Husband & Father, Energy Entrepreneur and Capitalist. Fighting for individual freedom = prosperity, for my children and posterity.
Texas
Joined September 2012
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Bud Brigham retweeted
The Demonic Goblin @GretaThunberg cracks up at your imbecilic gullibility. She's moved on from climate alarmism. It's all about Gaza now.
Bud Brigham retweeted
Every day, I wake up with a renewed vigor to fight for the West. I'm optimistic by nature so I always believe that there is hope at the end of the proverbial tunnel. But as the author of The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy, I'm increasingly feeling that the West's desire to commit Civilizational Seppuku, as the highest form of enlightened virtue, is too deeply ingrained. Those who might resist the self-inflicted death spiral are too apathetic. The solutions are very clear but I do not believe that we possess the testicular fortitude to implement them. I think that it is going to be a slow and painful demise. The greatest tragedy that the world has ever seen.
Bud Brigham retweeted
1/ Gov. Abbott left a kill-switch in the Texas data center permit freeze. He directed TCEQ to pause permits “until ERCOT completes its review”—the basis lapses December 10, when conditions are met. Furthermore Hinojosa's industry-wide freeze is legally vulnerable. Here's why...👇
Bud Brigham retweeted
🚨BREAKING: House Freedom Caucus leadership just dropped a lame-duck roadmap for @SpeakerJohnson and @LeaderJohnThune.
Strip Democrat leverage. Deliver real wins. Do it before the clock runs out.
No leaving town until it’s done — let’s finish the job!
Bud Brigham retweeted
Texas's incoming governor wants a pause on new data center approvals while more than half of state's ~34 GW pipeline is still only announced so the real question now is who already has power and who is still waiting to build.
Here's how much capacity companies have lined up in Texas:
• $AMZN ~5,700 MW
• $GOOGL ~4,500 MW
• $MSFT ~1,300 MW
• $IREN ~1,300 MW
• $META ~1,200 MW
• $HUT ~1,100 MW
• $CIFR ~1,000 MW
• $GLXY ~900 MW
• $CORZ ~900 MW
Bud Brigham retweeted
Anthropic reportedly agreed to pay $3.4B for 1.7GW of Caterpillar gas-fired generators, taking over OnePWR’s existing equipment orders.
“Biggest power purchase” needs some context. The record claim covers a single purchase of generation equipment by an AI lab. 1.7GW is enormous, but this is generating capacity, with equipment available near term and over the next two years. The IT load it can support depends on site overhead and redundancy. let's assume 1.7GW/1.2 = 1.4GW of IT load.
What is clear is that, Anthropic is still pushing hard for compute, including taking more direct control of the power needed to run it.
Anthropic has agreed to pay $3.4 billion for gas-fired generators for data centers, the FT reported, in what it described as the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by an AI lab bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Bud Brigham retweeted
Anthropic has agreed to pay $3.4 billion for gas-fired generators for data centers, the FT reported, in what it described as the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by an AI lab bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Bud Brigham retweeted
Roy is rightly taking a consistently pro-freedom position: energy should be de-subsidized *and* unleashed.
Part of both is responsibly reforming transmission permitting so it doesn’t end up unleashing waste that consumers are forced to pay for.
Before BAAJA was released I was worried that the Senate permitting proposal would make transmission policy worse, but BAAJA actually makes it modestly better.
Given that, BAAJA is overall a no-brainer for energy freedom.
Bud Brigham retweeted
David Sacks on Gina Hinojosa: “She does not say that existing projects are protected...I don’t think there’s going to be major new projects in this new regime for a long time”
Asked what the midterms mean for data centers in Texas, David Sacks said people like Gavin Baker are too optimistic about the governor-elect:
SACKS: “And both of them are going to play out. Now, at the state and local level, I think people are just being way too optimistic about what this election means. I mean, I’m seeing like Gavin Baker saying, oh, don’t worry, Hinojosa, she seems totally reasonable. She’s not threatening any projects. And I’ve watched interviews with her. Look, I went and watched the interviews that Gavin watched, and I don’t see the things that he’s saying. She does not say that existing projects are protected. She simply says that there’ll be no new permits issued until they pass legislation dealing with the issues she’s talking about.”
