They are planning on building a 10 GW data center here in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and generating all of the electricity on site..
“Wyoming is poised to become an artificial-intelligence powerhouse after Laramie County commissioners last week unanimously voted to move forward with the construction of a 1.8 gigawatt data center designed to eventually scale up to 10 gigawatts, which would be the largest single AI campus in the U.S. “
10 GW is the equivalent of one hundred million 100W light bulbs.
I asked Google Gemini to calculate the energy balance.
To calculate the true environmental heat flux of a 10 GW compute footprint, we must look at both sides of the meter: Silicon Dissipation and On-Site Generation Inefficiency.
The Silicon Compute Load (100% Thermal Conversion)
According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy cannot be destroyed. Inside the computing cluster, electrical energy is fed into transistors to drive bit transitions. Aside from a negligible fraction of a percent that escapes as light through fiber optics, 100% of the computing wattage degrades into Joule heating due to electrical resistance.
The mathematical representation of continuous heat generation (E_compute) over one hour (t = 3,600 seconds) is:
E_compute = P * t
E_compute = (10 * 10^9 J/s) * 3,600 s = 3.6 * 10^13 Joules (36 Terajoules)
The On-Site Generation Load (50% Thermal Inefficiency)
To deliver 10 GW of usable electricity to the servers, an on-site power plant must burn fuel. If the plant operates at a standard 50% thermal efficiency (eta = 0.50), it means that for every 1 Joule of electricity produced, 1 Joule of raw heat is lost directly to the environment through the plant’s own cooling towers and exhaust stacks.
The total fuel energy input required (P_input) is:
P_input = P_compute / eta = 10 GW / 0.50 = 20 GW
Thus, the heat wasted purely by generating the electricity on-site (E_generator) over one hour is:
E_generator = 10 GW * 3,600 s = 3.6 * 10^13 Joules (36 Terajoules)
Total Combined Heat Footprint
Adding the heat from the chips to the waste heat from the on-site generators gives us the total hourly thermal output (E_total):
E_total = E_compute + E_generator
E_total = 3.6 * 10^13 J + 3.6 * 10^13 J = 7.2 * 10^13 Joules (72 Terajoules)
Quantifying the Yield of an Atomic Bomb
To provide context for 72 Terajoules, we examine the energy released during a nuclear explosion. The “Little Boy” weapon detonated over Hiroshima was a uranium-235 fission device. In physical reviews, the energy metrics of nuclear weapons are calibrated in kilotons (kt) of TNT equivalent.
By international scientific convention, one gram of TNT releases exactly 4,184 Joules. Therefore, a standard metric kiloton of TNT translates to:
1 kt TNT = 4.184 * 10^12 Joules
Forensic assessments by Los Alamos National Laboratory place the explosive yield of the Hiroshima detonation at approximately 15 kilotons. To determine the absolute energy yield (E_bomb) in Joules, we compute:
E_bomb = 15 kt * (4.184 * 10^12 J/kt) = 6.276 * 10^13 Joules
The Hourly Comparison: Side-by-Side Analysis
We can now calculate the explicit ratio (R) between the hourly heat emission of our 10 GW megastructure (with on-site generation) and the total yield of the Hiroshima bomb:
R = E_total / E_bomb
R = (7.2 * 10^13 J) / (6.276 * 10^13 J) = 1.147
Metric Comparison:
Energy Release for 10GW Data Center Complex (Every Hour): 7.2 * 10^13 Joules
Energy Release for Hiroshima Atomic Bomb (Total Yield): 6.276 * 10^13 Joules
TNT Equivalent for 10GW Data Center Complex (Every Hour): 17.2 Kilotons
TNT Equivalent for Hiroshima Atomic Bomb (Total Yield): 15.0 Kilotons
When factoring in the 50% thermal efficiency of on-site generators, a 10 GW data center campus generates 114.7% of the total energy of the Hiroshima bomb every single hour. Stated another way, the facility matches the energy footprint of an atomic bomb every 52 minutes.
A study done of existing smaller data centers shows a massive data heat island effect extending many kilometers away.
