Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Data Centers Go Nuclear (with Maia Woluchem and Dr. Livia Garofalo), 2026.03.09

• Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna • Episode 74

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We knew that the energy demands of data centers were preventing dirty energy sources from being sunsetted.  Now hyperscalers are reaching even further, resurrecting Pennsylvania's infamous Three Mile Island. Emily and Alex are joined by Maia Woluchem and Dr. Livia Garofalo, who have researched the impacts of data center construction across PA.

Maia Woluchem and Livia Garofalo are with the Trustworthy Infrastructures program at Data & Society. Their latest article, "Pennsylvania is perfect," is part of the New Internationalist's AI–themed issue.

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Emily

Alex

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park. 
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Alex Hanna: Welcome everyone to Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, where we seek catharsis in this age of AI hype. We find the worst of it and pop it with the sharpest needles we can find. 

Emily M. Bender: Along the way, we learn to always read the footnotes, and each time we think we've reached peak AI hype, the summit of Bullshit Mountain, we discover there's worse to come. I'm Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington. 

Alex Hanna: And I'm Alex Hanna, director of research for the Distributed AI Research Institute. This is episode 74, which we're recording on March 9th, 2026, and we're joined by two brilliant guests this week from the nonprofit research institute, Data and Society.

Emily M. Bender: Super excited. Our first guest is Maia Woluchem, the director of Data and Society's trustworthy infrastructures program. She's an urban planner, educator, and technologist who has worked across government, philanthropy, civil society, and in academia to preserve human rights in the digital realm. She's also an adjunct faculty member at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where she teaches about the legacy of economic and racial segregation.

Alex Hanna: And Dr. Livia Garofolo is a cultural and medical anthropologist and a researcher with the trustworthy infrastructures team. She focuses on technologies and infrastructures of healthcare broadly defined. She's interested in understanding how people experience and make meaning in times of crisis, how conditions of illness and distress are treated inside and outside clinical settings, and how power and subjectivity show up in everyday life. They have a piece out this month in the New Internationalist called "Pennsylvania is Perfect." So they look at the impacts of data center construction across Pennsylvania, as well as some of the local resistance to these projects. And that's available online at newint.org, where you can also read the rest of the magazine's AI hype themed issue. Great to have you both with us.

Maia Woluchem: Thank you so much for having us. We're so excited to be here.

Emily M. Bender: We are so excited to learn from you today, about the super important topic of data centers and the resistance to them and all of that. Our first artifact is from something called ConstellationEnergy.com. And this is a press release. So home slash newsroom, "Constellation to launch Crane Clean Energy Center, restoring jobs and carbon free power to the grid." And then it continues, "Constellation signs its largest ever power purchase agreement with Microsoft, a deal that will restore TMI Unit 1 to service and keep it online for decades; add approximately 835 megawatts of carbon free energy to the grid; create 3,400 direct and indirect jobs; and deliver more than $3 billion in state and federal taxes." And this is from September 20th, 2024. TMI Unit 1. What's that? 

Maia Woluchem: Yeah, it's a great question. I think, TMI, better known of as Three Mile Island, which, you know, captures the public imagination for a few reasons. Or, those who were around a few decades ago might remember Three Mile Island as the site of the largest nuclear disaster in the country so far. And for a long time it's been kind of sputtering in and out of service. And one of, this particular piece is an announcement of Three Mile Island's sort of resurgence as a result of a really profound Microsoft investment. To invest in nuclear energy to support its data centers across, frankly, wherever they might exist, energy that's needed to support that infrastructure. Livia, what else is Three Mile Island? Anything else you might add? 

Livia Garofalo: Yeah, so Three Mile Island is literally an island, located on the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania, around Harrisburg. And so throughout our research, we've driven there multiple times, and it's quite staggering to see, you know, you see the stacks and you see the river, and across the way houses. And you just can, you know, feel what it must have been like to have the nuclear accident in the seventies. And so, this restarting has brought up different reactions in the community, obviously, and we will talk about this later. But jobs is kind of one of the points of the resurgence and being at the forefront of the AI race. But a lot of these discussions are also about the grid. Constellation is in the energy business, and they have renamed it Constellation Clean Energy Center or whatever. So yeah, the first time we went there, they had covered the original sign with just a, like a plastic thing. In November 2024. And when we visited more recently, it had been actually formalized in a solid, but it was literally a coverup of a sign. That was quite telling. 

Alex Hanna: That's pretty wild. The first paragraph here is really shocking as well. So it's a press release, but it's a Dateline format, and it says "Londonderry, Pennsylvania. September 20th, 2024. Constellation, Nasdaq CEG, announced today the signing of a 20 year power purchase agreement with Microsoft that will pave the way for the launch of Crane Clean Energy Center, or CCEC, and the restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, which operated at industry leading levels of safety and reliability for decades before being shut down for economic reasons exactly five years ago today. Under the agreement, Microsoft will purchase energy from the renewed plant as part of its goal to help match the power of its data centers in PJM use with carbon free energy." Let's start with that one. Thoughts?

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. It's astonishing to me that they can talk about Three Mile Island Unit 1 with great safety records. As if it weren't part of the same installation, built the same way, presumably, as the one that melted down.

Livia Garofalo: Yeah. And one of the interesting things is that the second, the Unit 1 was closed. These economic reasons, it was because it wasn't profitable, right? It wasn't profitable to keep the whole thing going. And so Microsoft per, you know, the contract basically is what gave it a new life. And while boasting sort of the Pennsylvania at the forefront of the AI race, which is something we've been hearing, a lot of things seem to be at the forefront of the AI race, but Pennsylvania is one of them.

