 1 seafood salad and cheese sandwich * 08:40 – cheese and saltine crackers * 11:50 – 1 pb&j sandwich * 13:50 – cooked, sliced sweet potatoes * 16:10 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:30 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:50 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 11:10 – listening to the pregame show for today's MLB game between the Pirates and the Phillies * 14:45 – and the Pirates win, 6 to 1. * 15:40 – called Health Insurance Co. to activate new card * 17:15 – listening to relaxing music while sorting clothes

Chess: * 10:00 – moved in all pending CC games

This is the first of a series of posts about the questions on the October 19 referendum in Alberta. While the public debate has centered exclusively on the separation question, I believe the original nine questions are even more dangerous.

About the separation question: I was a canvasser for the Forever Canadian petition. People were literally lining up to sign. Both from my personal experience, and from everything I have read and heard about it, I am certain that the remain vote will win handily, provided remain voters turn out in sufficient numbers.

The original question that Mitch Sylvestre proposed read as follows:

Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada to become an independent state?

I am not a constitutional expert, but I doubt Canada's Constitution allows for the possibility of seceding. First Nations people certainly agree, as Canada's treaties with First Nations are recognized and affirmed in the Constitution itself, and Alberta independence would certainly go against them. So the question should be dead in the water. It has become a matter for the courts.

Where does the UCP government stand on this? They have done what they could to make it easier for the separatists to get their day in the sun. They lowered the number of signatures required for the application to be approved, they have appealed the court rulings against the question, and there is no doubt that some members of the UCP caucus are separatists. But the success of the Forever Canadian petition ultimately forced the government's hand, and they added a tenth question to the already crowded October 19 referendum:

Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?

I won't dwell on the detail that there is in fact no such “legal process required under the Canadian Constitution”, because, again, the Constitution does not contemplate secession. Given the question, many people's immediate reaction was: why such a convoluted way of asking whether Alberta should remain in Canada, or leave?

If you think this is convoluted, try reading the question on Quebec's 1980 referendum:

The Government of Quebec has made public its proposal to negotiate a new agreement with the rest of Canada, based on the equality of nations; this agreement would enable Quebec to acquire the exclusive power to make its laws, levy its taxes and establish relations abroad – in other words, sovereignty – and at the same time to maintain with Canada an economic association including a common currency; any change in political status resulting from these negotiations will only be implemented with popular approval through another referendum; on these terms, do you give the Government of Quebec the mandate to negotiate the proposed agreement between Quebec and Canada?

Say what now? This was even more convoluted, and for the same reason: If the Constitution does not allow for unilateral separation, as Mitch Sylvestre and his friends would have it, then separation can only come about as a result of negotiation with the rest of Canada. Although the UCP's question doesn't talk about negotiation, that is probably the “legal process” they talk about. In either case, the negotiated agreement would then have to be put to the people in a second referendum. Sylvestre, like Parizeau before him, would prefer a unilateral declaration of independence, but Canada's answer would be, as we used to say when we were kids, “Oh yeah? You and what army?”

Another criticism of the Alberta question was that it wasn't a yes/no question. But that's not a problem. It is still a binary question. Like the Brexit question of 2016, the options are remain or leave.

So the UCP government's tenth question is valid. And, to repeat what I wrote earlier, I am certain that the remain vote will win handily, provided remain voters turn out in sufficient numbers.

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So why am I writing these posts? I believe that the UCP's real agenda lies in the other nine questions. Hardly anybody is paying attention to these, but if the UCP succeeded in getting sufficient support for them, they would justify completing a process that started years ago, and push Alberta in a very destructive and irreversible direction. In this series, I want to take a detailed look at the other nine referendum questions. But first, in the next post, I want to discuss what the UCP's long game is.

#fiction #theatre #bureaucracy #austerity

Warning: Contains spoilers

A statement commonly misattributed to Joseph Stalin holds that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is only a statistic. Its perseverance attests to its fundamental truth. Not only do our minds glance off human misery on a massive scale, but our media culture routinely elevates individual tragedies over mass suffering in the service of ‘human interest’. Catastrophes require avatars to be relatable, and individual victims such as Alan Kurdi, Renée Good or Anne Frank will come to stand in for all those who shared their fate.

