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Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host and the single most punished man alive, Ed Zittron.

Yeah. Everyone hates me.

Everyone hates me, but the people don't hate the man who's joining me today. I've got Paris Marks. The host of tech won't save us, the writer of the Disconnect blog, and the actual host of the brand new series is about to tell us about data vampires. Paris, thank you for joining me. Absolutely. It's so fun to be on the show. So tell me about the new show. I'm excited. Yeah, it's, you know, I think everyone has kind of been paying attention a bit more to, like, the energy use of data centers and cryptocurrency and all this kind of stuff.

And, you know, especially what powers generative AI and, you know, what's been kind of fueling the hype for the past two years. And so in this series, I wanted to go into why we're actually building so many data centers.

What is behind these things? How much energy are they actually

using? And on the one hand, like the commercial impulses to do this, but also like the kind of weird

ideological reasons that these people want to build these massive AI systems in the first place,

relating back to all these like things about AGI and, you know, trying to make computers with

human level intelligence and all this kind of stuff,

where they eventually want to merge their brains with machines.

So it goes into the wide range of all these sorts of things over four episodes.

So talk to me about the scale of this.

How many of these data centers are they building?

Like, give the audience some idea, because from what I know, it's not great.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's quite a lot, right?

Especially when you see it scale up over the past number of years.

So we've seen this, like, really significant escalation over the past five years in particular

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