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. It's a crowded field. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. So it continues. So there's a quote here from the president, or the CEO, where he says, "'Powering industries critical to our nation's global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centers, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon free and reliable every hour of every day. And nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise,' said Joe Dominguez, president and CEO, Constellation. 'Before it was prematurely shuttered due to poor economics, this plant was among the safest and most reliable nuclear plants on the grid. And we look forward to bringing it back with a new name and a renewed mission to serve as an economic engine for Pennsylvania.'" So I'm really curious here, both Maia and Livia, on the narrative here that's being presented by the CEO of Constellation, especially the kind of economics engine in the way that they're really talking about data centers as something that's really gonna drive Pennsylvania forward.

Maia Woluchem: Yeah. Thank you for that provocation. It is an interesting argument, because Pennsylvania, you know, one of the things that makes it really unique is that it has a particularly, it's a pretty strong energy competitor compared to many other states across the country. It has an incredible, I mean, incredible in ways that I think many organizers would describe as quite troubling in some ways. It's a leader in natural gas, fracked gas, has quite a high nuclear capacity. And so I think often you might see these conversations around data centers, particularly when it comes to sort of a narrative perspective, really interlaced with this energy picture, because a lot of those jobs are dependent on industries that are in many ways deeply extractive. You know, so many of the ways that data centers are described are, you know, particularly for the state of Pennsylvania, are in incredible job terms, because it means that we are turning back on coal plants that have been shuttered for many decades. We are reinvesting in fracking of an industry that, you know, we've known for a long time, you know, it's just incredibly harmful for the neighborhoods and the communities around those particular sites, though they are jobs. So I suppose if you wanted to make an economic argument, perhaps that might be salient in an election year, such as the one that we are facing now.

Alex Hanna: Yeah, no, for sure. There's some great stuff here. Emily, do you wanna read this quote from Bobby Hollis from Microsoft? 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, sorry. Yes. So, Bobby Hollis says, "This agreement is a major milestone in Microsoft's efforts to help decarbonize the grid in support of our commitment to become carbon negative. Microsoft continues to collaborate with energy providers to develop carbon free energy sources to help meet the grid's capacity and reliability needs." And he is the VP of energy at Microsoft. And this is the same Microsoft that, you know, made this carbon negative promise. And then sometime before this press release said, oh, nevermind, we can't do that. It was a moonshot. And the moon is now five times further away, right?

Alex Hanna: Yeah.

Livia Garofalo: One thing that's interesting here is also the "collaborate with energy providers," right? I mean, that collaboration is actually, it's negotiations, it's contracts, it's how much, how many megawatts are you actually gonna pull from the grid? And this is, you know, a lot of this is future talk. By the time they restart this, by the time it powers these data centers, right. There's a lot of, in all these documents, if you like, there's a lot of vagueness and hand waviness about details. That obviously is part of the hype, I guess.

Maia Woluchem: And just one thing briefly on the nuclear picture, and sort of this piece about carbon free energy. It's so interesting to hear nuclear described in this way. You know, particularly because I think some of these sites get a lot of attention because the alternatives, particularly for a state like Pennsylvania, if you're looking for energy, it's going to be fracked gas or it's gonna be coal. So like, in relationship to those, you know, using the power of the tech industry to help us develop what we are considering clean energy. You know, if we're just looking at the state of Pennsylvania, perhaps it might be a boon to this kind of comparatively less carbon heavy footprint. However, we already know that nuclear has a range of other externalities that are harmful in a whole other ways. The fact that we're renaming TMI at all, indicative of such a past. So it is a complicated sort of narrative story that I think is just really well exemplified in that particular quote.

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. And I see a couple of versions of it. There's both the narrative of, well, we have to get all of this energy because we need these data centers, clearly. Right? And so therefore, isn't nuclear better than coal and natural gas and all of that. Sort of just setting aside the possibility of like, maybe not, like what if we didn't? But then we also see, and we might see some more of this later, folks saying, well, here's a real opportunity to build out carbon neutral energy sources. As if that's the goal, as if we couldn't work for that goal without tech investing. I don't know if that's a narrative that you see frequently, and how you like to combat it, if so. 

Maia Woluchem: Yeah, I think it's definitely an interesting question because sort of implicit in this kind of, you know, data centers and the tech industry are part of the reason that we're able to revitalize or reinvest in Pennsylvania, is a real question about whether that is the model that should be encouraged at all. That we are relying on kind of big industrial giants to be able to give us a healthy tax base to be able to afford to keep our hospitals and our educational institutions alive in this place. It's a very, I feel we've sort of ceded a lot of ground to this narrative that this is one of the healthiest development paths for any of the other kinds of goals that we might wanna see, data centers or otherwise. And I think, you know, the fact that it's data centers, it could have been, you know, Pennsylvania is interesting because it has had so much of this history of industrial kind of starts and stops and restarts. And it seems, you know, implicit in our research is trying to understand how data centers are part of that lineage that it, you know, it might as well have been any other industry, but the fact that we are relying on the tech giants to fulfill this gap is in many ways, as you all know, just incredibly problematic. But Livia, anything else you might add?

