Gigawatt AI datacenters and the energy bill you're going to pay

Five nuclear reactors’ worth of power. Per megalomaniac datacenter. To run chatbots that tell you whales are fish.

Sam Altman stands on a stage next to Trump claiming he needs five hundred billion. For what? For servers that hallucinate. Chinese startup DeepSeek does the same thing with two thousand GPUs and five point six million. That difference? That’s called a lie. Or a grift. Take your pick.

Louisiana rewrote their laws. Literally. Redefined what renewable energy means so Zuckerberg’s gas plants count as green. The state bent the knee to Facebook. Changed the dictionary. And you’re paying for it.

Holly Ridge, two thousand souls. Traffic accidents up six hundred percent. Kids can’t play outside because construction traffic hit their school three times. Tap water runs rust-brown. Blackouts. But Meta’s servers? Those keep humming along just fine.

Blue Owl Capital dumps twenty-seven billion into the project, takes eighty percent ownership. Meta keeps twenty percent and all control. You? You pay for the grid upgrades through taxes and energy prices that jump nine point three billion. They cash out, you bleed. That’s how extraction works now, except they call it “public-private partnership.” Fancy words for theft with contracts.

Musk built his complex in nineteen days. How? By ignoring every permit. Air pollution? Doesn’t matter. Environmental impact? Later. Nineteen days versus the normal four years. And nobody stopped him. Because when you have enough money, rules are just suggestions for poor people.

DeepSeek proved this entire mess is unnecessary, but OpenAI builds anyway. Meta builds anyway. xAI builds anyway. Because it’s not about AI. It’s about who owns the infrastructure when AI finally works. And by then your electricity bills will have tripled while Zuckerberg explains it was for society.

Not depressed enough yet? Read more about AI energy gigawatt consumption.