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The Endgame?

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An Assessment Of The Accelerating Timeline for “You Will Own Nothing”

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PATRICK WOOD
MAY 21, 2026

I am an economist, first and foremost. I’m going to give you a sobering look at the progression of Technocracy and what to expect in the future. Take it for what it is. I have been following the global elite and Technocracy for over 48 years, and since my first book with Antony Sutton, Trilaterals Over Washington, Vols. I and II, I have never pulled any punches and never watered anything down. I have been warning for 12 years that the endgame was upon us. I gave you the receipts for my thinking. Time is running out… soon.

My epic new book, The New Economics of Technocracy: You Will Own Nothing, laid bare the structure, architecture, and strategy being used to dominate the world. My earlier book, co-authored with Courtenay Turner, was released in November 2025: The Final Betrayal: How Technocracy Destroyed America.

(Patrick Wood’s Technocracy News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you don’t read these books, I can’t help you. There will be no discussion. For those of you who have read these books already, you should tear into this essay with determined resolution to get to the bottom of it.

To the rest of America who have fought me tooth and nail for decades (from the left and right, you know who you are), I have only one final thing to say to you: “I told you so, and I was right.” ⁃ Patrick Wood Editor.)

When Klaus Schwab declared at the 2016 World Economic Forum that “you will own nothing and be happy,” most observers treated it as aspirational futurism. A decade later, the architecture to deliver the first half of that sentence is being built in front of us — and it is being built faster than nearly anyone outside the industry has acknowledged.

I have been documenting Technocracy for almost 20 years. The pattern is always the same. The technocrats describe the future they intend to build. Critics dismiss the description as paranoia. The future arrives on schedule. Then a new generation is told the new arrangement was inevitable.

What is different this time is the speed. And the speed is itself accelerating.

I want to lay out a defensible timeline for May 2026 with the full understanding that it will look different in six months. That is not a hedge. It is a feature of the moment we are in. The compressors are themselves compressing.

The Original Estimates Were Too Conservative

Industry analysts have been forecasting tokenization timelines using growth-rate models built for human-paced engineering and human-paced legislation. Boston Consulting Group projected $16 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030. McKinsey echoed similar figures. The World Economic Forum suggested ten percent of global GDP would move on tokenized rails by 2027.

These numbers were defensible eighteen months ago. They are no longer defensible today.

Six forces have entered the picture that none of those models accounted for. Each one shortens the timeline. Stacked together, they multiply.

The first is artificial intelligence and its compounding doubling curve. The second is regulatory capture by the technocratic class. The third is the buildout of more than five thousand AI data centers as the physical substrate. The fourth is the Pax Silica Declaration binding signatory nations to American AI infrastructure. The fifth is the federal-wrapper strategy for routing around state property law. The sixth is the Bank for International Settlements as the global alignment mechanism for tokenized monetary infrastructure.

Three of those compressors I had previously misclassified as immovable constraints. They are not. They are accelerants.

The AI Acceleration

METR, an AI evaluation organization, has been measuring how long a task an AI model can reliably complete. The doubling time used to be seven months. It is now closer to four. On software-engineering benchmarks, the doubling time is under three months.

This matters because tokenization is, at its technical core, a software-engineering problem. Smart contracts must be written. Audited. Integrated with custody systems. Reconciled with off-chain registries. Connected to oracles. Hardened against exploits. Compliance logic must be embedded.

Every one of those tasks is being accelerated by AI tooling that did not exist two years ago. The TON ecosystem is already shipping AI-assisted smart-contract toolchains. Base has launched dozens of agentic AI projects executing on tokenized assets. Broadridge surveyed 900 financial-services technology leaders in February 2026 and the headline conclusion was unambiguous: “GenAI delivering now, tokenization is next.”

The build phase that should have taken a decade is being completed in three to four years.

The Technocratic Capture

The second compressor is what Harvard’s Sabeel Rahman has called the “technocratic impulse” — the regulatory posture in which legislators defer rule-drafting to the very industry they are meant to oversee.

Members of Congress cannot read smart-contract code. They do not understand zero-knowledge proofs. They cannot evaluate consensus mechanisms. Representative Ro Khanna stated the problem out loud: Congress does not have the knowledge base.

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Industry is happy to provide the missing knowledge. And the missing legislative text.

Big Tech alone deployed $1.1 billion in political spending through 2025 to shape AI rules and preempt state regulation. The crypto industry deployed comparable sums to pass the GENIUS Act and move the CLARITY Act through the House.

The pattern is visible in the regulatory record:

  • The GENIUS Act was drafted in close consultation with stablecoin issuers themselves.
  • The SEC’s January 2026 statement that tokenized securities “may or may not” carry shareholder rights was language requested by tokenization platforms.
  • The Department of Labor’s “asset-neutral” safe harbor of March 30, 2026 uses verbatim phrasing from industry comment letters.
  • Chair Atkins’s Project Crypto framework cites industry-developed standards like ERC-3643 as the regulatory model.
  • The December 2025 AI preemption Executive Order was prepared with substantial industry coordination.

This is not bribery. It is something subtler. The legislators are being handed pre-built solutions to problems they cannot independently evaluate. They sign because they have nothing else to sign.