Livia Garofalo: Yeah, I mean, there's also, I think what's skipped in a lot of it's like, we need the data centers because we need AI. Because we need AI, right? It stops at the, because we need AI, and there's never like, we need AI because another reason, it's kind of a recursive argument about the AI need for itself. And it's interesting because some of the people we've spoken to in this research, are seeing maybe for the first time AI being a thing that comes in front of the farm that they look at every day. So the connection between like, oh, AI is just, you know, ChatGPT on my phone, but it's also the thing that's gonna make my electricity bills higher because they're gonna have to pull from somewhere. They're gonna have to pull from the aquifer of the streams that I look at every day. So it's doing interesting things, like people are putting together things in ways that maybe were harder to do without the physical infrastructure coming next to their home. 

Alex Hanna: Absolutely. It's the idea of the cloud actually has a material basis, right? It's not just this thing that's an interface. It's right here. This next paragraph is really interesting, and I'd love for y'all to engage with it because it's talking about jobs, which we hear about so much in this conversation about data center development. And so the press release says, "A recent economic impact study commissioned by the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council found that the new CCEC will create 3,400 direct and indirect jobs and add more than 800 megawatts of carbon free electricity to the grid. The report, produced by the Brattle Group, also found that restarting the plant will add 16 billion to the state's GDP, and generate more than $3 billion in state and federal taxes." I would love y'all, Maia and Livia, to talk about both the job claims, but also I think the investment claims, and then the tax claims.

Maia Woluchem: Yeah, this is a tough one, right? Because these job numbers, as Livia noted, they're projections based on a whole range of things. And in many ways, the data center conversation around jobs has exemplified how these things can be really dubious. Like, we are counting data center jobs, even if they're short term construction jobs that are just about creating the frame of the warehouse, and then everyone goes home, and the only people who are there are the ones who are like managing the servers day by day. A very small number of people. And so these job numbers, we often find, like, looking underneath the hood can just be a bit difficult to parse out, both in the short and the long term. And it's, yeah, so it's hard to know. I think frankly, it's just hard to know. And as Livia's mentioning this kind of amorphous, we need these things to support AI, is also kind of dependent on this idea that five, ten years down the line when Constellation's energy center is up and going, that the needs from data centers and from these models are going to remain the same. Where we don't know, like, maybe data centers get smaller, maybe chips need different things. Maybe our appetite and our energy towards AI as an infrastructure that we're relying on has changed by that time. So it's just, it's a bit hard to know all economic numbers in some ways, you know, the projections are hard to parse. But for many of those reasons, this one is just hard to understand.

Alex Hanna: Yeah. And I do know that, I've had a conversation with some state lawmakers and they're kind of like, well, trades will often be like, well, it's a construction project. And once that's done, they'll look for something else. And so if it's to keep it rolling, it doesn't necessarily matter if it's short term. I'm also interested too, just because y'all are very much in the Pennsylvania context, and this has a quote by Governor Josh Shapiro further down. I'm really curious on how the state thinks about this. That because we tend to see data center construction happening where there is not ideal, let's say, environmental or grid supporting infrastructure, but just really an attractive business and political environment. So I'm curious on just the claims about taxes and the benefits of the state. Like, how real are those, or is that more kind of vaporware just to ensure, you know, other data centers come to town? 

Livia Garofalo: Well, you know, the article that we wrote is called "Pennsylvania is Perfect." Because it has all, I mean, the quote actually comes from an organizer who was imagining a regenerative economy, for which Pennsylvania would be perfect, right? But the same things that make it perfect for this wonderful imagined future is also what makes it perfect for the extraction piece. Pennsylvania exports energy as of now, so it's exporting electricity. The climate is mild and moderate, and it has a history of deregulation. The politics, you know, at the state level, supporting the data center industry is a bipartisan effort. So Josh Shapiro has been quite supportive of this. He's had to kind of tone down some of his support in the last, literally, month. But the interesting thing about this phenomenon is how it crosses party lines, both on the sort of legislative side, but also on the organizing side. It's not like a left versus right thing. It's more complex with that, because obviously many people have ties to the tech industry at several levels. So the tax thing also, like nobody wants to pay taxes and people want tax revenue. It's like, putting those two things together is always the problem, right? 

Emily M. Bender: It has to come from somewhere. I was struck by this thing just a little bit further up, where they're talking about basically buying off the community. So it says, "To ensure that the local community fully participates in the economic benefits of restarting the facility, Constellation has committed an additional 1 million in philanthropic giving to the region over the next five years to support workforce development and other community needs." And then, "The company had a strong relationship with Middletown and the surrounding communities over the 20 years that it had operated the plant, with public safety as its number one priority. Constellation is committed to making community outreach, engagement, and dialogue cornerstones of its restart plan." That kind of sounds to me like, they know they aren't necessarily welcome, and they're trying to pay for something over, but what does that look like from the Pennsylvania perspective?

Maia Woluchem: Yeah, this is an interesting one because in some ways the conversation about nuclear can be more complicated. Like, there are very, as Livia's describing, very sort of wide constituencies of folks who may have a really present memory of Three Mile Island. Because there were families who may have been struggling with the health impacts after the disaster in the seventies, you know, may have really been on the forefront of the organizing around the anti-nuclear movement at the time. There are, you know, many of those folks we were able to chat with. And at the same time there have been folks on the other side who are saying, you know, I've had this diner here for a long time and we just haven't been able to operate in the way that we used to. And so perhaps having a more vibrant downtown is something that we might be interested in. So it's kind of a wide berth. But I think to this point around community benefits, that one is a tricky one. I think this particular example of $1 million over five years, you can imagine, like, that's not an incredible amount of money. Like that's maybe, you know, a small park or something like that. And we've, you know, in our research have gotten to go through many of these sites that were part of community benefits agreements where, you know, there might be- oh my gosh, Livia, I'm trying to remember this nature center that we were able to go through on our way down through Eastern PA. 

