Everyone's got a hot take on data center water use, and most of them are garbage. This week Jacob and Igor skip the outrage and give you seven questions to help you decide whether a given data center is something you're on board with: where it's built, how it's cooled, where the power comes from, who owns it, and who's footing the bill (you'll have to listen for the other two). They test them against SpaceX's Colossus facility in Memphis, unpermitted gas turbines, a drought-prone aquifer, and a stalled water recycling plant included. The guys also get into why "zero water consumption" claims can be misleading once you understand the difference between withdrawal and consumption. Plus: a bonus rant on why data centers in space aren't happening anytime soon.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (08:14) - Is It Really an "AI" Data Center?
• (13:28) - How Is It Cooled, and Where's the Water From?
• (19:48) - Where Is It?
• (29:03) - Collosus as a Worked Example
• (35:14) - How Is It Powered?
• (38:15) - Who Owns It & Who Pays?
• (47:58) - Is This Too Complicated? Seven Questions Recapped
• (54:35) - Bonus: Data Centers in Space
• (58:48) - Outro

• Our World in Data article - How Much Energy Do Data Centers and Artificial Intelligence Use?
• EcoLogits webpage
• ACM paper - Not All Water Consumption Is Equal: A Water Stress Weighted Metric for Sustainable Computing
• Preprint - Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems
• Politico article - Musk promised his data center would reuse water. That's now stalled.
• IEEE paper - Press Release Ethics: Performative Ethics in AI Consortia and Industry Associations
• Harvard Environmental Law Program PDF - Extracting Profits from the Public

Anthropic's Fable gets classified as a munitions export days after launch, and Jacob and Igor try to figure out who's really being punished and why. From there: SpaceX's suspiciously well-timed IPO, a "genius" financial deal with Anthropic, and Elon buying Cursor because Grok needs friends. They also cover Anthropic Core's pivot to expert-systems consulting, the backlash over silently nerfed guardrails, whether Chinese models are actually a safe alternative, and why the Pope's new AI document is getting weaponized as corporate propaganda.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (05:37) - Fable/Mythos Updates
• (26:17) - SpaceX's IPO and the Cursor Buyout
• (34:57) - Anatomy of an AI Bubble
• (40:02) - Anthropic Core and "AI as Expert Systems"
• (50:03) - Guardrails, Chinese Models, and Whether We Can Trust the Benchmarks

• Anthropic statement - Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
• Luta Security blog post - Fable 5 Is Back, But We're Still Slowing Down Defenders
• Tech Policy Press analysis - Did the US Government Just Set an AI Export Precedent by Blocking Mythos?
• SEC EDGAR filing - SpaceX Free Writing Prospectus — Anthropic and Google compute agreements
• Engadget article - Anthropic Backtracks on Policy That 'Sabotaged' Researchers' Work
• Anthropic announcement - Introducing Claude Corps
• The Vatican encyclical - Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

This week, Jacob and Igor swap the usual news breakdown for a complete taxonomy of AI boosters within the framing of a tier list. They run through every type, from the good-faith genuine enthusiast to the denial-prone deflector, the financially captured, corporate power-players, platform builders, and finally the model-building true believers. They also get into "crit-hype," the idea that some critics are inadvertently boosting the systems they're fighting against. No muck to separate this week, just the guys working through their framework and explaining why their opinions are S tier.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:45) - Introducing the Booster Tier List
• (07:48) - A-Tier: The Genuine Enthusiast
• (11:36) - B-Tier: The Denial-Prone Booster
• (14:34) - C-Tier: The Financially Adjacent Booster
• (19:03) - D-Tier: The Corporate Booster
• (23:31) - E-Tier: The Product and Platform Booster
• (26:36) - F-Tier: The Model Builders
• (31:08) - Bonus Tier: Crit Hype
• (39:28) - So What Do We Actually Do With This?
• (46:04) - Outro (Igor's Challenge)

• Ed Zitron Substack article - How to Argue with an AI Booster
• MIT Technology Review article - How Social Media Encourages the Worst of AI Boosterism
• The Telegraph article - AI isn’t magic. We’re just being taken for mugs