And where real life does not readily yield relatable faces for a tragedy, art may create them. I, Daniel Blake stands in this tradition, of social realism which centres the misery inflicted on the working class. The movie, and now stage show, is the j’accuse of veteran filmmaker Ken Loach, and a testament to the thousands of Britons who were socially murdered as a result of austerity. Silent victims whose deaths resulted from the impersonal technocratic machinery of the state and the invisible hand of the market. The movie premiered in 2016 when the UK had been in the vice of austerity for eight years. Now, over ten years later, Daniel Blake has come to the stage to tell his story once again.

Like the movie before it, I, Daniel Blake moves inexorably and mercilessly towards its grim conclusion. One does not, after all, mention a stroke in Act I for everyone to live happily after by the end. It is the journey, not the destination, which is salient and I, Daniel Blake takes the audience on a dismal tour of all the dehumanising cruelties of the British workfare state, illuminating what happens when a government decides to deal with the messiness of human existence by smothering its beautiful and irreducible variety with the cold impersonality of standardised forms, checklists and scripts.

We are introduced to the titular Daniel Blake just as he is signed off for work after having suffered a stroke. A fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of Britain’s infamous ‘work capability assessments’ – with Daniel labouring under the misapprehension he is to speak about his condition rather than fill out a predefined survey – means that the state deems him fit to work. Social security payments thus become contingent on a pointless search for a job, plunging Daniel into a bureaucratic nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. There are real parallels here to The Trial, with Daniel prevented from appealing the outcome of his assessment until it is formally communicated to him by the mysterious, unreachable authority of the official assessor. With his appeal stuck in the purgatory of the interminable machinery of the Department for Work and Pensions, Daniel must participate in a charade of applying for jobs he is unfit to perform to avoid his social security payments being sanctioned.

While pursuing his quest for the elusive appeal, Daniel meets Katie and her daughter Daisy. They have been relocated from London to Newcastle as the only place where they could secure more than a studio apartment to live, only to find the place unsuitable for human habitation. Offering up his carpentry skills to help sort the place out, Daniel and Katie strike up a warm but uneasy friendship, hampered at times by the differences in their backgrounds and the choices they have to make to survive.

Daniel and Katie’s persistent attempts at mutual aid and human connection serve as the obvious counterpoint to the callous British state bureaucracy. I, Daniel Blake is not exactly subtle with its juxtapositions, with Daniel and Katie’s humanity and empathy frequently contrasted with the robotic indifference of various functionaries. Daniel in particular is presented as a more or less flawless human: a kind and caring old man, suffering emotionally and physically from the death of his wife, whose only fault is to have been left behind by the times and the state he expected to look after him. This bluntness is even more pronounced on stage, where emotion or exposition are delivered by exhortatory monologue, but unlike in the The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, here primary colour emotions serve a purpose and reinforce rather than detract from the potency of the play.

Because I, Daniel Blake is of course not about a man named Daniel Blake. It is about the 190,000 to 330,000 nameless victims killed by austerity. Daniel Blake does not exist to go on a hero’s journey, but to give a face to the faceless dead, hidden behind the convenient statistical euphemisms of ‘excess deaths’ and ‘increased mortality’. If Daniel Blake is improbably sympathetic, it is as a pre-emptive strike against the conservative’s justification that surely the poor must have brought their fate upon themselves. Against this claim, we invoke Stafford Beer’s dictum that, no:

The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.

Thus, a ‘welfare’ system that routinely finds sick and disabled people fit to work and forces the unemployed to look for employment that doesn’t exist does not exist to deliver collective social security, but instead serves to protect the interests of an imaginary taxpayer and to maintain the reserve army of labour. As Stephanie Kelton pointed out, ‘natural’ unemployment and its attendant suffering is a policy choice, and yet we still blame those unable to find work for their predicament.