Livia Garofalo: Berwick, yeah. 

Maia Woluchem: In Berwick, exactly. It's just, it's certainly not enough to be able to assuage a community that is, you know, really concerned about now generations of industrial and environmental harm as a result of, in many times energy extraction, but also extraction from the land, extraction from the water. And, you know, nuclear and kind of relationship to data centers are pulling a tremendous amount of natural resources and land that could have otherwise, as one of our interviewees discusses in that piece, been used for a beautiful regenerative economy in which we really focus on our health and our environment and our education and other sorts of things aren't necessarily, you know, tools of surveillance and extraction. But, yeah, I'm sure there's other ways to think about this as well. 

Livia Garofalo: No, there's just bread crumbing, right? I mean, we also saw this in Berwick, where the impending Amazon sort of deal was, you know, they're like, well, we'll give money to your theater because it's an old community theater that needed restoring. And so it's the, well, something's better than nothing. But then where are the cost and benefits? And I think the discussion about nuclear or an existing plant that people have lived with on their landscape since the seventies is different than, there is a hill here where there are eagles, and now we're gonna put a data center here. So that's, I think there's a different way that people are used to or accept the bargain when it's an existing structure versus, oh, we're building this from scratch and it might be five years, ten years. And then what if a data center is the size of a refrigerator and now you're gonna leave us with a detritus of yet another boom and bust that Pennsylvania has seen since, you know, late 19th century at least. So, yeah. 

Emily M. Bender: And hearing you say in there, oh, your theater needs renovations, so we'll contribute to that, makes me think there's probably somebody at Amazon whose job it is to like, go into these communities and identify what they would offer based on what's going on in the community. And I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is, it's really bleak.

Livia Garofalo: They have their own PR. I mean, they have to, especially as organizers are really combing through these ordinances, combing through the plans. And so yeah, everybody is paying attention from both sides.

Maia Woluchem: It's true, like, these municipal meetings, they have so many different actors who show up, which at times can include folks in suits from the energy company, from the tech company, from, you know, they have handsomely paid lobbyists who are there to push, and in some ways muddy the discussion around economic development. Because, you know, it can be hard in some of these cases, as Livia is describing, you know, potentially we have a hill that doesn't have anything on it. We have a much clearer before and after. Or perhaps as in some of the cases across Pennsylvania, you know, you might have had a coal plant living on this land that has been, you know, seeping into the ground for many generations. And is having this piece of detritus, as Livia mentioned, were better or worse than the $20 million that they're promising to start up a school. And even if they're in a suit and they're not from here, like, that is a job that I might not be able to have otherwise. So it really, it can really muddy the waters of what is in many ways a very deeply held community conversation. Like, it's not really often best adjudicated by the three Amazon representatives who were there at the meeting at that time. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. And it's so interesting to just see how cross partisan this is. Because you have quoted in this article, Pennsylvania State Representative Tom Mehaffie talking about climate change, in addition to Josh Shapiro, who's a democrat, in addition to US Congressman Scott Perry, who is part of the Freedom Caucus, which is, and wanted to overturn the 2020 election. And so you've had this really strange kind of group of actors that are together, and there's some talk a little bit in the chat just about the ways that certain candidates, even I think a DSA candidate someone had mentioned, had taken some money from OpenAI. And so there's something from, I think this is intelaigente, I dunno how to say this. I'm gonna, I'm taking liberties with the name. Someone running for city attorney. And so it's really curious on just bringing all these, and then in addition to the trades, so it's really interesting to hear from y'all from that on one side and on the other side, all these community organizations, they're really trying to push back at just, all of this, and on these different fronts.

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. So to transition over to our next main course artifact, I do wanna get back to this earlier comment from abstract_tesseract. Are you up to the singing, Alex, or should I just read? 

Alex Hanna: Is it to, I don't know the tune. Is it "We Didn't Start the Fire"? Is that the tune? 

Emily M. Bender: No, no. So, okay, I'll just read. So, "Well, we're living here in Allentown and they're closing all the factories down-" that's a Billy Joel lyric. This is from abstract_tesseract. "Now imagine them getting Billy Joel to sing a song about opening Three Mile Island back up to keep the chatbots going." All right, so our second artifact is from July 15th of last year. It is on the website of Dave McCormick, who is one of the senators. So it's on mccormick.senate.gov. And the header here is "Fact Sheet: More than 90 billion in investments announced at Senator McCormick's Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit." And then I'll just read the first paragraph, and then we can dive into it. Dateline is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "Top executives in energy and AI, leading global investors, key representatives in labor and trade, and top government officials have joined Senator Dave McCormick and President Donald J. Trump at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, July 15th, 2025. At this first of its kind summit, companies announced over $90 billion of investments in data centers, energy and power infrastructure, and workforce and AI training projects. These commitments will create tens of thousands of construction jobs and thousands of permanent jobs, signaling Pennsylvania's readiness to power the AI and energy revolution, further strengthening America's resilience and independence." I feel bad just having read that, but thoughts?

