Geopolitical Tensions & Water Scarcity Solutions | TSG Ep. 866

The US bombed Iran. What's the it Blast Radius You're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone.

Happy Tuesday. You know, and for those of you who don't know, we, we record these shows one day in advance, but what a difference a day makes, right? We recorded on Friday, it was, it was a very different sort of reality.

Now, here we are recording this show, Monday for Tuesday, and everything we said on Friday, at least, geopolitically might have gone out the window. But, um, as we sit here Tuesday, I can't tell you what's gonna happen tonight or Wednesday every night is, uh, you know, I I try to get up in the middle of the night and check my news sources to see what's going on over in the Middle East, but it's certainly been a, a, a memorable weekend. Uh, lot going on.

I don't, you don't come to us for your news, news like that, but let's jump into the it of it. We've got a great gang. We're going to talk about, you know, most of these people.

So I'm not gonna go through a whole thing. We're gonna try to get right to the news today. But let me quickly say, we have on the gang today, the one and only Kimberly Bates, JP Morgenthal, Stephen FoST, fst, the Dean, Mike Ard, Bonnie Schneider, and myself.

Am I the only one that has, uh, flashbacks? So Hollywood Squares, when you do that Kinda in the little corner. So here's the real question.

Are you Paul Lind or Charlie Weaver, or I'm not Paul. No, no. I, I love your little Paul lid.

Uh, Who, but then who's Charles Nelson Riley, right? Charles Nelson Re they, Joanne Worley. There was some great people on there.

But anyway, hey, I'm trying to get right to the news today, Mike. It blast Radius. What do we got?

So I think everybody's on Knife's edge kind of waiting to see what happens here. it Allen talking about some of the concerns ranging from, you know, will there be, you know, budget freezes on it to what are the cybersecurity implications? But, you know, let's start off with you.

And there just seems to be a lot at stake here. A lot more than 48 hours ago, that's for sure. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. So, and dude, check out my article on text from it on this. Um, you know, generally speaking, There are some people who make a lot of money during war, and there's some people who lose a lot and not just money during war, right?

War is not healthy for animals, pets, and other animals, children and other living things or, so I'm trying to remember that from when I was eight or nine growing up in the Vietnam War era. But, um, you know, generally speaking, when there's chaos in the world, people try to, you know, they, they, they get tight and it budgets generally get tight. Uh, and so you might expect to see some of that as a result of, of recent events.

However, as I wrote in my article, I think with this particular, the, the particulars of, of the Iran Israeli, US Triangle, unless someone else gets involved, what we're seeing is not so much a pullback of IT budgets, but maybe reallocation of it budgets, right? Um, we, we could talk specifically about cyber, but when you've got three of the, of the world's preeminent cyber warfare countries involved here, and make no mistake, Israel, well, the US is in a class by itself, and Israel's probably close behind, and Iran is no slouch, right? You gotta expect that there will be cyber repercussions here and cyber fallout and cyber attacks.

So, as, uh, as Jen is a Pataki, I, I, I, no, Jen Easterly former CER person wrote on LinkedIn this week, Hey, shields up, shields up. Now is the time to put on your maximum cyber type of defenses. And that may mean spending a little bit more money, immediately getting, you know, whether it's manpower, SaaS based services, whatever.

But now now's the time to burst up your, your cyber defenses because stuff's gonna happen. I can pretty much tell you on top of that, I think this is also going to give rise to a big IT sovereignty push. We've been talking a lot about it sovereignty over the last couple weeks, few months, but this is going to really put some rocket fuel in the tank, right?

You don't want to be, you don't want your people stuck in a country where the airspace is shut down. You certainly don't want your data stuck in a infrastructure or internet or play hosting where it's been shut down or, or, you know, not, not available to you. So I think it, sovereignty projects, obviously cybersecurity projects, and then everything seems to benefit ai, doesn't it?

Um, a lot of people say, Hey, we need to be able to do more with less. We might have less people. We, we need to have more automation.

And so I think you'll see an increased, uh, push into ai, uh, accelerating what we already have on the board. So overall, I, I, I don't think budgets will be frozen. I think budgets will be reallocated to tremendous time for more digital transformation.