(PDF) The data heat island effect: quantifying the impact of AI data centers in a warming world
Steel plants generate a lot of heat, but are located near bodies of water which dissipate the heat and minimize any local temperature increases. Without water to transport and evaporate the heat away, the air is going to become very hot.
From Gemini:
“Because water’s volumetric heat capacity is roughly 3,500 times greater than that of air, a tiny temperature shift in a body of water represents a massive reservoir of energy. Mathematically, transferring the exact amount of thermal energy required to raise a specific volume of water by just 2°C into an identical volume of air would trigger an astronomical temperature spike of nearly 7,000°C—well beyond the 6,000°C mark.
To put this into perspective, this concentrated thermal energy would make that volume of air hotter than the radiant surface of the sun, which burns at approximately 5,500°C.”
The Rawhide Generating Station near us in Colorado uses water to evaporate away the heat. I took this picture at -10F on February 14, 2021 and you can see the water evaporating off the cooling pond and out of the stack.
Evaporating water is the only viable way to remove large amounts of heat from the local environment, but these data centers are being sold based on the idea that they won’t use water.
We are having the warmest and driest year on record here in Cheyenne, and there is no snow at any of the locations we depend on for our water supply.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/all/USW00024018.dly
Besides the noise, pollution and heat, this will greatly increase the competition for energy, which will drive up fuel prices.
“An Enormous Data Center In Wyoming Will Consume 5x More Power Than The State’s People. The Owner Remains A Mystery”
In order to house the workers, they are building hideous four story apartment complexes all over town.
Report projects worsening housing crisis in Cheyenne | Local News | wyomingnews.com
“A data center of this scale would release more thermal energy into the local atmosphere than the entire city footprint receives from the winter sun.”
“‘So much worse than I even thought’: Utah’s ‘hyperscale’ data center could create massive heat island near Great Salt Lake”
Our community and environment are being destroyed by these data centers, but big money seems to get whatever they want. “Consent of the governed” no longer seems to be a valid concept in America.
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
Are they running the entire knowledge of the human race through the facility every 2 mintues?
In any case, sounds like a full environmental impact study is in order.
And you all thought Skynet was fiction lol.
Fact. The probability of ONE center going SKYNET is less than 1%.
BUT 50 connected takes that to…98%!
Hello T900!
A data center is being built where I live, Temple, TX by Rowan. City leaders want it. Majority of residents do not. There is information suggesting that Rowan will build 7 more data centers in Temple. Neither the city leaders nor Rowan will confirm or deny that information. Both claim there will be no noise, heat, water or electricity issues. Majority of residents do not believe that.
So the majority of residents voted for the wrong people.
Fact.
Remove them NOW!
The calculation is much simpler. Every picowatt fed into the plant will eventually end up as heat. Some time ago I calculated how much power generation from all sources would be needed to raise the Earth’s temperature by the ostensibly unacceptable (according to alarmist doctrine) 1 degree Celsius. I recall it was something like 400 times the global power generation in 2020. Anyway, it was an amount which seemed ridiculously high at the time. Now I’m not so sure.
Curious, how the globalist promoters of global warming are investing so heavily in these AI data centres.
Yes yes yes.
What the he__ is going on??
How are we getting along with living now, without them?
And who is paying for them?
How many planned??
Why? What group is pushing these and why aren’t they transparent?
Imagine a Carrington size event?
All the preaching about agw and to many people.
I’m now frightened for my grandchildren.i pray
Truly
Yeah, I was thinking the same, possibly dividing by the efficiency of conversion from fuel to electricity.
The figure of 50% is absurdly optimistic, in practice we will be lucky to get 25%, so the overall heating effect is about double these estimates..
Isn’t it strange that Artificial Intelligence requires megawatts of power, while human intelligence gets by on a few tens of watts.
It’s actually about 100 watts for average human to exist. Average intake between men and women is around 2,000 kcal per day which is 96.875 watts every hour, 24 hours a day.
I don’t think a single order of magnitude error has much influence on the argument. The point is made.
