Where the data centers will end up
The Permian Basin's commercial landowners will warmly welcome the data center you keep out of your community
It brings me no joy when I have to tell people that local data center opposition, like a popped AI bubble, won’t do much to stop the race to superintelligence, and that we’ll need strong international agreements instead.
But it’s true. Just as the AI chips would flow to whatever post-bubble companies could make best use of them, data center projects in exile will land wherever they are received. It is inconvenient to the tech giants to lose their preferred sites, but there’s no shortage of federal or commercially owned land in the middle of nowhere.
A Wall Street Journal piece points to the Permian Basin of West Texas as one such promised land. Roughly the size of Nebraska, but with fewer than 500,000 residents, the region is home to companies that bought great “land empires” of scrubland in order to lease out the mineral rights beneath. Now, these holders think they can make a fortune from the surface, too, by leasing it to data centers and selling them “everything from water to construction materials.”
In an indication that these plans are expected to materialize, the stocks of these land companies are up as much as 56% this year.
Data center builders like CoreWeave have signed deals, and so have energy companies like Chevron that want to supply them. Matchmaking is expected to be easy in the region due to a shortage of pipelines for bringing its abundant natural gas reserves to market. Data centers in the basin mean the gas can be profitably burned for electricity near where it is produced.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.