But those three areas that I mentioned, and I mentioned them in the, in the article, are, are prime for, uh, for, from spending and, and for activity. Kimberly, do you think that sovereign clouds will get a big boost? I mean, we've already seen a lot of countries who are normally allies of the United States saying, we had nothing to do with this.

So they're already kind of positioning themselves accordingly. But will that get extended out to where workloads are placed? I think that's just gonna continue the, I don't think it's, uh, we're already on that march.

I mean, it's a fa complete, in my opinion, um, with countries creating their own, um, sovereignty environment and wanting the data there. And that goes even beyond this, this blast, you know, that we're in, in the middle or potential war, it goes into all the geopolitical. Who owns my data?

You know, I, I am in a root ship of it. I think the biggest thing here, the biggest issue here is the cybersecurity. Because if you wanna attack and not be seen as directly attacking America, um, which is, you know, where the threat of, of the president has been saying, don't attack, you know, our soldiers don't attack America.

That's the way to go. And some way, and somehow we are, we are exposed, many of our, um, infrastructure areas are probably exposed and they don't even know it. Um, they still have the password of 1, 2, 3 admin or something along those lines.

And so, Jen Easterlies, um, posts that I, if you haven't read it, she, she did a great job on a, a short piece that was up on LinkedIn, um, that I, I reposted from her. Um, very good, you know, marching it down that every cyber security, CIO, you know, executive needs to go and, and check their list about where they're at. And then probably do, um, if they haven't done it recently, probably do a tabletop exercise, um, about where they're at.

I mean, it's really because that's, you know, they've been known to, to attack that way, and we've attacked them that way. So we've got, you know, San sand worm and all that kind of stuff that in the history of that. 0.

I mean, it feels like we're just getting smaller and smaller and the, the clouds are becoming more disaggregated. So I don't know, is there a fundamental change in the way we think about it, architecture afoot? Well, you know, it's, it's interesting that, um, to consider the cyber implications.

Of course, you know, when people are dying, it's sometimes, um, difficult to think about, you know, the, the implications on business. But I guess if we want to, if we wanna talk about that, if we wanna figure out how this works, um, yeah, I think we need to think about how, um, all of this impacts everything that we do on a daily basis. So, certainly, um, to your point on the architecture and the design of the global infrastructure that we're deploying, we cannot, as it pros pretend that what we do isn't impacted by global events.

As, you know, y'all mentioned just now the involvement of, uh, the US and the attack in Iran, the denial of involvement from other countries, specifically Europe and Australia. Uh, the concern over these state sponsored threat groups, um, you know, as, as Kimberly pointed out, it is very obvious that these threat groups, that's gonna be the vector they're gonna use to strike back. It seems very obvious to me because what we've taught the world over the last couple of decades of doing, essentially nothing about these advanced persistent threats, at least nothing on a diplomatic front, is that you can attack us and not expect any kind of response.

And so, Iranian, um, threat groups, so they've got a PT 33 34, which is probably the same group, um, which has the charming name of Helix Kitten and APT 35, which is the, uh, charming kitten. Um, you know, 33, 34 targets, infrastructure elements 35 has generally targeted, um, businesses, uh, including the famous, uh, election interference, the HBO cyber attack, that sort of thing. I think that we'll definitely see both of these threat groups active going forward, where they're trying to figure out ways of inflicting some damage on the west.

Generally the United States specifically, I know that Israel has been actively under attack for the entire time of the operation since October 7th. But, um, and, and of course before that as well. Um, so, so yeah, I think that all of us, we need to recognize as, as Kimberly said, that, um, you know, they're coming for us.

They're coming for all of us, and, and, and it's going to affect the way that we deploy applications where we deploy those applications, what we can expect from them. And, uh, I think it, it highlights the questions that we've had previously about, um, sovereignty, data sovereignty, and cloud sovereignty. We have to think about, you know, where are we deploying applications and what is the geopolitical implication of that?

So I I, I just would add to that though, yes, we've gotta be wary and put our defenses on high alert, you know, DEFCON five or whatever, but let's not let, let's not forget offensive cyber capabilities that have been put into play here. Right? And I'm gonna give you two quick examples.