Most of the data stored at vast expense amounts to noise, rather than useful information; essentially a vast waste of energy.
Hmmm, is it ironic that Tony has migrated to creating an AI project, then posting dire warnings about AI data centers?
I’m not so worried about the power requirements or the local warming, my concern is there are numerous dire warnings about AI becoming rather nasty. But alas Skynet is highly unlikely, precisely because the AI centers are so power hungry… makes it easy to shut them down or provides a failsafe if they try to take over.
The most nasty thing about AI are not the dire warnings,
but how much it is being pushed and that the major pushers are from the AGW lobby corporatists.
Everything AI operates in a completely different reality.
Co2 output, renewable energy production,environment – nothing matters anymore.
And it is absolutely not obvious where this supermassive demand is coming from (a bit like producing mrna vaccines on a global scale before any outbreak has happened ) to justify the investments.
The markets are not reacting rationaly(they neither do in terms of Iran war).
Btw – they already started the narrative about the “easy shutdowns” to push for certain protection laws.
AGW ,ESG, green energy and mass immigration pusher Larry Fink has just recently hinted at the fact that people don’t like those huge data centers and that those could be taken out
by cheap drones,
Now if people don’t like AI Data centers – where is the demand coming from.
And if they may try to shut down those centers with drones – what may people motivate to do this?
No one ever used drones against blackrock,Biden, Trump etc.
To piss people so much off to make them use TNT drones
the Ai must be used for something people absolutely reject.
Let’s say mass surveillance China style.
Remember Trumps postponed China meeting.
Despite the new and very short term appointment Trump pulled a dozen
top CEO ‘s with him to go there(and I thought these CEO’s are superbusy)
– including Nvidias CEO who isn’t even allowed to sell his top products to China.
What was the reason?
Was this to confirm the powershift to the east?
Was this to get tips for a total surveillance system that was already started
in 2002 by DARPA’s Total Information System that was than transformed to Palantir, just as they did with LifeLog > Facebook?
And I think Oracle CEO Ellison gave us already a hint,
when he warned Americans that they should be careful with what they post on the Internet
Why?
One would need an all seeing a eye to be able to monitor and sanction all our Internet activities.
Brave New world.
Our poor grandchildren.
A good read for today is “The First and Last Deception” by Daniel O’Connor.
“Aliens, UFOs, AI …”
It seems to pick up on Paul Harvey’s “If I were the devil”
and Peter Cooks monolog as Satan at the end of the movie “Bedazzled ” (1967)
which were both remarkably prophetic.
I’ll give it a try.
I image that just like the first computer filled a room, and now our phone has many times as much computering power and uses tiny amounts of energy, so future AI will become more powerful and use much less energy and space. In fact, they might gravitate toward a biological AI: DNA and brains as being more efficient.
My understanding is that phones use the cloud to store data, rather than on an internal hard drive or even SD card. There is more mileage in actually understanding AI well enough to be able to predict reliability, stability, false alarm probability and all the other system level performance metrics of an information processing system. It should not be surprising that the current mix of blind faith and code hacking results in these ridiculous behemoths.
FUEL?
Massive apartment buildings are being built all over the country, not just Wyoming. biggest apartment boom since 1974 says Google. After the covid debacle and 4 years of the Biden rigime, most people under the age of 40 can’t afford a house. I do know of a local man that can afford a $4 million home. big beautiful house on 40 acres. is he a doctor? nope. a lawyer? nope. he’s an apartment building contractor.
The heat generated then vented by power stations and data centers is at present, wasted. There is no reason for this. I just finished an analysis of how much greenhouse space could be heated for vegetable and other crop production in Alberta based on the proposed data center in Grande Prairie. If heated year round, the area of standard Dutch style greenhouse coverings with standard Dutch production technology from a 1.5 GW gas combined cycle generating station and a 600 MW server farm exceeds 69 million square meters. One such installation would produce enough fresh vegetables to supply British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and several Northern states. It would produce a profit of CAD$5.9 per year with a simple repayment time of 2.5 years.
