Image: BoingBoing/DALL-E

The AI boom has discovered rural America, where struggling towns are being promised salvation in the form of enormous data centers, industrial temples to machine learning that reportedly create far fewer permanent jobs and more heat than the factories and mills they replace.

There's little research into whether massive industrial sites actually deliver the long-term economic gains they promise, but early reports suggest otherwise. Experts say that rural communities often lack the governmental expertise to properly assess how data centers might impact an area. According to recent Pew Research Center data, 67 percent of planned data centers in the US are headed to rural areas, and 39 percent are going to counties that currently have none. As data center development scales rapidly, it's becoming clear that what rural communities around the country are actually getting isn't jobs, but a power- and water-hungry industrial facility that temporarily employs about as many people as a midsize restaurant.

The Verge

The robots don't really want your job; they want the water rights.

Previously:
• Study finds AI server farms creating their own local heat islands
• EPA: Elon's methane-powered xAI datacenter illegally generating electricity
• RAM prices go wild as AI companies buy every chip
• Microsoft cancels $1bn data center planned in Ohio, suggests they use land for farms