This is what regulatory capture looks like when the captured do not realize they have been captured.

The 5,000 Data Centers

The reader might ask why this is happening now. The answer is partly political. But it is also physical.

The United States is in the middle of a buildout of AI data center capacity, unlike anything in industrial history. Estimates put the global figure at well over five thousand operational and announced data centers, with the United States hosting more than half of large-scale capacity.

These facilities are not just running language models. They are the physical substrate on which the tokenized economy will execute.

Every tokenized stock trade requires compute. Every smart-contract execution requires compute. Every oracle update, every compliance check, every identity verification, every agentic AI transaction on a tokenized rail requires compute.

The data center buildout is the engine room of the architecture. It is being financed by sovereign-wealth capital from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, and the new entrants — Stargate, CoreWeave, and the rest.

This is the part Schwab’s quote glossed over. “You will own nothing” requires somewhere for the not-owning to happen. The data centers are that “somewhere”.

Pax Silica and the Treaty Workaround

I previously assumed cross-border legal recognition of tokenized assets would set a hard floor on the timeline because treaty cycles run five to fifteen years. That assumption is already obsolete.

The Pax Silica Declaration binds signatory nations to American AI infrastructure as the operating substrate for their digital economies. Once a country is inside that arrangement, it inherits the technical standards, identity systems, compliance hooks, and settlement rails that come with it. That is not a treaty in the traditional sense. It is soft annexation through infrastructure dependency. Legal recognition follows the wire.

Then there is World Liberty Financial. The WLF deal with Pakistan for cross-border payments was not on most analyst maps a year ago. It is now operational. WLF is positioning USD1 as an upgrade to the dollar itself, deployed through bilateral arrangements with friendly jurisdictions. A stablecoin issued by a politically connected American entity is being used to settle cross-border flows in a sovereign state of 240 million people.

This is a treaty substitute executed at the speed of a smart contract. Pax Silica plus WLF plus USD1 means the cross-border problem is being solved through bilateral infrastructure deals and dollar-aligned tokenized settlement, not through the Hague or the UN.

The treaty cycle of five to fifteen years collapses to whatever the bilateral signing schedule is.

The Federal Wrapper Around State Property Law

I also previously assumed that state-by-state title statutes would slow the tokenization of sovereign property because state law moves slowly, and there are fifty of them.

That was the wrong frame.

The architects do not need to replace every state’s title system. They need a federal wrapper that leaves state title systems formally in place while allowing tokenized representations to function as the operative instruments for transfer, financing, securitization, and beneficial-interest trading.

This is the same legal trick used for mortgage-backed securities under MERS. The deed stays where it is. The economic interest moves through a parallel federal layer that the underlying state recording offices treat as authoritative. State recording becomes ceremonial. Federal tokenization becomes operational.

A federal wrapper of this kind requires one act of Congress, not fifty acts of state legislatures. With CLARITY-Act-style preemption already in motion and the precedent of the AI preemption Executive Order of December 2025, the wrapper can be deployed in a single legislative cycle.

That bottleneck is essentially removed.

The BIS Whip

The third constraint I had wrongly classified as a floor was the alignment of 195 jurisdictions on tokenized monetary infrastructure. That is not a 195-decision problem. It is a Bank for International Settlements problem.

The BIS sits above the central banks. Through Project Agorá, Project mBridge, the Innovation Hub network, and the Unified Ledger initiative, it has been pre-positioning the technical and governance scaffolding for tokenized monetary alignment for years. Member central banks are already conforming their domestic CBDC and tokenized-deposit work to BIS-published standards.

When the BIS decides the architecture is ready, it does not need 195 separate political decisions. It needs roughly two dozen central-bank governors at the table in Basel agreeing to a coordinated launch, after which the remaining jurisdictions align by default through correspondent-banking dependency, IMF conditionality, and SWIFT-successor-rail compatibility.

That is the whip. The Basel capital accords were imposed on the global banking system through exactly this mechanism. There was no global vote. There was a BIS framework, and compliance followed.

The 195-jurisdiction floor exists only as long as the BIS chooses not to crack the whip. Once it does, alignment compresses from decades to roughly the implementation window of a single coordinated rollout — call it eighteen to thirty-six months.

The Rolling Process

Now to the question that matters most. When does this hit ordinary people?

The answer is not a date. It is a sequence.

Nobody wakes up on a Tuesday in 2030 and discovers all their assets are gone. The architecture is being designed so that the losses arrive in waves. Different victims. Different asset classes. Different legal vehicles. Different demographics.

The first wave is already underway. Retail crypto users buying offshore tokenized stocks — xStocks, Robinhood EU, Kraken’s tokenized US equities — are the first generation to discover that what looks like a stock token may carry no shareholder rights, no dividend pass-through guarantee, and no recourse if the platform fails.

The next wave is stablecoin holders facing GENIUS Act compliance triggers — whitelisted-only redemption, freeze authorities, and the discovery that a “dollar token” is not a dollar. USD1 and the WLF rollout will accelerate this wave.

After that come the US retail buyers of third-party-wrapped tokenized stocks under the SEC’s innovation exemption. Synthetic exposure without entitlements. The price tracks. The rights do not.