Maia Woluchem: This was such an interesting event. This Energy and Innovation Summit, it was one of the, you know, it's a lot of Pennsylvania leadership stepping forward on this big bet of AI, of data centers, of really kind of using the platform of PA as an energy exporter to lead what they're calling the AI revolution. And there are a lot of quotes from this particular day that stick out. One of them was our department of energy on stage saying, you know, this bet on AI is quite like their Manhattan project, and if we don't win this bet, we're gonna, you know, imagine if we hadn't developed that atomic bomb, what would the world look like in an alternative scenario. And so they're really using the money, this language, this kind of big AI race, the rah rah about economic activity, to create almost this patriotic duty to be a part of what we're considering the innovation of the 21st century, which is, yeah. It's, talk about those narratives. I think one that really created a lot of confusion on the ground, in relationship to some of these earlier things that we're talking about, about like deep environmental harms, the concerns about losing community character. Like what does it mean to give tech companies all of this power over local democracy and local decision making when, you know, buttressed against these arguments around, wow, it's a one of a kind summit. We are having billions of dollars of investment. We need this as a nation. It's just, it's a very wild time indeed. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, absolutely. There's something that struck me too about this, which I thought was very interesting, is the claim here where they say these commitments will create tens of thousands of construction jobs and thousands of permanent jobs. And, you know, so there's a factor of 10 difference between these jobs, which I thought is interesting. And then reading a little bit, my spidey sense always goes off when I hear any kind of claims about what jobs are created. To whom? Like, how is that money going to go back into a local economy, if any? I'm kind of interested from your organizing work, you know, how those claims are, how those land on different types of groups and different folks. 

Livia Garofalo: I think one of the skepticism is also around the permanent jobs. It's not that everybody can work in a data center, you know, they're also like quite secure facilities. It's not a construction job. So, the fear that people will, companies will bring their own workers, right? So it's not jobs from, it's like, is this being paired with retraining for people who once worked in extractive industries? You know, that you have to have a specific profile to be able to work in a data center. But the construction piece is the one, you know, temporarily first. So it's like, well, we'll take those. And it's kind of a job scarcity thing. It's like, we'll take it and we'll think about it later in this AI race, because the time is taking, I think there's a whole temporality thing that is, who's gonna win if we don't do this? And the organizers obviously question that, but even, you know, CMU or other universities, other institutions that are not corporate entities, are partnering around this race idea. 

Emily M. Bender: Absolutely. I mean, the first thing listed there includes Anthropic giving $1 million over three years to support energy research at Carnegie Mellon. And $1 million does not go very far in terms of research grants like that. That's actually kind of tiny. 

Alex Hanna: Pretty small research grant, considering, yeah. And given that half of it goes to overhead and then that gives you $500,000 over three years. So it's probably gonna pay one or two research assistants. Okay. And also the pitance that they're giving here that says Anthropic committed 1 million over three years to support the PicoCTF program that provides cybersecurity education to middle and high school students. And then the rest of the numbers are billion in the billions. 

Emily M. Bender: But that's already probably enough for Carnegie Mellon to be like, we have to make nice with Anthropic now, 'cause they're giving us money.

Alex Hanna: Yeah.

Maia Woluchem: I was gonna add, I think this piece too about the balance between kind of academic institutions and what we're considering to be an AI first job. At this summit was a pretty astounding panel that featured Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs, talking about the kinds of jobs that Pennsylvanians are gonna have as a result of this. And there was a lot of talk about, you know, we need to train a hundred thousand electricians. We need to train all of these plumbers. We need folks who are really in the trades. While in the same breath and through the same panel, talking about how education was going to be transformed away from the sort of, I mean, it can't be divorced from the fact that we are living in this time where we are pretty profoundly disinvesting in our educational institutions of many kinds, different kinds of majors that can also participate in whatever they're envisioning the AI future to be. You know, Pennsylvania has already lost a few of its PIT and Penn State satellite campuses that would've served many of these places that are, instead of receiving substantial support for educational institutions, are going to be the trickle down recipients of what we hope will be a strong trade job, but a trade job nonetheless, that is going to end at the end of this construction period. So I find both the numbers and the ways that they're describing this, whatever this boon is for Pennsylvania, I mean, on its face it doesn't make sense. But also, it's just really flying in the face of what we hear all the time from folks that they would otherwise value. Like, wouldn't it be nice to have a community that was able to have power to be able to like, you know, have educational institutions that we can rely on to be here a generation or two from now. It's just a really, it's like, perhaps a fatalist way of thinking about what the future of Pennsylvania could be.

Alex Hanna: Yeah. And it's really notable that the only university named is CMU, which is private. And I know there's not a mention of PIT, which is state related- I believe that is the term- that is ostensibly state funded. But I know the margins are tiny, comparatively. And, you know, IrateLump mentions in the chat, "Interesting how the services to citizens is measured in the millions, the handouts to corporations is measured in the billions." So yeah, very clearly to see that. 

Emily M. Bender: And then, I think it was sjaylett who drew our attention to this bit from Brookfield. "Brookfield estimates 300 new jobs to be protected." What does, if they're new, in what sense are they being protected? That's a weird statement.

