Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller alleged in a recent column that Beale Infrastructure had lied about the terms of its deal with the Pima County Board of Supervisors to build a data center on county land.
When it comes to artificial intelligence and data centers, lies are expected. With trillions of dollars sloshing around financial markets for anything associated with AI, we can also expect hyperbole, greed, avarice, and hypocrisy.
Eventually, AI will bring transformational benefits to society, but the Road to Damascus, er, Silicon Valley, will be strewn with winners and losers, political shenanigans, scoundrels, and major socioeconomic dislocations.
As a Tucsonan, my most burning question is this: Why did the Beale company select Tucson for a data center? After all, it’s not as if the hotshots at the San Francisco-based company and their fellow masters of the tech world would ever consider living in the dusty outpost of the Old Pueblo, especially among rubes such as this writer.
I’ll answer the question later, but first some background on Beale Infrastructure.
The company is in the business of building data centers. It is in the asset portfolio of Blue Owl Capital.
Blue Owl is an asset management company headquartered in New York with offices around the world. Its US offices are in Chicago, Greenwich, Menlo Park, San Francisco, Dallas, and Short Hills, NJ. Not exactly dusty outposts.
Beale’s website is replete with corporate pabulum. Example: “We partner closely with communities to understand local resource constraints and develop responsible roadmaps for growth. Once greenlit for approvals and investment, our projects create transformative value for local economies, labor and municipal infrastructure.”
That statement is at odds with the fact that data centers consume mammoth amounts of water and electricity. Putting one in the parched desert of Tucson is as foolish as building a marina for cruise ships on the Rillito River that winds through the city, a river that is dry for over 300 days a year.
Most recently, the data center industry has been spewing methane gas from the manure it is spreading about a new cooling technology that uses less water. Yeah, it uses less water but still tremendous amounts. Besides, Beale’s original plan, which created a public outcry, was to use the old technology in Tucson, of all places.
Photos of Beale’s management team are on the website. To read a short bio of each person, click on the individual’s photo. Alternatively, you can take my word for it that they are out of central casting for San Franciscans in the tech industry who are afflicted with cognitive dissonance and live in a self-congratulatory echo chamber without wearing noise-cancellation earbuds. Some previously worked for Meta, Microsoft and other behemoths. Others have experience in green energy, which probably means that they are experts at milking the cash cow of government subsidies for renewable energy.
Project Blue was the name they gave to the Tucson data center, conjuring up images of blue skies and blue water. Considering the tremendous amounts of water and electricity needed to operate the data center, it should’ve been named Project Brown.
According to the International Energy Agency, a data center dedicated to AI can consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, but larger ones being planned would consume 20 times as much; that is, the equivalent power consumption of two million homes.
That brings us back to my question about why Tucson was selected for a data center.
Quick answer: Tucson is near a lot of AI users in California; is in Arizona, where electricity is much cheaper than in California; and is perceived as being populated by rubes who will fall for the slick presentations of the likes of Beale.
California has an electricity generation deficit of 22,851,658 MWh. This is the amount of power consumed in the state over what is produced in the state. It’s the amount that has to be imported from other states.
By contrast, Arizona has an electricity generation surplus of 25,919,938 MWh, an amount of power that can be sold to other states, especially California.
It’s a new form of carpetbagging. Californians build data centers in Tucson and other Arizona cities for use by California tech companies, powered by the cheaper electricity in Arizona, so that tech magnates in Silicon Valley can become richer while the rubes in Arizona watch their electricity prices skyrocket as demand for local power outstrips supply.
Given that data centers are a dirty business, it’s not surprising that columnist Steller alleged that Beale had lied.
Tucsonans should take the advice of another Beale—namely, Howard Beale, the fictional newscaster in the award-winning film “Network.” They should open their windows and yell, ”I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].