Water pricing, land grabs can clear way for nuclear powered data centers: perspective

Putting prices on water, the control of prime agricultural land, and a revitalized interest in nuclear energy may all converge when it comes to developing new AI data centers.

Massive AI data centers are most likely to be built on prime agricultural land and will require huge amounts of water and energy to operate.

But where will all that land, water, and energy come from, and how will they all be acquired?

“If we’re going to develop new data centers, they’re likely to go in prime agricultural land; they’re likely to require a whole lot of water, energy systems”

Katherine Daniell, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, 2024

Speaking at the 2024 WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, aka “Summer Davos,” in Dalian, China during a session called “Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2024” Australian National University School of Cybernetics director Katherine Daniell said:

“If we’re going to develop new data centers, they’re likely to go in prime agricultural land. They’re likely to require a whole lot of water, energy systems.”

Similarly, Moody’s Analytics senior economist Ermengarde Jabir said in a recent interview with “America’s Commercial Real Estate Show” that data centers increasingly need more land, power, and water.

“We still very much are in the exponential growth phase for data centers in terms of needing more physical space, more land, more power, more water for cooling just to continue feeding all of the Gen AI applications that are now coming online,” she said.

Indeed, a whole lot of water, land, and energy are already going into data centers and demand is only increasing.

Looking at water, “A large data center will use between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day,” according to the National Association for Industrial and Office Parks (NAIOP).

According to a 2021 report published in Nature, “Data center operators have a history of using drinking water for cooling, and most source their water from reservoirs because access to rainfall, grey water and surface water is seen as unreliable.”

In 2021 Google’s data centers in the US consumed 3.36 billion gallons of water across 15 locations.

In 2022, Microsoft’s global water consumption reached 1.7 billion gallons, representing a 34 percent spike from the previous year.

Silicon Angle reports that “ChatGPT [GPT-3 model] itself likely guzzled up the equivalent of a 500-milliliter bottle of water for each discussion that involved between 25 and 50 questions.”

With data centers already guzzling up billions of gallons of water, that quantity is only going to rise with more demand.

At the same time, unelected globalists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and COP meetings are telling us that they want to put prices on water just like they are doing with carbon.

“Beyond carbon [taxes] let’s think about other aspects of nature that are easier to quantify […] What about water?”

Gim Huay Neo, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, 2024

Speaking on another session at this year’s Summer Davos on the panel called “Understanding Nature’s Ledger,” WEF managing director Gim Huay Neo said that “integrating natural capital to our accounting framework” should happen soon, stating:

“We need to keep pushing while continuing to refine and enhance, and the best example I can give is carbon pricing.

“Today, carbon pricing, ETS [Emissions Trading Systems], carbon taxes really cover about 25 percent of global emissions.

“We should actually look at scaling this to cover all 100 percent of carbon emissions.

“And beyond carbon let’s think about other aspects of nature that are easier to quantify.

“We will probably not be able to quantify everything on day one, but what about water?

“That’s quite possible for us to start integrating systematically into current trading carbon pricing mechanisms.”

During the same session, University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership CEO Lindsay Hooper said that every part of the economy depends on nature, including water, and that in order to protect natural systems, one solution would be to “bring nature onto the balance sheet.”

“Every part of the economy is fundamentally dependent on nature […] The air that we breathe, the water we drink, the soil, the oceans that we need for the food that we need to consume, the minerals that we need as inputs to technology and into infrastructure. Without these forms of value, these forms of natural capital, we won’t have economies”

Lindsay Hooper, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, 2024

“At the moment, the way that decisions are made on an every day level within businesses and financial institutions is because we’re looking at financial data metrics that are not factoring-in nature,” said Hooper.

“Nature is treated within the economy as though it’s unlimited, and predominantly as though it’s free.”

Why does Hooper believe that nature should be factored-in to financial data metrics?

According to her, it’s because “every part of the economy is fundamentally dependent on nature,” including, “the air that we breathe, the water we drink, the soil, the oceans that we need for the food that we need to consume, the minerals that we need as inputs to technology and into infrastructure.

“Without these forms of value, these forms of natural capital, we won’t have economies. They are the fundamental building blocks of our economies.”

Water is an important natural asset that should be taxed like carbon, according to bankers, academics, and economists.

“We can’t do business on a dead planet. If we’re going to protect natural systems, one of the solutions is to bring nature onto the balance sheet”

Lindsay Hooper, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, 2024

With data centers requiring “a whole of water,” and with unelected globalists looking to put water and soil onto the balance sheet, the WEF says that “data centers are likely to go in prime agricultural land.”

Data centers in general take up 40 acres of land at the bare minimum, and seeing how Bill Gates is the largest private owner of agricultural land in the United States, his investments could yield ludicrous returns if data centers were to be built on his properties, although the sky — or rather the ground — is the limit on what that land could be used for.

And there appears to be a worldwide push to crackdown on farmers through taxes and regulations regarding their use of land and water, along with their greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, in Europe Denmark just became the first country to tax farmers for the greenhouse gases emitted by their livestock.

The Defender reporter Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., writes, “Criticisms are now being levied against Denmark’s new carbon tax, with some experts arguing that it amounts to an added burden for the agricultural sector — particularly small farmers.”

Meanwhile, farmers in Oregon, Idaho, and elsewhere are saying that the government is shutting them down with regulations and that they can’t afford to bring everything up to code.

The government is basically treating small farms like large corporations in the name of “water conservation,” according to many anecdotes from farmers.