JCAL: “What are the issues she’s talking about?”
SACKS: “I’ll explain it. But look, I saw an analyst from SemiAnalysis come out and say that you do realize that projects that are under construction right now don’t necessarily have every single permit they need to actually open for business. In other words, once you’ve constructed the data center, you may still have to get an air pollution permit. There’s various kinds of permits that sometimes you don’t get till the end. So if you take what she’s saying seriously and literally, that there’ll be no new permits passed until this new regulatory regime comes into effect, we could end up with a bunch of stranded, half-finished projects.”
“Now, I’m not saying that’s not going to happen. I’m not criticizing her because I don’t know what she’s going to do. She hasn’t even taken office yet. I’m simply pointing out that this could go a lot of ways. They could do this in a reasonable way or an unreasonable way. So you could end up with a lot of half-finished projects.”
“My base case is that the projects that are fully permitted will get done in 2027, but I don’t think there’s going to be major new projects in this new regime for a long time, for the simple reason that there’s no political incentive for anyone to grant a new permit or a new project.”
David Sacks predicts Democrats will use AI legislation and frontier-model approvals to create a surveillance and censorship state 'turbocharged by superintelligence'
“It’s 100% that Democrats are going to make a major push for AI legislation in the next Congress. The question is what that looks like. And I don’t think you have to speculate too much to understand where it’s going.
“I believe that Democrats want to create a surveillance and censorship state that’s turbocharged by superintelligence. I mean, that’s ultimately the end state.
“How do you get there? You create a department, a federal department of AI. You require that all the so-called frontier models have to be reviewed and approved by that. The regulators give their notes on it. You can’t get a model released unless you address their concerns.
“And their harms will include all the things that the government is telling us that social media companies should be concerned about, like disinformation and misinformation and dissonant thought. All the things that the government was pressuring the social media companies to crack down on and censor during COVID. How quickly we forget all of this.
“They’re going to basically reenact that whole regime again using AI, and it’s going to be infinitely more powerful because we’re talking about superintelligence here. So I do believe that that is the regime that we’re headed towards.”
Bud Brigham retweeted
Agreed and our most proactive citizen.
It's appalling that the victory of one party or another means that a private citizen and his businesses, none of which have been accused of breaking the law, would suddenly be targeted by the government. That's pure Third World and should outrage everyone. latimes.com/business/story/2…
Bud Brigham retweeted
Data centers are the closest thing to a municipal money printer for funding infrastructure and schools and the slopulist political opposition is evil.
Data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia: “We get $1.2 billion a year in local tax revenue, about 40% of all of our tax revenue...on 3% of our land”
Buddy Rizer, the county's economic development chief, explained how “data center alley” grew:
“We would have never looked at having 55 million square feet of data center, 230-some buildings. That was not the plan. The plan was to utilize the fiber loop, the internet exchange, to utilize a reclaimed water line, and buildings that were already built. That was the plan, right? And so that made a lot of sense.”
“But, you know, fast forward, today we are largely dependent on that. We get $1.2 billion a year in local tax revenue, about 40% of all of our tax revenue. And while that looks overwhelming, data centers take only about 3% of all of our land in the county. So it’s quite a return on investment. You know, 40%, $1.2 billion, on 3% of our land.”
Bud Brigham retweeted
🚨 Harwood, North Dakota: Voters overwhelmingly REJECTED new restrictions targeting data centers.
The town of just 820 people expects $1.65 MILLION in property tax revenue by 2028, plus 200+ permanent jobs.
Harwood's Mayor: “I'm personally very happy to have the data center.”
Bud Brigham retweeted
DATA CENTRES ARE OUR FIRST AND MOST CRITICAL LINE OF DEFENSE AGAINST SUPERINTELLIGENCE WIELDED BY OUR ADVERSARIES.
Protect them like your lives depend on them: because they do.
Bud Brigham retweeted
People are confusing political theater and emotion with how the real world works.
The demand for super intelligence is only increasing and we don’t yet have at scale humanoid bots, self driving cars globally, AI in mfg, massive disease discovery , and even close to full AI penetration in business or personal agents scaled which will increase demand maybe millions of times where we are today.