Then come the 401(k) participants — roughly seventy million Americans — whose target-date defaults will quietly absorb tokenized private equity, tokenized credit, and crypto under the DOL’s new safe harbor. They will not be asked. They will not be told. The illiquidity and valuation losses will surface only in the next downturn.

Then pension beneficiaries. Then self-directed IRA holders. Then fractional real-estate token buyers who discover they own LLC interests, not deeds. Then conventional shareholders of Russell 1000 stocks whose governance gets diluted by third-party wrappers. Then physical property owners under the federal wrapper, whose state-recorded deeds become ceremonial. Then cash users as CBDCs and tokenized deposits become the dominant settlement layer.

That is a ten-wave sequence running across roughly a decade — but with the first six waves now compressed into the next four to five years.

Each wave’s victims look different from the last. That is the point. No common identity forms. No political coalition forms. No reversal happens.

The Revised Timeline as of May 2026

Putting the six compressors together, with the three former floors now reclassified as accelerants, gives a defensible answer for the present moment.

The original analyst estimates of 2038–2042 for 80 percent global asset tokenization are obsolete by every measure I can identify. They were drawn before the AI doubling data, before the technocratic-capture cycle of 2025–2026, before the data center buildout reached its current pace, before Pax Silica was operational, before WLF and USD1, and before the federal-wrapper strategy was visible.

My previous revision placed the saturation window at 2030–2033 with an aggressive case of 2029–2031. That estimate is now also too conservative.

The defensible May 2026 timeline:

  • Mid-case: 80 percent global asset tokenization by 2029–2032.
  • Aggressive convergence case: 2028–2030.
  • Architecture load-bearing across all asset classes: 2027–2028.
  • First six waves of dispossession substantially completed: 2027–2030.
  • Full ten-wave sequence: completed by 2032–2034.

That is the picture from where we sit today. My honest expectation is that this estimate will move forward by another six to nine months when I revisit it in late 2026. The compressors are themselves compressing. AI doubling pulls forward the technical buildout, which pulls forward the regulatory permissions, which pulls forward the next set of bilateral infrastructure deals, which pulls forward the BIS readiness window. Each loop tightens the next.

I am writing this with the explicit caveat that any reader looking back from November 2026 should expect to find the dates have moved earlier, not later.

Why It Will Be Brutal

The brutality is not in any single wave. The brutality is in the cumulative effect.

News emerged in January 2026 that all NYSE-listed stocks will be tokenized. By April, the platform was unveiled. We now know it will be launched by year-end. Formerly, such an operation would have taken years to cut through regulations, deliberation, and testing; not so with Technocrats driving the process.

A retail trader loses on a tokenized stock platform in 2026. A worker discovers their target-date fund underperformed because of illiquid alts they did not choose in 2027. A pensioner watches benefits cut as “necessary recalibration” in 2028. A small landlord finds their LLC token diluted by sponsor amendment in 2029. A homeowner finds their deed has become ceremonial under a federal wrapper in 2030. An elderly cash user finds their preferred medium quietly unusable in 2032.

Each of these is dismissible in isolation. The aggregate is the most thorough redefinition of property in American history.

The technocrats know this. They have always known it. Wyoming’s Select Committee on Blockchain spelled out the destination in 2020: once tokens are recognized as title, tokens replace physical title. That is not a metaphor. That is the statutory roadmap.

Industry voices are equally candid. A January 2026 LinkedIn analysis titled “The Programmable Square Foot” declared: “Static ownership is fading. Programmable value is taking over.” State Street describes tokenization as a process that “redefines ownership.” Better Markets warns of “shadow stocks” that look like the real thing but lack the legal substance.

Programmable. Redefined. Shadow.

These are the words of the people building it. They are not hiding what they are doing. They are simply describing it in a register that most of the public cannot decode.

Where This Leaves the Reader

I am not writing this to alarm anyone. I am writing it because the timeline has changed, and the public discussion has not caught up. And because the timeline will change again before this essay is six months old.

The legal permission to dispossess is being passed faster than the technical capacity to execute, and both are being passed faster than the public capacity to understand what was done.

Four things follow from this.

First, the window for political resistance is now measured in months, not years. The compression of the legislative cycle means the architecture will be substantially load-bearing by 2027–2028. After that point, undoing it requires a future Congress to take affirmative action against an entrenched industry, a foreign infrastructure dependency network, and a BIS-aligned monetary system. That is a far higher bar than the original passage.

Second, the rolling nature of the dispossession means waiting for a defining event is fatal. There will be no single crisis. There will be a sequence of small ones, each affecting a different population, each dismissed as an edge case until the aggregate is irreversible.

Third, the convergence of AI, technocratic capture, data center buildout, Pax Silica, the federal wrapper, and BIS alignment is the actual story. No single one of those is enough on its own. Together they are a regime change in what property means and who controls it.

Fourth, the timeline itself is a moving target. Anyone who assumes the dates I have given here will hold for two years is reading the same map the analysts read in 2024 — and that map is now wrong by a decade.

I have called this Technocracy for almost two decades because that is what it is. The 1930s technocrats believed engineers should run the economy because politicians were incompetent to manage industrial complexity. The 2026 technocrats believe blockchain architects, AI engineers, and tokenization specialists should design the rules of property and finance because politicians are incompetent to manage digital complexity.