What better way to take control of prime agricultural land than to drain farmers of all their capital by making them pay an absorbent amount of money they don’t have?

While farmers’ water rights are being siphoned off, the city of The Dalles, Oregon recently agreed to hand over data on Google’s water consumption for its massive data centers after settling a lawsuit with The Oregonian newspaper for that information.

According to The Oregonian:

In 2021, “Google’s data centers used 355 million gallons of The Dalles’ water,” which represented “29% of the city’s total water consumption.”

“The records show that Google’s water use is up threefold since 2017, the year before the company opened a third data center in The Dalles.”

Google is now expanding its presence in The Dalles with a $600 million project to build a fifth data center on its campus.

It’s been well-established that data centers will require massive amounts of prime agricultural land and water.

Now, governments are squeezing farmers because of their use of water.

Could the two be related?

What will it take to power these AI data centers that are so important to humanity’s future?

“We’ve actually seen recent cases of purchases of land for data centers being made close to independent power sources — nuclear power plants essentially“

Ermengarde Jabir, America’s Commercial Real Estate Show, 2024

Goldman Sachs estimates that data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030.

“At present, data centers worldwide consume 1-2% of overall power, but this percentage will likely rise to 3-4% by the end of the decade. In the US and Europe, this increased demand will help drive the kind of electricity growth that hasn’t been seen in a generation.” 

And according to Stream Data Centers, “Today’s 40+ megawatt data center requires a land area about the size of seven football fields and about as much utility power as used by 36,000 homes.”

By 2030 AI data centers will require 30 gigawatts of power to run, which is enough power to run at least 30 cities, says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

“They’re now talking about data centers that are going to be one gigawatt — that powers a city! There’s one tech company that I spoke to the CEO last week who said, ‘Right now with all their data centers is about five gigawatts; by 2030 they need 30 gigawatts.’ Thirty! The amount of power that’s needed to use AI has huge impact on society”

Larry Fink, WEF Special Meeting on Global Collaboration, Growth and Energy Development, 2024

Speaking at the WEF’s Special Meeting on Global Collaboration, Growth and Energy Development in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last April, Fink told the panel on “Investing Amid Global Fracture” that intermittent wind and solar were not going to cut it when it came to powering AI data centers.

Nuclear is the only feasible solution at this point.

“The amount of power these data centers need […] If we’re not going to use the fossil fuel — of course we need renewables — but how are we going to solve the problem? Then, you come to this solution that, OK, nuclear”

Kam Ghaffarian, WEF Special Meeting on Global Collaboration, Growth and Energy Development, 2024

Speaking at the same WEF meeting as Fink, but on a separate panel called “The Role of New Nuclear,” Axiom Space executive chairman Kam Ghaffarian said that when it came to powering data centers, “All of the energy formulas that we’ve been thinking about we’ve got to throw them out the door.”

Nuclear was his solution.

And getting back to the interview with Moody’s senior economist, Jabir says that “As the demand for data center explodes, the need for additional power becomes more pressing, and so what we are seeing is data centers trying to source their power from alternative sources of power.”

“We’ve actually seen recent cases of purchases of land for data centers being made close to independent power sources — nuclear power plants essentially.”

At present, “The owners of roughly a third of US nuclear-power plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity to new data centers needed to meet the demands of an artificial-intelligence boom,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Small Modular Reactors are being put forth as a potential means to generate between 20MW to 300MW of nuclear power and can be installed on-site at the data centers themselves.

These reactors can produce “about a third of the power generation of a traditional, large nuclear plant,” according to the BBC.

With the globalist agenda to phase out coal, oil, and natural gas in the name of net-zero, and with renewables like wind and solar not being reliable to power AI data centers, nuclear is the only carbon-free energy (CFE) source left on the table (unless there’s some secret government program somewhere suppressing an alternative source of so-called clean energy).

“AI has destroyed Google’s promise of carbon neutrality, with emissions rising 50% over the last five years”

Eva Roytburg, Fortune, 2024

Just this month, Google admitted that its carbon emissions had risen by 50 percent over the past five years due to “increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute.”

According to Google’s latest Environmental Report, the big tech giant repeatedly states that its ambition is to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy.

The entire report is replete with mentions and examples of Google’s investments and developments in geothermal, solar, and wind power, which would give the impression that that’s what they’re going for.

However, tucked away at the very bottom of the report in the footnotes there is one word that isn’t mentioned anywhere else in the report.

Can you guess what it is?

That’s right — Nuclear!

Footnote 112 of the report defines carbon-free energy as being “any type of electricity generation that doesn’t directly emit carbon dioxide, including (but not limited to) solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear.”

“We have a bold goal to reach net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030, supported by a goal to run on 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy on every grid where we operate”

Google, Environmental Report, 2024

Big tech stands to greatly benefit from the land grabs, the water pricings, and the war on farmers.

However, big tech is hardly alone.

Energy companies, big agriculture, real estate companies, land developers, and governments all stand to profit.

And not to mention the public and private entities that push for humans to eat less meat in favor of alternative proteins such as insects, plant-based foods, cultivated products grown in a lab, and fake meat.

The public-private benefits of land grabs and water rights may extend well-beyond the data centers that will process the most powerful technologies the world has ever seen.

All industries will rely on data centers and artificial intelligence in their operations.

In the end, these nuclear powered data centers can contribute to some of the greatest discoveries in human history, but they can also lead us towards totalitarian digital dystopia or extinction.

---

Image (AI-generated) by vecstock on Freepik