Clayton Morris: Blackouts & Water Shortages, Tech Overlords Build AI Dystopia & Crush Resistance

The Tucker Carlson Show - Tucker Carlson Network

In this episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, host Tucker Carlson interviews Clayton Morris to discuss the rapidly expanding infrastructure behind artificial intelligence,

Key takeaways

• The U.S. is on the brink of a massive data center build-out, with nearly 5,000 already built and another 3,900 projected in the next year.
• Data centers are consuming vast amounts of electricity and water, contributing to shortages and rising costs for everyday consumers.

Main topics

• AI infrastructure expansion
• Data centers and resource depletion (electricity, water)

Notable quotes

"We're not even at the beginning of this build out. We haven't even begun to see the thousands of data centers..." – Clayton Morris

"You can ask companies to delete your data. But when the FBI wants it, suddenly it manages to show back up again." – Clayton Morris

Conclusion

The episode warns that while AI promises transformative progress, its physical infrastructure is already causing real-world

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:04) The Speaker 2 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 1 (0:15) The new Speaker 2 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 4 (0:33) Clayton Morris, thank you so much for doing this. A lot of us have been focused on the AI slash data center story from a badly informed tech perspective, trying to answer the question, will machines become our masters? Is this the end of the human race? But there's another component to the story which may be bigger, and it has to do with the physical world and the demands of AI on that world and the short-term implications for the rest of us because of the construction of these data centers. And you have been on this. more than anyone I know. So can you just frame the way that you're looking at AI and data centers? Why is it important? Speaker 3 (1:11) Well, I think it's so important for these communities. You're seeing, if we step back, there's so much math involved in this. And I always say that every real estate story is all local. So it's all different what's happening in New York from what's happening in Texas right now, what's happening in Quincy, Washington, or Homer City, Pennsylvania. It's all different. But it's all of the same animal, so to speak. Speaker 3 (1:39) We are, I don't even think we're at the beginning of this because there's so much discussion about AI, just flip on CNBC or Bloomberg or anything. It's AI everywhere. We're going to hit an AI bubble. We haven't even started this build out for AI data centers across the United States. And I honestly think we're at the precipice of a major transformation for humanity. And we won't know for years whether it's good or bad. There were studies done on Google, the Google effect back in like 2011. You know, our kids like outsourcing their ability to search for things to Google. Like think about how funny that is now in hindsight all these years later. But we are, I think, at the beginning of this build out. We haven't even begun to see the thousands of data centers and the way that this is going to change humanity for good and bad. And I think that anyone who says they know for sure doesn't know. And I think a lot of these companies that are spending $500 billion, we just got word that NVIDIA is going to take out credit in order to build out massive amounts of infrastructure. So this is like a new phase of this now, not even their own money. It's going to be a credit story, borrowing money at enormous sums from Wall Street in order to build out this infrastructure. Speaker 3 (2:59) Just at like a micro level, if you just think about communities and what it means to just you and I, it means right now increased prices for kilowatt hours just to run your home. It means increased prices at the grocery store just to get additional groceries because the cost of everything has gone up. It means water shortages across the United States. We're already seeing it. We're already seeing its effects on ranchers. Speaker 3 (3:28) So it's so big and there's so many pieces of this. You've got the robotics piece of this, which is the human robotics layer. So AI will, of course, be involved in every level of robotics, which is going to be as, if you listen to Elon Musk, and I believe he's a smart, very smart person, he says that his Tesla robotics division is going to be the biggest product in human history, his Optimus robots. So if you take him at his word, or even if half of his word is true, And that's just one company. The human robotics element of this is going to be absolutely massive. And of course, then the AI, the compute power that will be layered inside of that hardware. Speaker 3 (4:09) The requirements for that are going to be astronomical. And that's just one piece of it. Every company that exists right now, just about every company is incorporating AI. It's like the AI that you don't see that I think is in many ways the most invasive of all of this. So for instance, Zoom, like you and I are talking right now on Zoom. Right. Well, they recently sort of shifted to becoming really an AI productivity company. in many ways that's their focus now forget being just like hey we're gonna have a meeting over zoom now they've added in a take notes feature which can use ai and basically take notes for you during your meeting um and now their focus is ai so ai being built into everything you can think of may i ask you to pause and ask a question Speaker 4 (4:53) for a second so just to take zoom as an example so zoom again being this software program that allows people to speak on video conferencing anywhere between each other anywhere in the world. Basically what they're saying is we're going to transcribe every conversation and that's going to be helpful as a productivity device somehow. But what happens to the data? So the substance of your conversation is now on a Zoom server. Do you have control over what's done with that data with your words? with that information? Speaker 3 (5:30) I mean, I think this idea that you have control over any of your data is a joke. You can ask companies to delete your data. But of course, when the FBI then wants to subpoena that data, suddenly it manages to show back up again. So wait, I thought, you know, like that you could just like delete that stuff. Or Google tells you that, hey, after 30 days, we delete this stuff. It's all there. It's fractals. It's always going to be there. So, you know, you're opting into this, the take notes feature, and I don't know the