NYTimes.com did a story about Project Jupiter Stargate Project Miner, the mega data center that is to built out there by Santa Teresa. Mostly the old gray lady reported on the hucksterism involved:
The company (BorderPlex Digital Assets, a data center marketer in Austin, Texas) had come to get approval for a venture so ambitious it sounded like the fever dream of a modern pharaoh. On roughly 1,400 acres of flat and vacant scrubland near the Mexican border, BorderPlex and its partner, Stack Infrastructure, a data center builder, wanted to build a collection of data centers that would cost $165 billion. The number seemed berserk. The entire U.S. Interstate Highway System cost less than half as much in inflation-adjusted dollars. Even the International Space Station, underwritten by more than a dozen countries, was a bargain by comparison. (It was $150 billion.)
. . .
Doña Ana is a poor county in a poor state. The populace is mostly Latino, and the median household income of $56,000 is well below the national average. Once Jupiter is built, BorderPlex and Stack intend to staff it with 750 locals in jobs that start at $75,000. To skeptics, the size of this promised work force sounds implausibly large, given that data centers are basically high-tech warehouses, with few moving parts, that don’t require much labor. Supporters, by contrast, regard Project Jupiter as an immense and blinking “Open for Business” billboard for New Mexico.
Which calls to mind monorails.
There’s one born every minute, or more often.
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