The data centers aren’t for common man LLMs.
They’re for the police state.
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines, believing it would free them. Instead, it allowed other men with machines to enslave them.” (Paraphrased quote from Dune)
Enslavement happened with the iPhone. Then when android got good and cheap. Then with tablets when they got cheap. Now we’re here and Ai is getting good, not cheap, never will be cheap but it’s getting good.
You’re not seeing the bigger picture.
The data centers might give a slight economic boost in the short term, before becoming an economic disaster in some 5-10 years!
Every single time this meme is posted, it is pointed out that the number in the above part is delusionally low. And yet the meme is reposted again and again both on reddit and on Lemmy and god knows where else.
500 million could buy you a fleet of 150 buses to start a bus system for a small town.
Sure, it won’t buy you a coast-to-coast rail system, but no one said that was what the 500m was trying to afford.
I think the lack of specificity in “US Government officials” implies national, federal government and not small town municipal official. Calling the latter “US Government officials” feels weird. I guess a federal government official could approve funding for a local government somewhere, though.
I think this is just a case of sloppy memesmanship.
I’d slow that to 50 busses and that way you have reserve for accidents and maintenance. Also, they can be fancier busses if we have fewer of them
That sounds about reasonable. But how many people upvoting the meme have such a modest result in mind?
We not paying staff?
The government isn’t paying to build that datacenter, the company that wants it is paying.
Everyone is more amenable to things when someone else buys it.
People need to stop shitting on ChatGPT. Glue on pizza is the culinary revolution of 2026!
$500 Million (500,000,000) = 1% of $50 Billion (50,000,000,000).
No, you don’t understand.
The $500 million is money the government has to pay to have a public good built.
Whereas the $50 billion is money invested corporations, which they got from their customers… and the government as incentives, tax breaks, and other magic that normal people can’t have. And it makes a private asset instead of a public good.
So obviously the $50 billion is less money.
Unless the end goal is entirely different.
The following areas have seen insane increases in both interest and spending lately:
- AI data centers (capable of more than just LLM training and operation)
- Flock and other surveillance cameras
- Online identity verification
You could probably write several more items to the list, but add just these three and what do you get?
It’s becoming clearer and clearer, with more and more irrefutable evidence that this AI craze is going nowhere. Sure, it’s pretty useful for a handful of tasks. Not nearly enough to justify even a fraction of money spent on it though. And yet both governments and oligarchs keep pumping more money into it.
Is it unreasonable to suspect an ulterior motive? One that is sure to benefit them tremendously if successful?
This meme is nonsense.
First, the infamous “put glue on pizza” incident happened in May 2024, when Google rolled out its AI Overviews feature. The feature used Gemini, but the incident wasn’t some demonstration of what a $50 billion AI data center does. Google AI Overviews pulled information from the web, including a years-old sarcastic Reddit comment about putting Elmer’s glue on pizza—and presented it as legitimate advice. Google subsequently acknowledged the problem and changed the system.
Second, a $500 million public-transit project and a $50 billion AI data-center investment aren’t alternatives to one another. They’re different projects, funded through different mechanisms, involving different entities, serving completely different purposes, and subject to completely different economic and political considerations.
Saying “they spent $50 billion on AI instead of $500 million on public transportation” is like saying “the government bought a $50 billion aircraft carrier instead of building a $500 million bridge.” The existence of one expenditure does not demonstrate that the other was rejected because of it.
And finally, the claim that an AI data center will “make the quality of life worse for everyone living there” is simply asserted rather than demonstrated. There can absolutely be legitimate arguments about the environmental, electrical-grid, water, tax, and infrastructure impacts of large data centers. Those are worth debating. But “AI bad, therefore public transportation good, therefore this $50 billion project is why we don’t have the transportation project” isn’t an argument. It’s a meme wearing a hat pretending to be an economic analysis.
The pizza-glue incident is also almost completely irrelevant. It was a Google AI search failure from 2024. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a particular AI data center should be built in 2026.
You can oppose a particular data-center project. You can support public transportation. You can criticize AI’s environmental costs. But none of those positions become more intellectually defensible by pretending they’re connected to Google’s pizza-glue hallucination.
Chatgpt got better. I’ve been using it less but it’s a really good tool.
