AI Data Centres, Central Intel, and Water Lockdowns | Jerm Warfare

**Jerm** (0:30)
My name is Jerm, this is Jerm Warfare, the battle of ideas. Hakeem Anwar, thank you for joining me in the trenches.

**Hakeem Anwar** (0:38)
Good to be back, Jerm. How's it going, my man?

**Jerm** (0:42)
Good, listen, are you standing?

**Hakeem Anwar** (0:45)
Today I'm standing. My back has been communicating to me that I should get rid of my chair, so I raised the desk up today.
One of my first standing podcasts. It's a lot better because instead of a static position, you can always move and shake, and they even have these paths you can put in below your feet and you can squish down on one side or the other. But from what I understand, the body is meant to move. So if you keep it in one place for such a long time, the muscles on the front of your legs, the tendons are going to get really tight, and this leads to a whole host of things like back issues. So yeah, I'm doing something new today.

**Jerm** (1:27)
Now, AI, Hakeem, is here to stay. There's no point in fighting it, right? It is going to be part of our lives no matter what. It's kind of like saying, well, I don't like the internet.

**Hakeem Anwar** (1:39)
Yeah, the genie is out of the bottle. And it's like, I mean, the companies that are really leading this effort and the Anthropic, the Open AI, they've been given free rein.
There's a massive coordinated push to get this in everyone's hands, on everyone's devices. I mean, I don't know if people noticed this, but now AI appeared one day magically on your phone and laptop. And it's not going back. You have to consciously make a choice to kick it out. And when I saw this happening last year, I wanted to learn more. And so that's what I've been doing for the last year is researching everything I can about AI data centers. And what I found is it's the perfect excuse to centralize our resources or land or water and our power. And it's something we should be thinking about because these AI products, a lot of them use online, they are free to use, but you don't know what you're paying with.
And that's the scary part. What are you paying with?

**Jerm** (2:49)
It kind of is becoming a war, building as many data centers as possible.

**Hakeem Anwar** (2:57)
Yeah, it is a war. That's how it's played up.
There was an interview between Tucker Carlson and Kevin O'Leary, where they're talking about the data centers. And Tucker brings up a good point and he's like, hey, so why do we have to build so many of these things? And Kevin O'Leary, who's building a massive data center in Utah, in the United States, says, well, hey, if we don't build them, then China is going to build them, right? And so it's pressing this narrative that there's a cold war happening and it's something akin to a nuclear weapon. And that's how the United States military and government think of it. AI is like a nuclear weapon. And so they have to secure the means, the distribution, and that is through AI data centers.

**Jerm** (3:48)
So where I live, Cape Town, currently has three data centers.

**Hakeem Anwar** (3:53)
This is not all data centers. I want to preface that. Is we were using data centers for a long time.

**Jerm** (4:00)
Yeah, we're referring to AI.

**Hakeem Anwar** (4:02)
AI data centers, right. And so the terminology people say is hyperscalers. So a hyperscaler, the data center at that level is using the same amount of power as 100,000 US homes.

**Jerm** (4:18)
Why? Hold on, hold on, hold on. Just slow down, slow down. All right. I'm a layman.
Why?

**Hakeem Anwar** (4:24)
Why? Yeah, no, it's the magic of AI, right? It's free, but it's not because there's an incredible amount of computation. So these AI chips, you could call them like the pinnacle of technology today. This is, if you look at how these AI chips are developed, they've got one chip with 200 billion transistors on it. Now, all these transistors allows for extremely quick computation. We're talking about a thousand trillion operations per second. So this is the speed at which this AI can consume information and look for patterns. And so, imagine one of these chips that can do this, and it's doing a thousand trillion operations per second at full load. And so, then, ultimately, it gets really hot. It uses a lot of power, and it gets so hot, it's close to the temperature of the surface of the sun.
So now, it's extremely hot. It can't stay at that temperature. It needs to be cooled down, and that's where the water comes in. And all of these AI data centers need a constant flow of water to cool the chips down, and they release that heat off into the atmosphere. These are some of the largest infrastructure projects in the world's history. Like an average AI data center facility is $10 billion. To give you some more idea of scale, in 2025, companies pledge $2.5 trillion towards AI data centers, $2.5 trillion.