The irony of social realism is of course that it is more popular with the bleeding-heart progressive middle classes than with the working class that is its subject, and one assumes this is even more true for an art form such as theatre. Given the audience will likely have been familiar with the story, one can be forgiven for asking what the point is of bringing I, Daniel Blake to the stage a decade after the original.

I, Daniel Blake answers this challenge through a clever piece of self-referential staging, projecting on a banner over the stage snippets of parliamentary speeches given since the movie came out. We hear a coterie of politicians justifying austerity and, in one instance, even denouncing and deriding I, Daniel Blake itself. The point is resounding clear. Ten years later, the victims and their relatives have not had justice. The social murder perpetrated through austerity remains barely acknowledged, while its architects enjoy esteemed positions at the British Museum, prominent charities, or to launder the reputation of predatory social media. It is national amnesia, promoted by an unaccountable political class and facilitated by a compliant media, against which Daniel Blake stands, and continues to stand, to remind us that 330,000 victims were not blips on computer screens or national insurance numbers, but human beings. Daniel Blake cannot rest until justice is done, and neither should we.

Notes & Suggestions

• Vacuous promises of ‘change’ and official sloganeering about the ‘end of austerity’ notwithstanding, austerity remains a reality for many citizens in the UK and abroad. If you need help navigating the Byzantine social security system, organisations such as Citizens Advice or Disability Rights UK are able to help.
• Possibly the best demonstration of the moral void at the heart of the British establishment, as well as the destructive focus on political etiquette over the material impact of political decisions, was the political and media class’ stronger condemnation of former shadow-chancellor John McDonnell’s description of the Grenfell disaster as social murder, than of those responsible for the disaster itself.
• Justice fails where power cannot be held to account. Doing so requires collective organising, through political parties, trade unions, community action groups and other campaigning organisations. If you are not already involved with any of these, seek one out. There are more likeminded people near you than you think.

Anticlimactic

The World Cup is a great festival for the world. Not perfect, it is one of the few events where people from all over the planet come together to play.

For that, it is also strangely anticlimactic. The group stage brings abundance – 48 teams this year – and every day comes with countless stories about the teams, their countries, players, and fans.

In the knockout phase, the matches are supposed to be better because of the more balanced pairings and the all-or-nothing outcome. Also, the number of teams dwindles exponentially until the final, the most important game of football/soccer, where only two are left.

By then, most of the world already doesn’t care.

Checkmating the White King

There's always chess going on here in the Roscoe-verse. Here's a Correspondence Chess (CC) game I won this morning playing Black by catching the White King in a Bishop-Rook-pawn-Queen combination checkmate on my 43rd move. This game started on the 16th of June and ended this morning. The graphic above shows position of pieces on our board at geme's end, and our full move record follows: 1. d4 h6 2. Bf4 Nf6 3. e3 e6 4. Bd3 d5 5. Nc3 Bd6 6. Bg3 O-O 7. Nf3 Nbd7 8. Ne5 Nxe5 9. dxe5 Bxe5 10. f4 Bxc3+ 11. bxc3 b6 12. Qf3 Bb7 13. e4 dxe4 14. Bxe4 Bxe4 15. Qe3 Bxg2 16. Rg1 Nd5 17. Qf2 Be4 18. c4 Nc3 19. a4 Bf5 20. Bh4 Ne4 21. Qg2 Qxh4+ 22. Kd1 Nc3+ 23. Kc1 g6 24. Re1 Qxf4+ 25. Kb2 Ne4 26. Red1 Nf2 27. Rf1 Qd4+ 28. Kb1 Ne4 29. a5 Qxc4 30. Qf3 Nd2+ 31. Kb2 Nxf3 32. Rxf3 Qxc2+ 33. Ka3 Qc5+ 34. Kb3 Rfd8 35. axb6 cxb6 36. Rc3 Rd3 37. Rxd3 Bxd3 38. Kb2 Rc8 39. Rxa7 Qc3+ 40. Ka2 Qc2+ 41. Ka3 Rc3+ 42. Kb4 Rb3+ 43. Ka4 Bb5# 0-1

And the adventure continues.