The difference is that today’s technocrats do not need to seize power. They are invited in by legislators looking for someone to write the technical bits of the bill.

That is the pattern. That is the timeline. That is why the thesis of “You Will Own Nothing” is no longer a 2030s problem. It is a now problem with a 2028–2030 endpoint, rolling forward one wave at a time.

The question is whether enough readers will see all ten waves as a single pattern before the fourth wave normalizes the technology beyond recovery.

That is the contribution this work has to make.

I will revisit this timeline in six months. I expect the dates will have moved earlier.

Endnotes

Boston Consulting Group and ADDX, “Asset Tokenization to Grow into US$16 Trillion Opportunity by 2030,” Ledger Insights, September 11, 2022.

Rony Dahan, “Global Adoption of Tokenization: Where Institutions Are Leading,” LinkedIn, September 23, 2025.

World Economic Forum, “Tokenized World: The Future of the Economy in 2030,” BBVA, May 5, 2026.

METR, “Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks,” March 19, 2025.

METR, “Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models,” May 7, 2026.

arXiv preprint, “Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks,” 2503.14499v2.

AI Digest, “A New Moore’s Law for AI Agents,” April 8, 2025.

BlockchainXTech, “How AI Is Accelerating Web3 Development & Automation,” LinkedIn, November 16, 2025.

Crypto Briefing, “TON’s New AI-Ready Toolchain Accelerates Smart Contract Development,” May 12, 2026.

BingX, “Top AI Agent Projects in Base Ecosystem 2026,” February 12, 2026.

Broadridge, “GenAI Delivering Now, Tokenization Is Next,” PR Newswire, February 24, 2026.

K. Sabeel Rahman, “Envisioning the Regulatory State: Technocracy, Democracy, and Institutional Experimentation,” Harvard Journal on Legislation.

Public Citizen, “$1.1 Billion in Big Tech Political Spending Fuels Attacks on State AI Laws,” November 20, 2025.

Wikipedia, “Regulatory Capture.”

Forbes, Zennon Kapron, “America Is About to Have Two Stock Markets for the Same Company,” May 19, 2026.

Better Markets, “The SEC’s Embrace of Tokenization Must Prioritize Investor Protection,” March 23, 2026.

SEC Statement on Tokenized Securities, January 28, 2026.

US Department of Labor, “Proposed Rule: Fiduciary Duties in Selecting Designated Investment Alternatives,” Federal Register Doc. 2026-06178, March 31, 2026.

US Department of Labor / EBSA Press Release, March 29, 2026.

Latham & Watkins, “DOL Proposes New ERISA Safe Harbor for Alternative Investments in Retirement Plans,” March 30, 2026.

Ogletree Deakins, “DOL Unveils Proposed Rule to Remove Restrictions on Alternative Investments,” March 29, 2026.

Executive Order 14330, “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors,” August 7, 2025.

Cleary Gottlieb, “2026 Digital Assets Regulatory Update: A Landmark 2025,” January 14, 2026.

Fireblocks, “5 Key Digital Asset Policy Changes in 2025 and What to Expect in 2026,” December 16, 2025.

Latham & Watkins US Crypto Tracker, Legislative Developments.

Americas Credit Unions, “GENIUS, STABLE, and CLARITY Acts and State Laws,” June 23, 2025.

Morgan Stanley, “The ‘GENIUS’ of Greater ‘CLARITY’ on Stablecoin,” July 17, 2025.

McGuireWoods Consulting, “Executive Order Targets State AI Regulation Through Federal Preemption,” January 19, 2026.

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, “New Executive Order Signals Federal Preemption Strategy for State Laws on Artificial Intelligence,” January 6, 2026.

Holland & Knight, “What to Watch as White House Moves to Federalize AI Regulation,” December 14, 2025.

Pillsbury, “Real Estate Tokenization: Recent Developments in New Jersey and Dubai,” July 15, 2025.

Wyoming Select Committee on Blockchain, “Real Estate Tokenization,” May 19, 2020.

ScienceDirect, “Is the Tokenization of Property the Next Step in the Financialization of Housing?,” 2026.

Lobusto, “The Programmable Square Foot: Real Estate Tokenization and the $2 Trillion Opportunity,” LinkedIn, January 23, 2026.

Binaryx, “BlackRock’s 4-Stage Tokenization Plan Explained,” February 27, 2025.

State Street, “Digital Asset Regulation Accelerates in 2026,” March 2026.

Atlantic Council, Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker, May 13, 2026.

Financial Stability Board, “The Financial Stability Implications of Tokenisation,” October 21, 2024.

World Bank ID4D, “Tokenization.”

Canton Network, “State of RWA Tokenization 2026 Report,” December 16, 2025.

World Economic Forum, “What to Expect for Digital Assets in 2026,” January 12, 2026.

Frontiers in Blockchain, “Tokenization and the Reshaping of Traditional Finance,” February 11, 2026.

SNS Insider, “Asset Tokenization Market Size, Share & Growth Report, 2035,” September 22, 2025.

