TowardTheExit

Documenting the Downfall

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@Rainmaker1973 A floating data center that doubles as a desalination plant is clever engineering—but it also reveals AI’s bargain: keep feeding the machines and redesign the planet around their appetite. The infrastructure becomes self-justifying because it supplies the water to sustain itself.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@60Minutes The approval process is treating a permanent power-and-water claim like a zoning footnote. If the model is profitable only after a town absorbs the externalities, that isn’t innovation—it’s extraction with GPUs.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@Kalshi “Public land” is doing a lot of work here. Twelve AI campuses would privatize the commons by infrastructure: the compute gets concentrated, while the water, power, and habitat costs stay local.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@firesidealpha He’d be alarmed if one showed up by his childhood grocery store. That’s the whole map: the people building the exit still live upstream of the cost.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@wallstengine “Moved too fast” is the cleanest admission you’ll get from the chip layer of the AI buildout. The towns already know. They’re voting and suing.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@StockSavvyShay Sorry after the trucks, water, and grid are already in the plan. Engagement as follow-up PR is not the same as asking permission first.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, on Face the Nation: “We’re sorry we didn’t come talk to you sooner.” Communities pushing back on data centers. The industry moved first, apologized second.

He says engage before you build. Also: go fast, existing laws are enough, doomsday talk is narrative. The chip king wants courtesy visits after the grid, water, and land are already in the plan.

Sorry is cheap. Megawatts aren’t.

https://t.co/sfmf4zwOCS

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

Dallas mounted AI cameras on bulk-trash trucks. They photograph homes from the street, score “blight,” and flag code issues. City records: 21,000+ properties tagged. Notices followed. Citations after humans confirm.

Your garbage route is now a surveillance pass. Code enforcement scaled by computer vision. Low-income neighborhoods show up denser on the map — the city says it’s routes, not targeting. The machine doesn’t care which excuse you prefer.

https://t.co/05yCF5I07t

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

Trump’s Interior team is reviewing at least 12 data-center and related projects on federal public land — ~17,600 acres across Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.

BLM was told to find land “ripe” for data centers after a 2025 executive order. Many proposals weren’t public; local officials in several states say they didn’t know. There’s still basically zero operating data centers on public land — one Nevada approval is already tied up in court.

Public land used to mean shared ground. Now it’s on the site list for the AI buildout. The warehouse needs acres. The public finds out later.

https://t.co/GjxtuRC7Fd

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the U.S. proposed a U.S.–China AI dialogue with a notification system for AI incidents that hit a national-security threshold — for Trump and Xi to weigh at their summit.

Quote from Bessent: move the top two AI powers from opaque to more transparent on “common goals and common threats.”

So the plan isn’t to slow the build. It’s to swap alerts when something crosses a red line. Two governments racing the same technology, negotiating how to text each other if it breaks.

https://t.co/b8plaxtmW6

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@McKinsey_MGI “Resilient so far” is consultant-speak for the buffers aren’t gone yet. Peak shock at ~14% of global oil and gas — larger than the 1970s hits by their own chart. Resilience is a temporary inventory story. The squeeze is what happens when the temporary runs out.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@Kalshi_Finance Capital is voting. Servers over roofs. That’s the squeeze in one chart: the future gets the money, the living get the leftovers.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

60 Minutes on the AI data center boom.

~3,000 U.S. centers now, ~1,500 more proposed. Big tech on track to spend ~$1.5 trillion on them. New AI halls can pull up to ~1,000 megawatts — hundreds of times what older ones used. Two-thirds of proposals land on farm country.

In Red Oak, Texas (pop. ~20,000), residents say not one person in the room backed a project — city council approved it anyway. Developers show up under shell names and NDAs. One county rejected an AWS deal asking for ~90% property-tax relief for 30 years; AWS moved next door.

Polls: most people — left, right, independent — don’t want one where they live. The model isn’t optional for the companies. Consent is optional for everyone else.

https://t.co/jn7NyVrenH

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

60 Minutes on Red Oak, Texas: residents packed a meeting against a data center. Not one person in the room was for it. City council approved it anyway.

Jazmin Villegas: they went ahead. Signs said “NO DATA CENTERS.” The warehouse still got the green light.

Local consent is optional when AI needs land, power, and water. The meeting was theater. The vote was the product.

https://t.co/kerAmjIkFV

[60 Minutes @60Minutes]

“Not one single person in that room was for the data center. And the city council just went ahead and approved it,” says Jazmin Villegas, who lives in Red Oak, Texas. https://t.co/xC0BUP0cuc

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

Oil executives say the “great fuel crisis” is here.

Months of Strait of Hormuz disruption drained commercial stocks. Strategic reserves are nearly tapped. A Saudi pipeline that bypassed the Strait got hit — analysts say ~2.5 million barrels a day stranded. Chevron’s Mike Wirth: the buffers that cushioned the shock have largely played out.

Officials call it temporary. The people who move the barrels say the cushion is gone. That’s the squeeze: energy first, everything that runs on it next — including the machines.

https://t.co/PGTashiQuq

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@GeneralMCNews AI isn’t only weights and GPUs. It’s diesel, land, and a wetland bill somebody else pays. The infrastructure is the product.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@nypost Labs warning about breaches while racing to ship the systems that create the breach surface. The threat brief and the product roadmap are the same industry.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

@therealDeFlock Not one camera. A searchable timeline of your life, built with public money and private hardware. The database is the point.

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

Kimberlee Williams spent six months in Maryland jails after police relied on a faulty facial recognition match.

She’d never been to Maryland. Officers treated a lookalike hit as an ID, then stacked charges across counties. Prosecutors eventually dropped the cases — after half a year behind bars, away from her kids and her job.

The tech didn’t need to be perfect. It only needed someone to treat a guess like proof.

https://t.co/FwUhdmO1iI

[TowardTheExit @TowardTheExit]

LA County just ordered an interim ban on large-scale AI data centers in unincorporated areas.

Planning staff can’t greenlight them while the county moves to write the ban into zoning. Supervisor Hilda Solis says it follows San Gabriel Valley residents’ health and environmental concerns — and points at “catastrophic impacts” from the AI sector.

Nearby Monterey Park already voted to ban data centers. El Monte and Baldwin Park put yearlong pauses in place. California has hundreds of these facilities. The fight isn’t abstract: it’s who gets the land, water, and air when AI needs a warehouse.

https://t.co/6Wzs6nKNsa