Matt Walsh

If you've been hoping to lie low while artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs and transforms the world's economy, then you need to pay very close attention to recent developments out of Lake Tahoe, California.

Now, in case you're not familiar, Lake Tahoe is home to some of the richest people in the United States on both the California and Nevada sides.

It's a premier tourist destination in our most populated state.

Median property values are north of $700,000.

People living there as a general matter are financially secure and highly educated.

Many of them work in tech.

You had to think of a list of people whose lives would be upended by artificial intelligence.

They would rank fairly low, you would think.

And yet because of AI, 50,000 people living on the California side of Lake Tahoe have no idea where their power supply will come from in a matter of months.

Some are worried that the lights will go out indefinitely as if they'd been hit by a terrorist attack.

But what's happened is that the utility realized that it's much more lucrative to power data centers, which are used to train artificial intelligence and which consume near infinite amounts of electricity, than it is to power single family homes.

After all, by some estimates, depending on the size, a single data center can consume more power than half a million homes.

I'll say that again, a single data center consumes more power than half a million homes.

Every utility is rapidly coming to the same conclusion because companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which collectively own one third of all data center capacity and which build the overwhelming majority of large data centers, are willing and able to pay enormous premiums for the electricity that they're using.

When they're able to price you out of the market, you're on your own.

And when the choice is between a big tech trillion dollar company or you and your single family home,

the big tech company is going to win out every single time.

This is reporting from Fortune.

Quote, Lake Tahoe doesn't know where its power will come from after next ski season, and it's a major problem for the 49,000 residents who call the region home.

Nevada Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe's electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities, the small California company that services the region,