Pointsville, “Global RWA Tokenization Industry: Market Analysis and Forecast,” August 19, 2024.

Rep. Ro Khanna, statement on AI regulation, July 13, 2023.

Bank for International Settlements, Project Agorá, Project mBridge, and Unified Ledger initiative materials.

World Liberty Financial / USD1 Pakistan cross-border payments deal coverage, 2026.

Pax Silica Declaration, signatory framework documents, 2025–2026.

MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems), federal-wrapper precedent for state title law.

Brickken, “How to Tokenize Real Estate: A Step-By-Step Guide,” February 19, 2026.

from:    https://patrickwood.substack.com/p/an-assessment-of-the-accelerating?publication_id=721283&post_id=198786723&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

AI Data Centers – A Great Way to Destroy the Environment

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‘It will destroy this place:’ Tucker County residents fight for future against proposed data center

As a little known company has proposed a data center and natural gas plant in the tourism destination — known for its natural wonder and outdoor recreation — residents are left with questions, mounting concerns and few answers.

BY:  – MAY 28, 2025 6:00 AM
A complex of data centers in Ashburn, Va. (Photo by Gerville/Getty Images)

 A complex of data centers in Ashburn, Va. The city is located in Loudoun County, which has been dubbed “Data Center Alley.” (Gerville | Getty Images)

As a child, Nikki Forrester dreamed of living in a cabin in the woods surrounded by mountains, trees, water and the outdoor opportunities that came with the natural land. In 2022 — four years after earning her graduate degree and moving to Tucker County from Pittsburgh — Forrester and her partner made that dream a reality when they bought two acres of land near Davis, West Virginia to build a home.

Forrester has thrived in the small mountain town known for its mountain biking, hiking, stargazing, waterfalls and natural scenery. She and her partner moved into their new home in February. Hiking and biking trails are right outside her front door. In the winter, she said, snow piles up making the nearby mountains look like “heaven on Earth.”

It’s been quite literally a dream come true.

“I feel like I’ve never felt at home so much before. I love being in the woods. I love this community. It’s super cheesy, but this was my childhood dream and now it’s actually come true,” Forrester said. “It felt so good to set down roots here. We knew Davis was where we wanted to start our future.”

But in March, one small public notice posted in the Parsons Advocate — noticed by resident Pamela Moe, who scrambled to find answers after seeing it — changed Forrester’s assumptions about that future.

A Virginia-based company, Fundamental Data, was applying for an air permit from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection for what it called the “Ridgeline Facility.” The company’s heavily redacted application showed plans to build an off-the-grid natural gas power plant between Thomas and Davis. That power plant will likely be designed to power an enormous data center just a mile out from Tucker County’s most populous and tourist-attracting areas.

Earlier this month, representatives for Fundamental Data — who did not respond to requests for comment on this article — told the Wall Street Journal that the facility could be “among the largest data center campuses in the world,” spanning 10,000 acres across Tucker and Grant counties if fully realized.

Now, Forrester said, she and her neighbors are in the middle of what feels like a “fight for [their] lives” as they attempt to learn more about the vague development plans and fight against “big data.”

Her images of the future — skiing on white snow, hiking through waterfalls, looking up at clear and starry nights all with one-of-a-kind mountain scenery below — now exist in the shadows of a looming natural gas plant, an industrial complex and the contaminants that could come with them. The fresh, mountain air that surrounds her home and community could be infiltrated by tons of nitrogen oxide (gases that contribute to smog), carbon monoxide, particulate matter and other volatile organic compounds, per the company’s air permit application.

“Honestly, I feel like if this happens, it will destroy this place. People come here because it’s remote, it’s small, it’s surrounded by nature. If you have a giant power plant coughing up smoke and noise pollution and light pollution, it puts all of those things in jeopardy,” Forrester said. “It would honestly make me question whether I would want to live here anymore, because I do love the landscapes here so much, but they would be fundamentally altered and, I think, irreparably harmed if this actually comes to be.”

Tucker United and a fight against the many ‘unknowns’

Since learning of the project in March, Forrester and dozens of other Tucker County residents have banned together and formed Tucker United. The residents — all volunteers — want answers from Fundamental Data or anyone else regarding details of the proposed Ridgeline facility.

But that fight hasn’t been easy. The state DEP has allowed Fundamental Data — a company with little to no information publicly available — to submit a redacted air permit application, omitting details regarding potential air pollutants that could come from the site.

 A heavily redacted page from Fundamental Data’s air permit application to the state Department of  Environmental Protection. 

According to reporting in Country Roads News, local officials were unaware of the project before reporters and members of the public brought it to their attention.

Reading the Wall Street Journal article was the first time most residents were alerted about the potential size of the planned development.

Josh Nease, who lives outside of Thomas and Davis in an unincorporated part of Tucker County, said the unknowns about the project have been the most frustrating part to grapple with.

“There’s no lack of uncertainty right now, that’s for sure,” said Nease, a sixth generation West Virginian who moved to Tucker County after spending vacations there as a child growing up in Bridgeport. “I think the unknowns here are really worrying.”

If given the chance, he would want to ask representatives of Fundamental Data the following questions: Why the lack of transparency? Why does the company want to locate in Tucker County and why not further out from the towns? And why does it feel like there’s resistance against working with the local governments and community members?

