BREITBART'S COLIN MADINE CHECKS IN 4/1/26

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:07

And joining us live is Colin Madine. He is the tech editor at Breitbart.com. Good morning.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Good morning, Liz. You know, I was I was searching Spotify. I don't see Nick's album out yet.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

What? It's not Are you really looking? It is there. It's on Spotify. I actually have an album, sir.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

Do you believe it? It's true.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

I I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 0:31

Well, it's true. It's called Disney Lane. It's actually it's true and it exists. Yeah. It's real big, big in Asia.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

We are actually. We were at one time. No, uh yeah, it used to be a thing, man.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

You hit you hit the top ten in Estonia.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Uh maybe, maybe, maybe I think. That was before the plane crashes downhill. Oh no. Uh anyway, yeah. No, look it up. Disneyland, you'll check it out.

SPEAKER_03 0:59

Yeah, check it out. Uh Colin McDonne, thank you so much for joining us. You know, we have um we have an intern here that we've nicknamed the Quintern. Um, and he has a real problem with data centers. Wouldn't you say that's accurate, Quintern?

SPEAKER_02 1:13

I'd say that, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:14

Well, uh Colin McDonne has a story about it that you're just gonna love. Right, Colin?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Well, there's always a data center story. Uh it's funny. Because uh from what I what I hear, it's like a hundred degrees there, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

So, you know, for my generation, for your generation, for generations in the past, we'd usually say something like, uh, man, it's like we're living in an oven, right? Some something like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:43

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Our our kids and our grandkids are gonna have that kind of heat and say, Man, it's like I live in an AI data center.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

Oh they give so much heat.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Many of the problems that we're gonna talk about with data centers are related to heat. Uh this type of computing, this type of concentrated processing power generates massive heat. So when we talk about data centers and we talk about the problems we know about them, like they use tons of electricity, they use tons of water, it's all because of heat. So what we're seeing across the board, story after story, is these companies are to say the least bad neighbors. Almost well, I would say probably belonging in jail, because they're trying to deal with this heat. So we have this story um out of Wyoming. You know, what do you associate with Wyoming? Beautiful plains, untouched nature, right? It's it's uh Why don't spaces right, kind of the opposite of where I live in Chicago. So um what happened there? Uh Meta came in and is building a massive data center, uh, one of the largest in the country. Just unbelievable scope of this project. And so they do something called a drain and fill, which is where they're working on their uh cooling system for this AI data center, and they fill it up with water and then they flush out the system, and that goes into like the wastewater system in Cheyenne, Wyoming. But there was a catch. This time it filled up that wastewater system with rare bacteria that contaminated the whole system.

SPEAKER_03 3:32

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

So, you know, because they they don't care, they do whatever they want. Can't they use geothermal?

SPEAKER_03 3:41

Can't they use the geothermal where it's kind of like you reuse the water and it just stays cool coming from the earth, you know, like going under. Don't they use that? They why are they flushing it out to the waste system?

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Yeah, they love talking about that stuff, and there's like a massive, unbelievably huge PR budget, by the way, Breitbart, and your show doesn't get a taste of that budget. Yeah, exactly. But uh, you know, they love to talk about that stuff, but we're not seeing it in practice. Now, so what you have is this fun situation where where Mark Zuckerberg's giant company Meta is out there saying, Hey, it's not that bad. We didn't contaminate the drinking water, we only contaminated the irrigation water. And we're saying, Yeah, this time you didn't, right? What about next time? So many companies are tr are scrambling to try to create solutions. Nvidia, the massive chip company is out there um trying to develop solutions to to have like reusable fluids, but that's not the state of the business, you know. In other stories, your nearby neighbors in Georgia have been uh experiencing droughts on and off for a while now. Yeah, yeah. And they discovered, yeah, okay, so they discovered one of the the largest data centers in the the country had a massive water pipe that no one knew about, and they took up to 40 million gallons of water without paying for it through this unregistered pipe. And then it was discovered, and they go, hey, you guys are naughty. They didn't uh even have a penalty. If you or I don't pay our water bill for a month, we get all sorts of penalties. All they had to do was pay the estimated cost of that water. That's the you know, to to put that in perspective, that's like filling uh filling Olympic-sized swimming pools hundreds of times over, you know?

SPEAKER_03 5:33

To go back to Wyoming a second, um, and I remember back in the eighties when I was in college and in communications and they would say how they would manipulate the marketing of it, and they would say, Well, our water is uh factory water, right? Our water is as clean as uh, you know, goes out as clean as it comes in. But they weren't saying the temperature of the water was changing the the rivers and uh killing, you know, the the flora and fauna, the natural, and then of course, you know, uh you things grow in heat. And you the you were talking about this bacterium that was found, a very like rare uh whatever. But um in the article in Breitbart, it talks about how this bacteria kind of shut down the water's uh reclamation uh facilities. And we have that kind of facility here. I don't I don't know if you guys know this, but um I got this bill from the city of Myrtle Beach from my water, and the water is my drinking water is coming from the intercoastal waterway and going through this whole process and explain the whole process, and I was like, What? The water is coming from the intercoastal? What? Um and I had no idea. So what happens when there is an a new bacterium in the water is that people don't even know how to get it out. Like it becomes an alarm. So how well how are they dealing with that? I mean, any word on what this is about? Like this bacterium? I mean, are they able to get it out?