Supply will eventually meet that demand whether it is built in the US, other foreign countries, and in space. The US controls their own destiny. We can choose to be AI sovereign, on the cutting edge, create the most amount of jobs/wealth, and be as secure as possible - making deals that greatly net benefit local communities too. We still have the opportunity to have our cake and eat it too… Or we can fall into a mob driven psyop used as a political wedge to help get one party elected. My gut tells me deals will get made.
But to be clear, the AI hyperscalers / cloud companies do not need US soil to build AI infrastructure. I think they prefer to have it in the US but these are highly resourced global companies who will go where is needed to fulfill demand. My other guess is the exec branch will start allocating significant amounts of federal land if local communities make themselves a bottleneck.
If you take one thing away from this post, just know AI infrastructure will get built to meet demand wherever in the world or universe is required. Taking the results of a midterm election in one country (that was mostly expected to be split gov outcome) and applying it to the demand/supply for super intelligence is literally absurd.
There is no fact-based argument for a reduction of data center build out due to an already expected split government midterm result or the state voting initiatives.
1. If a local/state gov doesn’t want to make a deal, the cloud/hyperscaler will move to one who will . This isn’t binary, most locals are making deals. The builds over the next 1-1.5yrs are already permitted.
2. If the US as a whole rejects enough land mass where the demand for AI factories cannot be fulfilled in the US, those AI factories will move offshore repeating the prior 3 decades of globalization and hollowing out of our middle class. It was dumb back then and even dumber now given the geopolitical national security implications of AI sovereignty…
@HalftimeReport @TheJudgeCNBC
Bud Brigham retweeted
The greatest lie ever told is “Capitalism makes things expensive”. No competition makes things expensive. Government mandates makes things more expensive. Witness the laughably named “Affordable Care Act”. Increased prices 3X. Public education, real cost increase of 3X per student since 1970. Capitalism and strong laws punishing fraud is the guaranteed solution to nearly every economic problem.
Bud Brigham retweeted
Data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia: “We get $1.2 billion a year in local tax revenue, about 40% of all of our tax revenue...on 3% of our land”
Buddy Rizer, the county's economic development chief, explained how “data center alley” grew:
“We would have never looked at having 55 million square feet of data center, 230-some buildings. That was not the plan. The plan was to utilize the fiber loop, the internet exchange, to utilize a reclaimed water line, and buildings that were already built. That was the plan, right? And so that made a lot of sense.”
“But, you know, fast forward, today we are largely dependent on that. We get $1.2 billion a year in local tax revenue, about 40% of all of our tax revenue. And while that looks overwhelming, data centers take only about 3% of all of our land in the county. So it’s quite a return on investment. You know, 40%, $1.2 billion, on 3% of our land.”
SpaceX’s Arizona data center, per a county supervisor: “We could be reducing property taxes across the board in Cochise County, the entire county, by 20%”
Frank Antenori, whose district includes the site, brought up the county’s tax math during a live Q&A:
“Here’s just something to just chew on. Arizona has an expenditure limit requirement that is placed on counties. If we exceed that expenditure, we have to rebate back to the taxpayers a certain amount.”
“So, if we’re receiving revenue in from SpaceX, by law, we have to offset that to the taxpayers. We have the potential to reduce, based on the projected revenue they’re creating, as much as 20%.”
“Let me just say it again. We could be reducing property taxes across the board in Cochise County, the entire county, by 20% to offset for the revenue here, because we can’t spend all that money. So, we have to give that money back to the taxpayers. The law says we have to.”
“So, you could see a potential significant impact to local property taxes. What that is, I don’t know. We’re going to have to do the math on it. But the law, if we have this large increase in property tax revenue, we have to balance those rates. So that will reduce dramatically the property tax burden of every resident in the county.”
“The construction sales tax, which also is the TPT, the transaction privilege tax, the retail tax, and the jail excise tax. So that will be part of the construction tax. We could literally use that money to pay the jail off in 2 to 3 years, as opposed to the 13 to 20 years.”
“So this could be a revenue to eliminate the half-cent sales tax in 2 to 3 years. We can get rid of that half-cent sales tax.”