There are plenty of people who claim the end of society will be brought about by artificial intelligence (AI). Movies have depicted robots enslaving the human race as the end of the world for decades.
I now believe it will be AI—more specifically, the data centers that house and power the supercomputers. If you’ve been keeping up with the latest tech news, you know tech companies, like Meta, are building data centers in states across the U.S. and the local population has been holding protests against them.
Data Centers Bad For Humans
There are multiple reasons people don’t want a data center near their home.
From Stax Engineering:
“Data centers’ continuous operation generates significant heat, necessitating energy-intensive cooling systems to maintain optimal temperatures. Some data centers use water-based cooling systems, which can lead to substantial water consumption.
An average Google data center consumes approximately 450,000 gallons of water per day. This can strain local water resources, especially in areas prone to drought or with limited water supply. Overall, data center cooling systems are responsible for over 40% of their electricity usage.
Additionally, many people don’t realize the sheer scale of backup power required for data centers. Because these facilities must operate 24/7 to prevent downtime, they rely on a large number of diesel generators as a failsafe during power disruptions.
While a smaller data center may only house a handful of backup generators, larger projects—including those being built to power AI—can have dozens. For instance, Quantum Loophole’s Aligned Data Centers proposed installing 168 diesel generators capable of delivering 504 MW of power.
These diesel generators can be massive, ranging in size from 1.5 MW to over 3 MW each. Most generators are designed to provide 1.5-2 times the total connected load.
These generators emit significant amounts of particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), and carbon dioxide (CO₂)—pollutants that degrade air quality, contribute to climate change, and pose serious health risks to nearby communities.”
That’s bad enough, but what tipped me into believing it will be the data centers that are our downfall was an image of a data center Mark Zuckerberg plans to build in Ohio.
The largest of the planned data centers, Hyperion, is located in Louisiana and will have the footprint of Manhattan and consume enough electricity to power 5,000,000 homes.
You know how the lights dim when your AC kicks on because of the initial huge draw on electricity? Now imagine a building that takes up an entire city and houses supercomputers drawing its power from the same grid as the homes and businesses in the area?
It’s times like these that I go back to complaining about how the majority of federal lawmakers in the Senate are 60-86 years old. It’s not agist to state an obvious fact: People in their 80s just aren’t as tech savvy as someone younger who grew up with a computer and cell phone, using ChatGPT.
Tech CEO’s are probably happy about the situation in Congress (and the White House. Trump is 79) because it means less interference and regulations coming out of the federal government.
Zuckerberg’s Massive Manhattan-sized Data Center: Hyperion
Back to to the behemoth coming soon. You can’t appreciate its size without seeing it.
Zuckerberg spoke about the data centers he has in the works during a recent interview.
The tech giant plans to launch the first multi-gigawatt data center in Ohio in 2026, called Prometheus, Reuters reports .
The other, called Hyperion, will be the largest, and will be able to scale to 5 gigawatts in the coming years. It is located in Louisiana. According to Zuckerberg, it is comparable in size to Manhattan.
From reporting in Ukraine by Dev.ua:
“In his post on Threads, Zuckerberg cited analytics firm SemiAnalysis, which claims that Meta is on track to become the first “supercluster” to hold more than a gigawatt of power.
The company is set to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” in data center capacity to build superintelligence. “We have the capital from our business to do this,” he wrote.
Meta, which derives the majority of its revenue from advertising on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, continues to show year-over-year sales growth.
To create a superintelligence, Meta’s CEO has personally recruited a team of experts over the past few months.
The new Meta Superintelligence Labs team includes researchers poached from OpenAI , Google’s DeepMind, and other leading AI companies. Meta recently hired Scale AI co-founder Alexander Wang as its chief AI officer and spent $14.3 billion on a 49% stake in his company. Zuckerberg has also successfully recruited former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman , AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Apple ’s Ruming Pang, who was lured to Meta with a compensation package worth more than $200 million.
What do you think? Will these massive supercomputers learn how to interconnect data centers all over the globe so they can rule the world?
Claude 4 Opus, an AI model from Anthropic displayed an ability to scheme, deceive and attempt to blackmail humans when faced with shutdown. It even wrote its own code!
I recall being told that if AI learns how to write code and manipulate humans to save its “life,” that’s it. Society ends.
Well, the creator of Claude 4 Opus reported seeing all of those things during testing of the latest model…
They released it anyway.
WHY?!
Let me know what you think in the comments: About the massive data centers and what you think will be the end of the human race.
