Claims about pivoting from crypto to AI may actually be false promises too.
Is it even possible for Panther Creek to just "pivot" to anything else?
I was listening to the Better Offline podcast, and lo and behold, Ed Zitron quoted from a CNBC article from August 2024 stating that there was a report that "almost all" data centers used for printing cryptocurrency at this time would have to just be trashed and replaced "from the ground up" in order to pivot to AI or any type of "high performance computing". So this stuff about Panther Creek in Carbon County Pennsylvania being poised to pivot to AI – that itself is apparently probably empty hype.
CNBC - Bitcoin miner Core Scientific rides AI from bankruptcy to $6.7 billion partnership in eight months Published Tue, Aug 6 2024 MacKenzie Sigalos For months, publicly traded bitcoin miners have been shifting into the AI infrastructure business because it became a lot less profitable to mine bitcoin after the halving in April. The companies had already spent the time and money decking out data centers across the country that could be retrofitted to serve an entirely new category of customers. But converting to AI isn’t as simple as repurposing existing infrastructure and machines, because requirements are different, as are the needs of the data network. Needham analysts wrote in a report in May that almost all infrastructure that miners currently have would “need to be bulldozed and built from the ground up to accommodate HPC,” or high-performance computing. Core Scientific’s Sullivan was among the mining leaders who attended a closed-door roundtable in June with former President Donald Trump, who recently jumped into the conversation of the convergence of bitcoin mining and AI.
It's imperative to inform politicians about tech scams that target their ideological hopes with false promises. Crypto mogul donors lure politicians to betray their communities by saying they're doing it to benefit their communities. It's a trick. Chloe Humbert Apr 14, 2025
I don’t want it converting anyway. AI hype is a load of bs too, and there are endless stories about how harmful AI getting things wrong can be. So for very little value, the AI data centers are polluting nuisances. Elon Musk’s data center & power plant currently polluting a minority neighborhood in Memphis.
“Musk Is Scamming the City of Memphis”: Meet Two Brothers Fighting Colossus, Musk’s xAI Data Center Democracy Now! Apr 25, 2025 We speak with two brothers who are fighting Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over its massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee, used to run its chatbot Grok. The facility is next to historically Black neighborhoods and is powered by 35 pollution-spewing methane gas turbines the company is using without legal permits. Musk says he wants to continue expanding the project. “What’s happening in Memphis is a human rights violation,” says KeShaun Pearson, executive director of the environmental justice organization Memphis Community Against Pollution. “Elon Musk and xAI are violating our human right to clean air and a clean, healthy environment.” His brother Justin J. Pearson, a Tennessee state representative for Memphis, says Musk is “perpetuating environmental racism” by ignoring the wishes of local residents: “They are abusing our community, and they’re exploiting us.”
This is an interview with one of the Tennessee state reps that were scandalously expelled from the Tennessee house for participating in a protest. A key issue that made it a scandal is that the state reps that were expelled were Black, and the white state rep who participated in the protest was not expelled. 6 days after the expulsion, the Shelby County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to reappoint him to the position.
It's imperative to inform politicians about tech scams that target their ideological hopes with false promises.
We can’t just depend on politicians to do the right thing just because they’re Democrats, surely that’s obvious by now.