It is incorrect to view this heat source as a calamity. It is paid for, freely available if planned correctly, and in the case I wrote, create 22,000 permanent jobs, and another 33,000 supporting jobs in the town of 110,000 needed to manage such a huge operation.
Heat and CO2 from the power station should be used for food production: short wheat varieties, three crops per year. Free heat is a marvellous thing. Fruit trees, vines, root crops and everything a green grocer wants could be grown locally instead of flown or trucked from Mexico or California. Server farms are going to be built somewhere, it might as well be where land, water and energy can be applied to grow the local economy – and food.
Heated greenhouses are extremely productive with available technology. Nothing to invent, just do it.
Typo – the profit per year is CAD$5.9 billion.
Good idea
Precipitation is up …but we’re getting drier??????????? fox9.com/weather/rainfall-across-globe-is-increasing-were-also-getting-drier-same-time. if it’s true it’s probably because we’re not paying enough in taxes. lol
a month or two ago we learned that a Danish engineer found evidence that there hasn’t been any sea level rise in the past 40 years. The Hired guns must dispute that and here they did. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-scientists-knowledge-sea.html. then this week we heard the claim that we don’t get normal rainfall anymore… we only get heavy rain or no rain. Hmmm. just saying but in South Central Minnesota this past day we just had the most gentle light rain…all day long. all day long. if it snows tomorrow will the experts claim we are entering a new ice age? probably
They keep wack-a-moling us. Any event becomes a talking point on how global climate change is real and dangerous.
We have all been taught that as computer technology advances, it gets progressively smaller, while simultaneously getting faster. This has been true, all this time, but now it is suddenly the diametric opposite.
It makes me suspicious of the entire enterprise.
It must be fake.
What are they really doing with all that energy and water? That is the question we should be asking.
Good observation.
Malthusian twisted proof?
Equatorial New Guinea has a glacier? you got to be kidding me. Google news says it’s true and it has lost 99% of its ice cover since 1850. wow seems to coordinate with the end of the little ice age. check out this quote from the article. “Carbon pollution and the destruction of nature has heated the planet by about 1.4C since preindustrial times, making it less hospitable to human life”. actually the record shows the opposite is true. warm good. cold bad. apparently there wasn’t much snow in those high mountains in New Guinea because the ocean levels haven’t changed in 40 years… says a Danish engineer. fyi, the New Guinea mountain is roughly 16,000 ft High. meanwhile in central Minnesota the temperature hasn’t changed in 100 years… but that doesn’t make the news. the crops are off to a great start. looks like the apocalypse has been postponed for at least another year.
Happy June everybody. just saw a news article that the United States …probably the 48th United States …are in a drought… 60% of us are in a drought. I have no idea if this is true but I live in South Central Minnesota and it rains every third day and I have to cut my grass every fourth day. just saying but I think my guess is we’re going to have another record crop high yield in southern Minnesota.
shocking news! not only is it warming but the warming is accelerating! https://spacedaily.com/t-the-danger-now-is-not-only-that-the-planet-is-warming-but-that-the-pace-of-human-driven-warming-is-accelerating-quietly-bringing-forward-the-climate-deadlines-many-people-assumed-were-still/. I’m still wondering with all this melting melting melting going on, the ocean level hasn’t changed in 40 years. I live in South Central Minnesota and the average high temperature over the next 10 days is forecast to be seventy two and a half. that’s not the average. that’s the high.
That’s a bit strange as RCP 8.5 got just cancelled(because warming is slower than expected.)
Congratulations to the Knicks. I was rooting for the Spurs… but …oh well. I just took a peek at the St Cloud Minnesota weather forecast for the next 10 days…. since I live near there. forecast high for Wednesday is 59. is that a typo? 59???!!! let’s recall that when it was in the mid 80s a month ago that was big news. But when an ice cold day is forecast in the middle of June…. crickets.
Agreed. And if it snowed, I don’t think that would get much dire press, either – likely the proverbial 30-second mention on cabal news outlets. But I agree with cz – there will be some opportunists making it a talking point on how global climate change is real and dangerous.