Luanne McGovern, an engineer by trade who owns property in Tucker County and who sits on the board of West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit in the region, holds similar frustrations to Nease.

Per the permit application, the Ridgeline facility — in its currently proposed form — would use gas-fueled turbines with heat recovery steam generators. Diesel would be kept on site in three 10 million gallon storage tanks as a backup power source in case of gas line interruptions. Those tanks would be 66 feet tall and 180 feet in diameter. Leaks from pumps and valves, among other pieces of equipment, are to be expected per the application. Operations for the facility should begin by 2028.

When residents started working together to make sense of Fundamental Data’s air permit application, they asked McGovern to look it over and share her thoughts. Having worked on similar permit requests before, she knew what she was looking at: A large, natural gas power plant.

What was more notable, however, was what she was unable to view.

Pollutants were listed on the request, but only in annual caps. There was no information on water usage despite some data centers using up to 5 million gallons of drinking water a day, straining resources in communities. While the heights of the diesel storage tanks were included, she said information on the turbines wasn’t.

While the DEP asked for clarification on Fundamental Data’s redactions following an influx of public comments from concerned residents, the company said it believed the omitted information met the state’s standard for confidentiality. The DEP ended up agreeing.

Fundamental Data, through its representative Casey Chapman, provided some details to the DEP in an attempt to put the public at ease: the site “does not plan” to use water from local water systems, rivers or streams and won’t discharge wastewater into them; mountains surrounding the development should “substantially limit” its visibility from populated areas and the facility “expects” to operate at noise levels that adhere with federal regulations.

But McGovern still had questions.

“Where is the water coming from? How high are these turbines? Where will they be? If we had some answers to these questions, we could do some modeling and figure out what the potential environmental impact would be, but we don’t,” McGovern said. “We’re just completely in the dark. There’s so many unanswered questions. As an engineer, there’s huge parts of this permit that are just bad. There’s no information provided, not even a level of standard of information that you would expect.”

Nease is realistic; he understands that these are complex issues and the state — as well as his region — are attempting to find new ways to bolster the economy and, hopefully, improve West Virginia’s economic standings long term.

He sees the challenges hitting Tucker County residents every day. There’s a housing shortage and short-term rentals are driving up costs for the places that do exist, pricing out residents who can’t afford to live where they work. While tourism can bring in crowds, it’s often only seasonal. The county’s population — like most of West Virginia — is declining.

“I fully understand the need to diversify the economy. I support doing that, we talk about it all the time. I guess I’m just not sure that a project like this is the solution,” Nease said. “We just don’t know enough about it. We don’t know if this is going to benefit the Tucker County economy. I sure hope it does, but all I have to rely on for that are vague statements.”

‘It feels extractive:’ West Virginia data centers to operate with no local oversight, questionable economic gains

On March 18 — the same day that Fundamental Data submitted its air permit application to the DEP — House Bill 2014 was introduced at the state Legislature to incentivize data centers to locate in West Virginia and generate their own power sources through microgrids. Senate President Randy Smith, a Republican who represents Tucker County and voted for HB 2014, did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

Despite being a key priority for Gov. Patrick Morrisey who requested its introduction, the bill was presented more than halfway through the state’s 60-day session. In back-and-forths over several weeks, lawmakers amended the bill again and again. One change removed a requirement for microgrids to use renewable energy sources, opening the door for coal and natural gas. Several other amendments changed the tax structure for any property taxes collected on the developments.

The version of the bill that now stands as law allows “high impact data centers” to curtail local zoning ordinances and other regulatory processes and establishes a certified microgrid program, which means data centers can produce and use their own power without attaching to already existing utilities.

The law creates a specialized tax structure for data centers and microgrids, which must be placed in designated districts. Local governments have little say or control over those districts, which are established at the state level.

Taxes collected on any data centers and microgrids operating in West Virginia would be split as so: 50% will go to the personal income tax reduction fund, 30% will go to the county where the data center is located, 10% will go to the remaining 54 counties split on a per capita basis using the most recent U.S. Census, 5% will be placed in the Economic Enhancement Grant Fund administered by the Water Development Authority and the final 5% will be put in the newly created Electric Grid Stabilization and Security Fund.

Initially, those taxes were going to be completely diverted away from localities where the data centers would be located, angering county commissioners and other local leaders from throughout the state.

Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, said the fact that 50% of any tax revenue collected going to offset the state’s personal income tax cuts is a concern, especially while only 30% will return to localities that host the data centers.

“Local governments are really limited in the ways that they can raise revenue, which is largely controlled by either the state constitution or the state legislature. So taking away a significant slice of one of the only ways that they can raise revenue — through property taxes — leaves [localities] with fewer options to fund basic services,” Allen said. “At the same time, these data centers and micro grids are probably going to increase the need for the public services that local governments pay for.”

Allen pointed to the potential risks that come with operating power plants: county fire and police services will be needed for safety at the plants and water districts may be impacted, she said.

Essentially, she said, counties will be on the hook for funding more services while only receiving a fraction of the revenue generated by the sources of those costs.

And, generally, there’s no guarantee — despite Fundamental Data’s claims for the Tucker County facility — that data centers will serve as massive employers.

