It’s from an SNL skit from ages ago - I only know it because my high school band teacher referenced it enough that he had to show it to us so we’d get it.

Chris Farley plays a motivational speaker whose whole schtick is basically “[don’t fuck up your life] or you’ll end up LIVING IN A VAN, DOWN BY THE RIVER!” Over the course of the skit, it becomes apparent that his angle is less “don’t fuck up your life and have to deal with a tough recovery,” and more “don’t fuck up your life and end up living in a van like I currently do.”

Okay, so I’m not a big AI guy. It kind of sucks at everything we try to do with it, and it’s basically a huge waste of resources right now.

But… Sometimes it’s fun to play devil’s advocate.

AI consumes shitloads of electricity and water, and produces nothing but slop. Even if they’re not using evaporative cooling, that water use impacts the availability of usable water downstream of the data center. Also, it’s a huge money pit - last I saw, AI companies weren’t really turning a profit.

The article addresses electricity (Altman specifically called out a pivot to nuclear, wind, and solar), but doesn’t say a ton about the other issues… Which could all be addressed with coastal data centers.

Don’t worry - I’m not about to suggest hearing the ocean up to cool data centers. Instead, why not pivot back to evaporative cooling, but with seawater?

Build the data center, and put some cooling pools around it - twelve seems like a good number. Make the pools big enough that the center can be cooled without the use of all of the pools (this is important). Heat sinks are made of metal, and saltwater is bad for most metals, so slap on a few sacrificial anodes like they’re metal-hulled boats. Boom - the data center is now cooled using non-potable water without warming the ocean.

Now, as water evaporates, salt deposits will form in the cooling pools. When a pool gets too salty, it can be drained (or allowed to fully evaporate), and the salt can be knocked off and collected. Boom - losses reduced, data center is now a salt farm. Salt’s not really worth much, but it could probably be marked up and sold to tech bros as fancy “AI powered sea salt.”

And then, once we’ve done that, we can train the AI to do something useful, like… Uh… Clean it’s own salt pools with a little robot, I guess; it kind of sucks at everything important.

IIRC, the guage running from “very nearly empty” to “almost full” is an intentional thing, weirdly enough.

On the upper end, it’s because supposedly people feel better if they fill the tank and the needle doesn’t start going down immediately.

On the lower end, it’s to give people an earlier warning that their tank is (very nearly) empty, so they don’t run out of gas on the road.