Down here on the Ohio River, the forecast for tomorrow morning is 53, a week from Summer Solstice.
Really? 53? But I read that temperatures are spiking. lol. actually I think the heat under Minnesota Governor walz is whats spiking. fyi Walz grew up in Nebraska and please please please, will you please take him back….
Notice when you go to Google they now have news stories that you can click on. typically about every 5th story is about our warming world and everything is melting. so how did this one sneak through? high elevation snow skiing in Montana now extended to June 21st…. or longer. https://unofficialnetworks.com/2026/06/15/americas-summer-ski-area-reopens/
don’t we all wish that Tony Heller had a herd of clapping seals to promote his observations the way Al Gore has his clapping seals to promote his propaganda …that turned out to be…. nothing but propaganda. nothing he predicted has come true. here it is almost 1/4 of the way through meteorological summer and we can’t even get out of the low 70s in Minnesota. check the link… clapping seal report from ABC snews. https://abcnews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/abcnews.com/amp/US/scientists-dead-al-gore-20th-anniversary-inconvenient-truth/story?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a9&id=133922490&usqp=mq331AQGsAEggAID#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17816759884839&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.com%2FUS%2Fscientists-dead-al-gore-20th-anniversary-inconvenient-truth%2Fstory%3Fid%3D133922490
Seen on the media:
An unprecedented heatwave is shattering records in Antarctica.
Temperatures are 36°F (20°C) above normal and triggering rare rain and ice melt in the middle of the continent’s coldest season.
In a stark demonstration of climate acceleration, a massive winter heatwave swept across the Antarctic Peninsula in early June 2026, pushing temperatures to historic highs. On June 6, researchers at Argentina’s Esperanza base on the Trinity Peninsula recorded an astonishing 59.7°F (15.4°C), smashing the region’s previous June record set in 1998. The prolonged warmth, which kept daily maximums above freezing for three consecutive weeks, has astonished the scientific community. Researchers working on the Collins Glacier reported witnessing rain falling and surface ice actively melting—phenomena virtually unheard of during the depths of Antarctica’s polar winter, which normally blankets the region in deep snow and thick ice.
it’s now June 20th and we still can’t get a temperature above 75 in the 10-day forecast in South Central Minnesota. somebody posted that some warm temperatures were recorded in Antarctica. let’s just note that it’s now in the middle of summer in the northern hemisphere and the forecast for the Greenland ice cap calls for high temperatures that will not exceed 14° in the next 10 days. I’m just wondering how does a temperature of 14° melt ice? only Al Gore knows the answer to that. which reminds me did anybody catch his interview on the 20-year anniversary of his propaganda film? his dire predictions didn’t come true but he won’t admit it.
The scoundrels always report on the weather at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula which is 3,000km from the South Pole. The tip of Argentina is much closer at only 1,000km. It’s not unusual at all here for temperature at this location in Winter to occasionally nudge above zero Celsius.
File this under…. you’ve got to be kidding me. lol. Do any of you have a spare $480,000 laying around the house? if so feel free to invest in the latest in outdoor amphitheater design…. the fire suite. it’s about the size of your deck, with what appears to be a natural gas lit fireplace in the middle and you have a nice view of the stage where you might be able to see an aging Rod Stewart singing his hits. never mind that Jimmy Carter said we’re running out of natural gas. never mind that all these outdoor fires are obviously going to contribute to global warming. lol. here’s a 4-minute video that explains it all. and then after you’ve seen the video give your opinion and comment… is it real or are we being punked? honestly I’m not sure. https://youtu.be/qOfm2-iaOd4?si=QYOGXhEhawKqv2_i
Breaking news! it’s almost the middle of summer in France and it’s hot. film at 10:00 p.m.. lol. it’s hot but is it hotter than the 1930s? well we don’t know because the national records only go back to 1947 – the City of Paris being an exception to that. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/power-cuts-france-leave-thousands-sweltering-amid-scorching-heatwave-2026-06-24/