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Yeah, well, so we're this has all come down after the fact. They spent the last four months that we know about fighting this and figuring it out. So, you know, uh the in in many ways, what the your water system is like the internet, except it's actually a series of pipes, right? So the advantage of the water system as we have it in America is they are very good about being able to track contaminations, uh, limit them, they can reroute things. So, you know, in many ways, the system worked here because they kept it out of the drinking water. You know, it didn't contaminate the whole thing. They were able to stop it, they were able to figure it out, and they were able to kill it. At least that's what the city of Cheyenne, Wyoming is saying. Okay. We don't always trust our government at Breitbart, right? Yeah, right. So so they were able to stop it, um, which is which is great news, but you have a lot of good points there, which is it's not there's so many things going on with the water, both with temperature and how how it needs to be treated. That's that's that's a huge concern. And that's only the tip of the spear, you also have uh noise pollution from these things. One of the big things that underlines a lot of these stories is these companies that are building and opening AI data centers, they are not going into you know urban areas and specific, you know, even in Middle Myrtle Beach or any city you go into, there's industrial areas. They've been built for industrial purposes. They have heavy-duty electricity lines and uh sewer lines, etc., because they're expecting factories and other things. That's not where they're building AI data centers. They're going out in the country, they're going to suburbs. So you, you know, you the American dream, you work hard, buy the nice house in the suburbs, suddenly there's a data center a half mile away. Uh, they're going out in the country to Wyoming, and I think part of the reason for that is they can kind of steamroll local and state governments. You know, they can come into a town that might be a sleepy little town and say, we're bringing all this economic development, and they get buy-in from local governments doing that. And they I think they tend to push things on communities that are probably less sophisticated. You know, if you're if you're Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, your government is different than some little tiny burg uh in the other half of the state, right? So I think that's a lot of that's going on. And we actually saw that. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 9:45

That was I was just gonna say that the data center issue was a huge top uh question, uh often debated during the gubernatorial race here uh in the primaries. Uh, you know, the chance of a Republican being elected here is very high. We were watching the Republican primary debates, and that question often came up. Um and there seems to be a faction that is like, oh hell no, no more data centers. And then there's another faction that's like, oh, well, it depends. So my question is, you know, are all data centers created or equal? Some of them say they're very small, they can make their own energy source, but there's a lot more to it. Not only the heat, not only the sound, but the ground vibration. And we know, I believe there are studies that show that the ground vibration of certain entities that we have around in our community, maybe uh like a power center or something, can cause a lot of health issues and mental health issues for people. I mean, is that an issue? Like uh the humming that causes the ground vibration?

SPEAKER_00 11:00

We we know that's an issue. Uh we we've seen long before AI data centers, things like hums and vibrations have have had negative impacts on people. Um, I am generally pretty negative on data centers, and there's a few reasons. Firstly, I don't really believe anyone who says, hey, we're just going to build a little data center. It's going to be nice and small because the economics dictates scale. You only make money by going huge. There's not a lot of money in being a nice little compact data center. Uh secondly, you know, uh I really struggle with the fact that the classic Silicon Valley model is we're going to develop the fancy stuff and you Americans are going to pay for it, right? So what we don't see, we don't see these data center companies building small modular nuclear reactors next door to power their data centers. We see them plugging in to the municipal power grid and sucking out all the juice that uh would otherwise go to houses. We don't see them developing their own water supplies. We see them lowering the water pressure in every house in a suburb, you know, within five miles. Um, you know, these things as they as we see them today only are drags. They only take away. And the classic conservative uh sort of pro-business argument is hey, we're bringing development, we're bringing good paying jobs to the community. There's very few jobs in a data center. You have essentially a few IT janitors and they unplug things and plug them in when they break. You're not uh employing hundreds or thousands of people at these places.

SPEAKER_03 12:46

I have one more question for you, and it comes from our quintern, Colin Madine, the tech editor at Breitbart.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

Yeah, I was just very curious why do you think that for some reason AI data centers are given basically uh unlimited access to whatever they want. They're allowed to build whatever they want, like to edit wherever they want, despite the fact that a lot of people are speculating. And AI bubbles about to burst, we've already had data centers that were more effective before AI data centers became a new standard. And why we have propositions for data centers larger than Manhattan being built that would destroy parts of the environment. Why do you think AI is allowed to act without impunity with these kind of developments?

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Because the checks being written by Silicon Valley today are bigger than checks ever imagined by Big Tobacco or any other industry in history. That's the short answer. The money, the money has more zeros involved than ever in history.

SPEAKER_03 13:46

And they're buying politicians.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Oh, I think that I think they're bought and sold, and they probably have their own poly market uh to trade to trade politicians at this point.

SPEAKER_03 13:57

Now that I believe. Yeah. That's amazing, yeah. Well, we sensed something was gone uh you know awry in this uh primary season because it was a hot topic and a lot of money's flowing and you know, incentivizing and don't demonize the data centers. We need it to stay competitive in the you know, against the rates for AI with China, and you know, we're losing jobs, are we? Uh you know, I mean like the cat's out of the bag and it's screaming at this point with the AI, and I think we're just a little late. And I don't know. A lot of people are bought, like you said. Well, Colin McDyne, thank you so much. We'll continue to follow the tech section. Uh I are you in Breitbart uh Fight Club too?

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Oh, absolutely. I'm right, my ugly mug is often on the video there. So you can you can see me with my beard and everything.

SPEAKER_03 14:53

Okay. All right. Well, thank you so much. Uh we'll find you on Breitbart.com or join the Fight Club to get exclusive content, videos, and podcasts. Thanks so much, Colin. We appreciate it.