Livia Garofalo: Yeah. I mean, there's so much private equity also in here, right? Which is the other element, or actor. And that's kind of the whole discussion about the AI bubble, like, is it gonna burst, right? Like, as these plans are going forward on the ground, the township meeting is happening and the buildings and the pipes and the water, there's also this specter of like, what if this all bursts? What if it's- I mean, it is all speculative in nature- but what if it happens? What happens on the ground to these literal buildings that people will have in front of their home? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. One of them is Blackstone. It's listed here, and it says, "Blackstone announced a 25 billion investment in data center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania, along with a new joint venture with PPL Corporation for power generation. And in the chat, I also wanna call out this person who is lozzahouse- "longtime listener, first time commenter." Hey, lozzahouse. They say, "Blackstone is also investing in a data center in the UK where I live. Karen Hao reports it'll be seven times the size of Buckingham Palace." And we see the combination of private equity here with the companies with some of these infrastructure firms. So like, CoreWeave, as well as the energy firms. And so it's quite interesting to see this, this is Constellation. And the implications of all of them. Maybe it would also be helpful if we wanted to mention who the spouse of Dave McCormick is. 

Emily M. Bender: Yes. And I'm gonna get to that, but I wanna just chime in here and point out also when we had things like, "Blackstone announced a $25 billion investment in data center-" blah, blah, blah. That makes it sound like $25 billion are going into the Pennsylvania economy, and I doubt it. Who is that being paid to, and how many of them are actually Pennsylvania local organizations that are going to be, you know, employing people in Pennsylvania, paying taxes in Pennsylvania? Like if they're buying chips from Nvidia to put into these data centers, none of that's Pennsylvania. But to your point, Alex, Maia shared this with us ahead of time. So this is something from about.fb.com, so it's from Facebook's own PR arm. January 12th, 2026. "Dina Powell McCormick joins Meta as president and vice chairman." 

Alex Hanna: Of Meta, that is. And then, what did she do beforehand? So there's a picture of her on the page. Prior, "Dina served as an invaluable member of Meta's Board of Directors, and she's been deeply engaged as we've accelerated our pursuit of frontier AI and personal superintelligence. What's personal superintelligence? Is that my own, that's like my own personal Jesus?

Emily M. Bender: I think it's a chatbot that's all up in your business, is what it is. 

Alex Hanna: I guess. Well, now I can't get, now I have the song stuck in my head. I'll use that as a transition. I'm gonna claim my own transition. I'll sing that later. And so, what else is here? "As we scale, the complexity-" I don't know. There's a statement about who she is, but that's all. 

Emily M. Bender: But so, this is January 12th, 2026, and this fact sheet was from 2025, but she was already on the board, presumably, in 2025, right?

Maia Woluchem: Yes, that's right. And was also on stage as well at this summit. It is, there's a few ways to kind of understand that news. I won't hazard at many of them. But the thing that sticks out to me is, I think, as has been discussed in many other spaces, is kind of closer connection between governance, government leadership, and the tech companies that are now, you know, what we talk about in that piece, "Pennsylvania is Perfect," is really trying to better understand the role these companies are taking as kind of state makers, is doing state planning, is doing resource management, all of the stuff that was previously in communities' hands in a much more real and rigorous way. We're finding just so much kind of municipal confusion under the weight of these closer connections between government and tech. The ways that these companies are acting at really like every level of government is certainly a place for us to be paying more attention. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, and actually to that point, what have you found about how people are paying attention and what they're doing about it?

Livia Garofalo: Yeah. So we have been so lucky to interact and talk to so many organizers across the state from Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is a huge state also, so every region has its particular combination of, you know, landscape and resources and political previous organizing. So one thing that's been interesting is that many organizations that were previously working, like, only on water or only on climate justice, or only on jobs, or only on- every kind of organizing entity has had to lock in around this issue and create different partnerships and share resources because the process is so fractured. There is no obviously federal model, and there's no statewide model, so everyone's doing it in their own township with the information they have, with different companies, with different electricity providers. So the community building is very strong. And also, residents showing up at meetings and saying what they want and asking questions that sometimes get dismissed or, you know, not taken seriously, but they're still at it.

Emily M. Bender: Super important to ask, right? And put it on record there, even if the response is dismissal. 

Maia Woluchem: And I think they've been, also, just so effective at moving both the conversation and the impacts. There have been some really key examples of the centers that have been, you know, there was one that was named in Governor Shapiro's fast track permitting program as sort of, aren't we excited that this one will be coming online? And actually the community got together to say, well, you have to get a zoning ordinance in order to do that, a variance in order to do that. And you don't have that. So, thanks, but no thanks. And I think they've been really effective at kind of holding leadership's feet to the fire. And as Livia mentioned earlier, seeing Governor Shapiro kind of soften his language a bit around what these investments are doing, knowing that there's so much community pushback, I think, is really a testament to the amazing, incredible work that so many organizers have been able to do to push their communities forward, and also to create enough fervor so that, you know, we know that there's consequences coming now.

Livia Garofalo: Yeah, that's, and it's an election year. I mean, I think people are feeling, now, I think data centers will be a big topic. Because there's so many communities across the US, I would say almost every state. So people are seeing like, oh, which side should I be on this issue, politically? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, a hundred percent. 

Emily M. Bender: Excellent. So with that, should we transition over to Fresh AI Hell? 

Alex Hanna: I think so, yeah. And there's already some good suggestions in the chat, so. To be fair, I've never actually heard all of "Your Own Personal Jesus" by Depeche Mode. So like, I've only heard the refrain, so just be kind. So it would be something like: Your own personal superintelligence. Someone to hear your prompts, someone who reasons. And then, you know, reach out- and there's two suggestions. So, reach out and touch hype! Or, reach out and touch Face... book. Anyway, that's it. And I'm inspired, and maybe next episode you'll get a whole Rat Balls mix.

