If you've been hoping to lie low while artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs and

transforms the world's economy, then you need to pay very close attention to recent developments out

of Lake Tahoe, California. Now, in case you're not familiar, Lake Tahoe is home to some of the

richest people in the United States on both the California and Nevada sides. It's a premier tourist

destination in our most

populated state. Median property values are north of $700,000. People living there as a general

matter are financially secure and highly educated. Many of them work in tech. You had to think of a list

of people whose lives would be upended by artificial intelligence,

they would rank fairly low, you would think. And yet, because of AI, 50,000 people living on the

California side of Lake Tahoe have no idea where their power supply will come from in a matter of

months. Some are worried that the lights will go out indefinitely, as if they'd been hit

by a terrorist attack. But what's happened is that the utility realized that it's much more lucrative

to power data centers, which are used to train artificial intelligence and which consume near

infinite amounts of electricity, than it is to single-family homes. After all, by some

estimates, depending on the size, a single data center can consume more power than half a million

homes. I'll say that again, a single data center consumes more power than half a million homes.

Every utility is rapidly coming to the same conclusion because companies

like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which collectively own one-third of all data center

capacity and which build the overwhelming majority of large data centers, are willing and able to

pay enormous premiums for the electricity that they're using.

When they're able to price you out of the market, you're on your own.

And when the choice is between a big tech trillion dollar company or you in your single family home,

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