We recently posted an item on how Meade County rejected a rezoning application that would have paved the way for a data center. The concerns included the cost of the operation as well as the impact on the local environment.

So imagine what we thought when we saw this (from Kentucky Lantern):

Kentucky’s utility regulator is granting permission to the state’s largest electric utility to build two new natural gas-fired power plants costing billions of dollars to meet a potential surge of power demand from prospective data centers seeking to locate in the state. 

The Kentucky Public Service Commission in a Tuesday order wrote that Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities (LG&E and KU) demonstrated there is a market for power demand from data centers “in the immediately foreseeable future” large enough to make economic sense to allow for the construction of the gas-fired turbines. 

The PSC — which is made up of three commissioners appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Kentucky Senate — also wrote in its 171-page order that while there is not “absolute certainty” that power demand from data centers will materialize, the electricity utility showed there is a “reasonable basis” that “economic development load is coming.” 

Investor-owned LG&E and KU estimate the cost of the two combined-cycle gas-fired combustion turbines, each with a capacity of 645 megawatts, to total $2.798 billion in construction costs and related transmission work. One is to be sited the Mill Creek Generating Station in Jefferson County and the other will be at the E.W. Brown Generating Station in Mercer County. 

Strap in, because this is going to be a long post with a lot of video accompaniment.

A recent Governor’s Conference on Energy and the Environment in Lexington involved University of Kentucky and University of Louisville professors discussing: “What data centers could mean for utility and electricity costs; where data centers will be placed; how nearby property values could be impacted; and how data centers will impact public health?”

The discussion led to the topic of “hyperscale” data centers.” According to Kentucky Lantern:

“Hyperscale” data centers are essentially massive computer warehouses that support a range of online services from artificial intelligence to credit card processing. These data centers also tend to use a tremendous amount of electricity to power the computers and water to cool them. A number of data center developers are eyeing Kentucky, particularly after state lawmakers enhanced tax incentives for such operations. 

That means we’re looking at what the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the state, on electric bills and on the environment.

Back in March, WKMS at Murray State University reported on how:

A bill that passed out of the Kentucky Senate last week aims to regulate the state government’s use of artificial intelligence – safeguarding the public sector from irresponsible AI applications and putting some protections in place to prevent the spread of election-related misinformation.

The lawmakers behind Senate Bill 4 – Lexington Republican Sen. Amanda Mays Bledsoe and London Republican Sen. Brandon Storm – say that it lays the ground for a risk-based AI governance framework to protect Kentuckians and foster innovation in state government. It also attempts to address concerns over AI-generated misinformation in political campaigns and elections.

If you’ve been on social media recently (and who hasn’t), you’ve seen a rash of videos that look real and are totally insane. Like this:

Or this one:

Not to mention this:

Now, they look real, but no kid is going to ride on the back of an alligator without being eaten, and isn’t it odd how that bear went through that closed fence in the second video? If you’ve seen enough of these short “pets rescue humans from wild animal” videos, you’ve heard the word “You saved me” at the end of most of them.

These are all generated by artificial intelligence. There are programs you can download that will let you do anything to anyone you want. A couple of weeks ago, Adam Conover did an extensive video on OpenAI, the West Coast company run by Sam Altman who got a ton of money to create a product that lets users create highly realistic, and totally fake, videos:

Miscreants like the flatulent, rapist, conman, MAGAt worshipped Orange Menace are creating insane videos like this.

As Conover pointed out, the stock market is setting records because we’re in an AI bubble. As the Yale School of Management notes in Yale Insights:

OpenAI is now taking a 10% stake in AMD, while Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI; and OpenAI also counts Microsoft as one of its major shareholders, but Microsoft is also a major customer of AI cloud computing company CoreWeave, which is another company in which Nvidia holds a significant equity stake; and by the way, Microsoft accounted for almost 20% of Nvidia’s revenue on an annualized basis, as of Nvidia’s 2025 fiscal fourth quarter. In less than three years, OpenAI has gone from a parlor game to a pillar of the global economy. …

And of course, there are the frequent comparisons to the run-up to the dot-com bubble. When a dramatic technological change occurs, people are often unsure exactly what to do, but they frequently act as if they do confidently know the best path forward.

Major players in the industry have begun to call out the AI euphoria. Just last Friday alone, three of them spoke out, hedging hard on what’s to come. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said he expects there to be “a lot of capital that was deployed that [doesn’t] deliver returns.” Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos called the current environment “kind of an industrial bubble.” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, warned that “people will overinvest and lose money” during this phase of the AI boom.

That’s right: Sam Altman, the guy in Conover’s video above on Sora, said that. He’s raked in a shitload of money, and his net worth is estimated to be around $2.4 billion.

What’s truly amazing about this is Sam Altman is an idiot. Angela Collier, a young physicist who has a Kentucky background, a month ago uploaded an hour long video explaining why he’s an idiot. It’s definitely worth seeing:

So, Sam is saying that long term, to address the energy needs of the planet, all we have to do is produce a Dyson Sphere. You know something bigger than the Earth, although you can’t build it from the Earth because, you know, it’s construction would require dismantling the planet, which makes no sense, so we’ll just have to go and dismantle another planet, something like the gas giant Jupiter. Oh, there’s an idea, I mean, what could go wrong?

Well, that would be bad. But Altman says we should build a Dyson Sphere. Let’s leave Jupiter alone and use the inner rocky planets to build this energy supplier:

That kind of wraps it up, doesn’t it? Sam Altman won’t get his Dyson Sphere, unless of course, he wants to destroy the Earth.

And Freeman Dyson was joking when he came up with the idea, because he thought the SETI program using radio waves was stupid, so he created his theory to essentially say, “hey, my theory is just as stupid, so why not do this?”

And Sam Altman thinks it’s a great idea.

Because he’s an idiot.

But let’s ignore the Dyson Sphere. What could go wrong if AI is left unchecked? Here’s a possibility:

Now if I have this right, Sam Altman is a billionaire idiot who’s read too much science fiction and thinks the answer to providing energy to solve the needs of data centers is to destroy the solar system, while his product, if left unchecked, will murder us all.

Which brings us back to the original point.

Kentucky is planning to spend about $3 billion for new power plants to meet the needs of this mystical “AI” revolution, that doesn’t make money, creates false realities (“alternate facts” as they say in MAGA world), will suck up our water supply as noted in our earlier post and will eventually result in a bursting financial bubble that will screw us over, economically, as badly as, or worse than, the tech bubble did not that long ago.

This is why we need to ignore the musings and promises of tech bros.