Emily M. Bender: Oh, amazing. 

Alex Hanna: And so, so for Maia and Livia, Rat Balls is the name of my post-punk band that I only sing clips from on the show. 

Emily M. Bender: No, it wasn't. Rat Balls was the name of the first hit single from the band. The band was something like, Ethical Intelligence Lingua Franca or something?

Alex Hanna: Oh, yeah, Ozzy confirms. That's a good title, that's a good name for a bit. Oh yeah. Ozzy, our producer, says Ethical Autonomy Lingua Franca. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. 

Alex Hanna: I don't know, how did we come up with that, anyways? 

Emily M. Bender: It was in some, one of the artifacts that we were going after.

Alex Hanna: Oh, fantastic. All right. I really gotta get on this. Okay. Let's, yeah. 

Emily M. Bender: Deep lore from the podcast at this point. Yeah. All right. So our first artifact here for Fresh AI Hell is actually pretty on topic for the main course of the episode. This is a piece in CNBC, published on Wednesday, March 4th, 2026. The journalist's name is Annie Palmer, and the headline is "Amazon's Bahrain data center targeted by Iran for support of US military, state media says." And I have to say, I garden pathed this headline when I read it the first time, because I couldn't tell which state the state media was the state media of. 

Alex Hanna: Wait, garden path as a verb. I've had this question for you before. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. That's when you get led down the garden path by some sentence because the structure is funny. Sorry, I went deep into linguistics there for a second. 

Alex Hanna: Got it. Okay. 

Emily M. Bender: But anyway, the main point here is that data centers are now also becoming military targets. Because they are also military infrastructure. Yeah. Any thoughts there, Maia, Livia, before we bounce onto the next one? 

Livia Garofalo: Just, what do you- not what do you expect. But the infrastructure of war then becomes a target of war, right? And I think it's an interesting- it's like the multiplicity of what Amazon signifies. I think that's what we're reminded when we hear these. Because Amazon is doing the data center in Berwick, Pennsylvania, but it has a data center in Bahrain, right? Same structure, different infrastructural and political conditions in those two places.

Alex Hanna: Yeah, for sure. 

Maia Woluchem: And I think these companies are also using the, they're very clear about using the language of war in this conversation around data centers. Like we didn't, no one on the ground is coming up and saying, wow, isn't this amazing? Like, what will this allow us to do on the global stage? But these companies, our federal government for one, I mean for many reasons, is sort of naming this as an element of global power of kind of, their quest for global domination. So it seems very, I mean, as Livia noted, I think the metaphors write themselves. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right. Sticking with AI and war. Go for it, Alex. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, so this is from The Guardian. " Iran War heralds era of AI powered bombing quicker than 'speed of thought,'" in quotes. And this is by Robert Booth and Dan Milmo, from March 3rd of this year. And so the subhead, "Speed and scale of US military's AI war planning raises fears human decision making may be sidelined." 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. And just that phrase, "speed of thought," was really- 

Alex Hanna: It's very terrible. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. Really concerning. All right. Moving right along. Speaking of concerning, this is some reporting in the Verge, by Emma Roth, March 5th, 2026. With stickers tech, AI, and gadgets. And the headline is "Meta's AI glasses reportedly send sensitive footage to human reviewers in Kenya." Subhead, "Nairobi based contractors have seen footage capturing bathroom visits, naked people, and intimate moments, according to an investigation from two Swedish newspapers." And we'll have a link to the original Swedish papers in the show notes, but we've got the Verge one here for you. And, you know, just a reminder that AI is always people. All of this stuff is built on massive data labeling work. And if you are buying into luxury surveillance, you are opting into having your own data and also the data of those around you shipped off to strangers on the other side of the planet who have to look at it.

Alex Hanna: Yep. All right. Next we've got a bad tweet from Senator Bernie Sanders, who has had many of them. And so there it's a video, and the text says, "Will AI become smarter than humans? If so, is humanity in danger? I went to Silicon Valley to ask some of the leading AI experts that question." He didn't talk to me, but that's fine. "Here's what they had to say." And he has in the room, the first person is Eliezer Yudkowsky, famed existential risk. Also has asked to bomb the data centers, but for very different reasons. Basically worried that once they gain sentience, we'll have to bomb them, in a Time article. And also had a book that came out last year with Nate Soares called, "If You Build It, We All Die." So, it's very disappointing that Sanders has really bought into the hype and existential risk as well as job loss. And the left really needs a different mode of opposing quote unquote "AI" that is not this. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. And abstract_tesseract in the chat says, "I'm once again asking for Bernie to stop with the doomerism."

Alex Hanna: Yeah. Terrible. 

Emily M. Bender: Right. So this is a post on Bluesky by Dr. Verena Krebs, from March 2nd. And the text says, "Using Grammarly for the first time in forever. What!? As a non-native speaker writing primarily in English, I used to use it to check prepositions, point out too long, convoluted sentences, et cetera. It now offers to summon colleagues, both living and dead, to quote, 'expert review' the piece. What?" And then the screenshot has a side panel. It says "Expert review" and then "Selected experts: David Abulafia, Finbarr Barry Flood, Chris Wickham, and William Cronon." And those are, then there's like little bios for each of them, and supposedly you can click on that and get feedback as if it came from that person, which, no thank you. I wish Grammarly had just stuck with their core product, which was like, grammar checking. That's a fine use of language technology. But no. Grr! 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. 