full back end of what Zoom's operation looks like, but most of it is all built on Amazon Web Services. Most of it is built on Amazon's infrastructure from Palantir to Flock Safety. You know, they'll tell you that they've got their own proprietary layer of what they do with that data, but all of it's built on like Amazon infrastructure and sort of this back end infrastructure. So where is that data going? It's living in these data centers. Speaker 3 (6:21) and being built out at a clip that we've never seen before. So right now, there are about 809, give or take, a few data centers being built right now. There's about 4,800 of them that are currently built. There's another, I think, 3,900 that have been projected to be built over the next year. doubling the amount of data centers in the United States. And they're not getting smaller. They're getting bigger. They're getting more massive. Take, for instance, like the Project Stargate in Texas, in Abilene, Texas. Massive, massive infrastructure Speaker 4 (6:59) that Trump, of course, was championing. Speaker 3 (7:01) And a lot of this was opened up, we shouldn't forget, at the very beginning of the Trump presidency with all these executive orders so that you could start building a data center without even getting environmental permits. So you could start the construction. So if... like the redacted news, you know, data center wants to get started, I could go out tomorrow, buy some land, and I could start this construction, local permits, and get started. Forget the EPA requirements, like how much pollutants will be spun off as a result of the diesel generator backups, or the water influx, or any of the particulate matter that will be spun off as a result of the center, the water usage, all of that. Don't worry about it, because now the EPA doesn't care. you can get those, you can already start construction. And then of course, on top of that, you have Trump's AI litigation team, which is pretty funny when you look at it. So the Department of Justice has built like an AI litigation team to go out to different states. Like you can see where the priorities are. So if there's a state or a community that says, we don't want data centers in our backyard, or we're putting onerous... rules in place and regulations in our backyard because we don't want these things here. Well, here comes Trump's Department of Justice and the AI litigation team. to town, not staying at a Best Western when they arrive, and they're going to start to look at your community and sue you for onerous regulations against data centers. This was part of that executive orders and executive actions at the very beginning of Trump's presidency. So glad we have an AI litigation team in place. Speaker 4 (8:36) Wait, so our Department of Justice, which I thought we owned as citizens, is now working on behalf of private companies, which we do not own. In order to force communities to subsidize those private companies? Speaker 3 (8:51) Yes. So under the attorney general, under this AI litigation team, this task force, will go out and they'll see, hey, you know, did, you know, did this community in upstate New York put in place some toxic diesel particulates zoning law that's not going to allow. this data center to be built because they'll need backup diesel generators. And when they kick on every 30, you know, every few days to test the diesel backup and it's going to shoot off these particulates and so forth. We don't want that here. We don't want it polluting our air and our waterways, by the way. So that's what this task force will look at. Or maybe we just don't want it. Speaker 4 (9:31) Maybe we just don't. We think it's ugly or we disagree with the whole project or it doesn't matter what the motive is. It's our community. And don't we have some right to shape its future because it's ours? We are strongly pro-dog on this show. We make no secret of that. Dogs are one of the great blessings of this life. 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There was a friend of the show, Derek Brose and Hakeem Anwar put on a day of action on the beginning of August. against these data centers. So people around the country to come out and say, we don't want these things in our backyard, at least kind of drawing attention to them. We don't want the noise. We don't want the pollution. And there's so much just misinformation and there's fear. Speaker 3 (14:05) about all of these data centers right now. And there's just a lot of BS that's kind of floating around about how these things operate. Maybe we could talk about it if you want to kind of dive a little more deeply. Well, Speaker 4 (14:17) I want Speaker 3 (14:17) to Speaker 4 (14:18) dive very deeply into it. I mean, you've already, you know, we're 10 minutes into this. You've already shocked me. So I had no idea that was happening. Speaker 4 (14:27) You know, if you were to have dinner with me, I would pretend to be highly informed on everything. But obviously that's not true because I didn't even know this. I didn't know that there was a Department of Justice AI task force designed to pummel communities into accepting things they don't want, which is to say taking sovereignty from American citizens. So, yeah, I do want to go into greater depth. So tell me about the misconceptions or, as you said, misinformation. Speaker 3 (14:53) Well, for one thing, if you listen to Wall Street or you listen to the people that the sycophants, like on CNBC, are the people that love to have these CEOs on their shows and access journalists who love to have these CEOs on their shows and kind of promote AI data center buildouts and all the new technology that they're rolling out. And so some of this technology is good, right? There is actual good cooling technology that's emerging from companies like... VRT, which instead of using water that would cool it with using evaporation technology, which is one of the biggest problems. Forget the electricity piece of this for a second. That's the other big part of the story. By the way, this energy, you know, it's like you can rob Peter to pay Paul. Speaker 2 (15:42) We're not using water. Speaker 3 (15:43) Oh, yeah, but you're using the energy now, the electricity to use dry cooling to cool. Okay, so it's just like... It's like the shell game. You say moving things around a board. So when you see these CEOs come on CNBC or Bloomberg or whatever and tell you how they've solved the cooling problem because they don't need water. Okay, now what about the massive amounts of electricity that you need now to use dry cooling? So it's anyway, it's a shell game. Well, it takes Speaker 4 (16:07) resources to make things. That's