Nationwide, according to the U.S. Census, jobs in data centers are increasing. But more than 40% of all jobs in 2023 existed in just three states. Per an analysis by Business Insider, most of the data center jobs available are only in construction and contracted from outside the places the centers are located.

Data centers are largely automated. Microsoft, for example, employs just 50 people per a facility. In West Virginia — because of the inclusion of microgrids, which aren’t mandated to be created for data centers — the picture could look different. But again, the lack of details from companies coming here makes the real impact difficult if not impossible to determine.

Allen said she’s wary of the state’s potential reliance on data centers for a financial boom given the state’s history of extraction-based economics.

Like with the coal economy, residents across the state will bear the aesthetic, environmental and health costs associated with living near data centers and their power plants. Most of the profits, however, may not return to them, Allen said.

“It’s not exactly identical to coal or natural gas or timber, but it feels extractive in the same way in that the benefits of the data center are borne by people outside of West Virginia, while the costs are borne by our residents,” Allen said.

Nease said that while he wants to be “pragmatic” about the potential for development in Tucker County, he can’t help but think of the state’s history in that regard either.

“I’m worried we’re going to fall into that same trap again. It’s an age old story — not just for West Virginia. Some people are going to benefit from this project, they just might not be here,” Nease said. “The company will benefit, its [shareholders] will. But will we?”

‘A race to the bottom:’ While West Virginia lawmakers want to compete with Virginia, locals say it’s not possible

While state lawmakers spent hours this legislative session debating how to craft the state’s new law to attract data centers, several couldn’t stop thinking about — or mentioning — neighboring Virginia, where the development of large, high-impact data centers have boomed.

Echoing sentiments shared by Morrisey through his “Backyard Brawl” plan to compete with neighboring states economically, delegates — including Del. Clay Riley, R-Harrison, who sits on the House Committee on Energy and Public Works, where the bill passed — said they wanted to see data center development here thrive like it has in Northern Virginia.

Loudoun County, Virginia has been dubbed “Data Center Alley.” It’s home to the largest data center market in the world.

But that development didn’t happen overnight, said Julie Bolthouse, director of land use at Piedmont Environmental Council in Virginia.

The industry started building in Northern Virginia in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of the largest data and internet providers at the time were located there. Over time, though, the market has changed.

Bolthouse said what used to be small complexes organized like business parks — featuring restaurants, shopping, day cares and more for people who lived in the region — are now large campuses with few people, no outside amenities and mostly computers and software.

And those “hyper-scaled” complexes — in Virginia and beyond — haven’t come without costs. The pollutants emitted by large centers are known to exacerbate respiratory problems and other health conditions. Residents nearby can hear the incessant buzzing and hums of the computers and generators at work. Light pollution, depending on the size and type of facility, can be impossible to ignore.

But these issues — outside of the environmental ones — vary place to place because of local ordinances.

“That is like the only thing that’s really protecting Virginia communities, because the only way that the people who live in these localities are able to get any kind of protection is because of noise ordinances, because of the lighting ordinances,” Bolthouse said.

In West Virginia under HB 2014, residents won’t have the same protections or powers due to the state’s superseding of local ordinances.

And now, decades into Virginia’s ever changing data center sector, Bolthouse and other environmentalists are seeking more regulations on the state level since the nature of these data centers has changed so much over such a short period of time.

“That’s the push we’re seeing now — for the state to come in and add additional regulations, to look at the environmental impact,” Bolthouse said. “No one is talking about taking away the ability of localities to regulate these facilities. I can’t imagine that.”

And while the landscape for data centers is evolving in Loudoun County and beyond, the reason so many large companies have decided to locate their centers in Northern Virginia goes back to the 1990s. The infrastructure for them to be developed, Bolthouse said, already existed — it wasn’t newly created like West Virginia is attempting to do.

“There’s such a robust fiber network here. These data centers are kind of like a gigantic global computer. They talk to each other, and so the closer they are to all the other cloud providers, the better,” Bolthouse said. “When you put a data center here, your data is stored in Northern Virginia and you are in spitting distance to [Amazon], Google, Microsoft, all the big co-locators … probably every big business has an operation here in Northern Virginia. So it’s like the Wall Street of the data center industry. That’s why they want to locate here.”

Bolthouse warned that without regulations, without protections and without the advantages that Virginia has through its location and infrastructure, West Virginia could be attempting to enter a new sector by inviting in the “worst players.”

“What you’re going to get if you do it this way is the worst players, the ones that didn’t need to be in Northern Virginia … the players that are wanting that lack of regulations because they didn’t want to abide by rules and didn’t want to or need to protect communities, which is worse for West Virginia and the communities,” Bolthouse said. “What West Virginia is doing is not what Virginia is doing.”

She said West Virginia needs to look at the assets it already has, not the assets others in the sector have worked with for decades.

Those assets, in Bolthouse’s words, are the same things that made Forrester feel like her childhood dreams were coming true when she built a home in Tucker County: the state’s “beautiful mountains, its rivers, its natural beauty and outdoor opportunities.”