Emily M. Bender: All right. Yes, go for it. 

Alex Hanna: This one is from, I can't tell the news source, I think it's a local news source, 10 News. And I think the website is, it says WSLS, I'm assuming this is something in Northern Virginia because of where the cities are. And so this is, the title is "Google Data Center Water Estimates Go Public, Residents in Roanoke and Botetourt-" sorry, I'm not, apologies for all our Northern Virginia residents- "React." And so this is by Monica Johnson, community journalist, February 25th, 2026. And the subhead says, "An agreement shows the site could draw two to eight million gallons a day from Carvins Cove, raising questions about long-term supply and who pays for expansions." 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. So here we are again, and I'm really grateful for the local journalists who are on top of this, and the community members involved, because these are the right questions to be asking, I think.

Livia Garofalo: Yeah. Shout out to local journalists because they're doing, really, the work on the ground as also, you know, the national news media landscape is changing. But they are really the ones doing the work site by site like this. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. I am reminded of the story that is in the, Tech Won't Save Us, their Data Vampire series. Where they, I believe it's the Oregonian, where they had sued to get- 

Emily M. Bender: Wait, the Oregonian? 

Alex Hanna: The Oregonian, whatever. Listen, English isn't my first language. I use that excuse a lot. 

Emily M. Bender: Pacific Northwest Pride. Anyway, go on. 

Alex Hanna: One of those, one of those states up there that's north of me. It's, effectively, they had sued, I believe this is the county, in the Dalles, to get access to the water numbers because they had signed a deal with Google. This is like, way back when hyperscalers were just starting to build. Anyways. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. And abstract_tesseract again in the chat. "Can't wait to hear all the effective altruists finding a way to well, actually the water usage." Which is particularly funny because water and wells. 

Alex Hanna: Ah, incredible. Love the pun. Okay. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right, so you wanna do this one quickly, Alex? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. So this is from Harvard Business Review, wildly enough. And this is a study written by Aruna, Ranganathan, excuse me, and Xingqi Maggie Ye. And so it's from February 9th, 2026. This headline is, "AI doesn't reduce work, it intensifies it." And so this is based off their, what sounds like a bit of a ethnographic study of a workplace. And if you want the headline here, like the top line says, I'm gonna read some highlights that I have. So, "In our in progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn't reduce work. They consistently intensified it. In an eight month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a US-based technology company with about 200 employees, we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tests, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to." This is all very Calvinist, self disciplining, like whatever. Like sociologists or religion and organizations would have a field day. But then they also have this thing where they say, "Once the excitement of experimenting fades, workers can find that their workload has quietly grown, and feel stretched from juggling everything that's suddenly on their plate. That workload creep can in turn lead to cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems." So this is, file this into, AI systems actually intensify work and make your job worse.

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. Which I guess is sort of filed under, we told you so, right? But I appreciate the research. And then one last palate cleanser here. This is in Emily Tucker's Medium blog. But it's actually a guest post by Elina Yadhav, or Jadhav. Sorry, again. I don't know the pronunciation. And the headline is, "Questioning the Normalization of Surveillance." From February 11th of this year. And Emily writes, "Last fall, I met Elina Jadhav, a local high school student who reached out to me as part of a research project she was doing on the use of surveillance technology by police. By the time she and I talked, she already had a sophisticated understanding of the wide range of digital technologies that are being integrated into systems of policing and punishment across the US, and of the wide variety of technical, political, and ethical problems they raise. She asked better questions than many reporters during our conversation. She also shared some of her own perspective as a young person coming of age at a time when widespread surveillance is taken for granted as a part of the infrastructure of daily life. I invited Elina to write a blog for the Privacy Center, sharing some of her reflections on this topic." And we will certainly have this link in the show notes. I really encourage you all to read it. But this one's filed under the kids are all right. 

Alex Hanna: Nice.

Emily M. Bender: Okay. That's it for this week. Maia Woluchem and Dr. Livia Garofalo are with the Trustworthy Infrastructures Program at Data and Society. Their latest article for the New Internationalist, "Pennsylvania Is Perfect," is available online at NewInt.org. Thank you both for being with us! 

Livia Garofalo: Thank you, thank you. A true pleasure. 

Maia Woluchem: Truly, it really was. It was so much fun. Thanks for having us! 

Alex Hanna: Thanks for being here! It was so great. Our theme song is by Toby Menon. Graphic design by Naomi Pleasure-Park. Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. And thanks as always to the Distributed AI Research Institute. If you like this show, you can support us in so many ways! Order "The AI Con" at thecon.ai or wherever you get your books, or request it at your local library. 

Emily M. Bender: But wait, there's more! Rate and review us on your podcast app, subscribe to the Mystery AI Theater 3000 newsletter on Buttondown for more anti hype analysis, or donate to DAIR at dair-institute.org. You can find our merch store there, too! That's dair-institute.org. You can find video versions of our podcast episodes on Peertube, and you can watch and comment on the show while it's happening live on our Twitch stream. That's twitch.tv/dair_institute. Again, that's dair_institute. I'm Emily M. Bender. 

Alex Hanna: And I'm Alex Hanna. Stay out of AI Hell, y'all.

Alex Hanna: Reach out and touch prompts!

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Emily M. Bender

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