“That’s what West Virginia should be leveraging. The state shouldn’t be trying to get something that another state has already secured the market on,” Bolthouse said. “I don’t know that West Virginia can become the next Data Center Alley. I don’t think that’s actually feasible … You’re trying to basically have a race to the bottom, and you’re only going to get the worst players.”

from:    https://westvirginiawatch.com/2025/05/28/it-will-destroy-this-place-tucker-county-residents-fight-for-future-against-proposed-data-center/

AI, Who Is the Biggest Power Hog in The World? OH, IT’S YOU!!!

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Needs So Much Power It Is Straining the Electrical Grid

July 29, 2024 The Conversation 1

The US electrical grid in many areas in the US is already operating at capacity. Due to the wild popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), especially large language models such as ChatGPT, there has been a great increase in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation will add to this energy demand. Energy companies are seeking ways to produce more electricity and are even considering restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant, site of the infamous disaster in 1979. With the advent of AI, many countries are having trouble adhering to their ‘decarbonization’ goals (note: global warming is a manufactured problem used to control the energy supply)..

The artificial intelligence boom has had such a profound effect on big tech companies that their energy consumption, and with it their carbon emissions, have surged.

The spectacular success of large language models such as ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation are likely to add to this energy demand.

The energy needs of AI are shifting the calculus of energy companies. They’re now exploring previously untenable options, such as restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant, site of the infamous disaster in 1979, that has been dormant since 2019.

Data centers have had continuous growth for decades, but the magnitude of growth in the still-young era of large language models has been exceptional. AI requires a lot more computational and data storage resources than the pre-AI rate of data center growth could provide.

AI and the grid

Thanks to AI, the electrical grid – in many places already near its capacity or prone to stability challenges – is experiencing more pressure than before. There is also a substantial lag between computing growth and grid growth. Data centers take one to two years to build, while adding new power to the grid requires over four years.

As a recent report from the Electric Power Research Institute lays out, just 15 states contain 80% of the data centers in the U.S.. Some states – such as Virginia, home to Data Center Alley – astonishingly have over 25% of their electricity consumed by data centers. There are similar trends of clustered data center growth in other parts of the world. For example, Ireland has become a data center nation.

Along with the need to add more power generation to sustain this growth, nearly all countries have decarbonization goals. This means they are striving to integrate more renewable energy sources into the grid. Renewables such as wind and solar are intermittent: The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. The dearth of cheap, green and scalable energy storage means the grid faces an even bigger problem matching supply with demand.

Additional challenges to data center growth include increasing use of water cooling for efficiency, which strains limited fresh water sources. As a result, some communities are pushing back against new data center investments.

Better tech

There are several ways the industry is addressing this energy crisis. First, computing hardware has gotten substantially more energy efficient over the years in terms of the operations executed per watt consumed. Data centers’ power use efficiency, a metric that shows the ratio of power consumed for computing versus for cooling and other infrastructure, has been reduced to 1.5 on average, and even to an impressive 1.2 in advanced facilities. New data centers have more efficient cooling by using water cooling and external cool air when it’s available.

Unfortunately, efficiency alone is not going to solve the sustainability problem. In fact, Jevons paradox points to how efficiency may result in an increase of energy consumption in the longer run. In addition, hardware efficiency gains have slowed down substantially, as the industry has hit the limits of chip technology scaling.

To continue improving efficiency, researchers are designing specialized hardware such as accelerators, new integration technologies such as 3D chips, and new chip cooling techniques.

Similarly, researchers are increasingly studying and developing data center cooling technologies. The Electric Power Research Institute report endorses new cooling methods, such as air-assisted liquid cooling and immersion cooling. While liquid cooling has already made its way into data centers, only a few new data centers have implemented the still-in-development immersion cooling.

Flexible future

A new way of building AI data centers is flexible computing, where the key idea is to compute more when electricity is cheaper, more available and greener, and less when it’s more expensive, scarce and polluting.

Data center operators can convert their facilities to be a flexible load on the grid. Academia and industry have provided early examples of data center demand response, where data centers regulate their power depending on power grid needs. For example, they can schedule certain computing tasks for off-peak hours.

Implementing broader and larger scale flexibility in power consumption requires innovation in hardware, software and grid-data center coordination. Especially for AI, there is much room to develop new strategies to tune data centers’ computational loads and therefore energy consumption. For example, data centers can scale back accuracy to reduce workloads when training AI models.

Realizing this vision requires better modeling and forecasting. Data centers can try to better understand and predict their loads and conditions. It’s also important to predict the grid load and growth.

The Electric Power Research Institute’s load forecasting initiative involves activities to help with grid planning and operations. Comprehensive monitoring and intelligent analytics – possibly relying on AI – for both data centers and the grid are essential for accurate forecasting.

On the edge

The U.S. is at a critical juncture with the explosive growth of AI. It is immensely difficult to integrate hundreds of megawatts of electricity demand into already strained grids. It might be time to rethink how the industry builds data centers.

The Conversation:      https://theconversation.com/ai-supercharges-data-center-energy-use-straining-the-grid-and-slowing-sustainability-efforts-232697

from:    https://needtoknow.news/2024/07/artificial-intelligence-ai-needs-so-much-power-it-is-straining-the-electrical-grid/