One is Israeli, right? Many folks in Iran and and Iran have have said that their internet has been shut down. Now, there's conflicting reports.

I've seen reports that it was, you know, is Israel that shut down Iran's cyber? They've, they've cyber attacked and shut down their, their internet for periods of time. I've seen other reports that it was the Iranian government themselves that have shut down the internet so that voices of descent can't take advantage of the situation in terms of regime change or, or gathering support or as well as giving out potentially strategic information about where attacks have been, how effective they've been and and so forth.

Um, but Israel is an offensive cyber powerhouse, and quite frankly, so is the us We have a cyber command. We have the USA don't think for a second that as part of this attack over the weekend, that cyber assets were not put into play to suppress Iranian communications. Because at some level, the Internet's communications, right?

And this is a game as old as humans. When you, when you're attacking, you want to suppress communications of the enemies of your enemy. So I am more than sure that is part of this attack package.

Besides the B twos and everything else, the cruise missiles and everything that came with it, there was a cyber blackout zone that, that we laid down there that to thwart command and control at the time of the attack offensive cyber. Yeah, Absolutely. Yeah.

And, and we seem a, and you know, I mean, we've, we've heard explicitly in the press, in the press conference after this attack, some of the tactics that they used militarily, the, um, they were using, um, it seems, um, air launch decoy drones that are designed to emulate other types of aircraft. Um, those of us in the hobbyist area, uh, I am a, uh, an A DSB hobbyist. I have a an A DSB radio receiver in the roof of this building, actually.

Um, and we were all used as well as part of the ruse because, um, the A DSB network, they openly broadcast that a bunch of B twos were heading west from, uh, Missouri. They openly broadcast that. And all of the enthusiasts were able to see those, those bombers taking off and heading west, um, on Saturday in the, you know, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, I think a lot of us were like, Hey, what's going on?

Why are all these bombers taking off? We were also seeing a whole bunch of, um, refueling tankers taking off from bases all over the United States. It was a really interesting situation because essentially rather than having these hobbyists snoop in on activities that they're not supposed to see, they use these hobbyists as a way to, uh, broadcast a decoy mission mission going in the opposite direction of the actual bombing group, which headed east.

Um, and, and, and certainly, I, I think that, uh, we saw some of this cyber, uh, operation. I think we're still in the early stages of figuring out what was cyber and what was not. But as you point out with Iran, uh, and their, uh, internet going down, um, I doubt it was the entire country being shut down by their own government.

I I have a suspicion that the US was involved in that too. So, Steven, I, I appreciate, I I love, love the, the fact that you guys, you were involved with this. Yes, unfortunately, I, I was used by this.

I was Part of that group, and I was fool by the use as well, because I saw that post, uh, up there when, um, it was like, wow, this is shocking. I think as, and I, and I brought this up several times because our utilities, state and local governments have very often, or particularly state and local governments very often have been underfunded with how they ex, you know, with their IT organizations, money goes elsewhere, et cetera. And for that reason, those are the areas that are probably most at risk.

Um, and since they own a lot of the utilities, um, I, I think about here in Boulder, you know, the utility is, they don't own the electricity, but they do own the water, water system. And so you question and ask, okay, so how much are they doing there? What, what are we doing in terms of hardening those areas?

And, and the other piece of it is that their, uh, their, their groups, their gangs that they have, the, the kittens, um, they have running around all over the place, cute kits, but doesn't Have to be kittens. I don't know how, why it has to be kittens, but the kittens that are running around, you know, anticipating that they have been worming their way into our systems and whether or not they wanna start flipping the switches, now, that's gonna be, you know, there's the option. So If not now, when Right.

If you're not gonna do it now, when are you gonna do it? Because you know, the regime change. Well, don't say that doesn't, a a anyone who's ever, Anyone who's ever watched Star Trek episode right?

Knows that before you attack, you raise shields. And I, I, I don't know, but it seems to me lately that, you know, this administration decided let's go into battle and we'll keep shields low so that it costs less money. And we, uh, and, and you know, it's not as expensive.

So I, I just, you know, it's that feeling of like, every other time we've ever gone into any conflict anywhere, right? Cyber defense was a, a, a, a critical factor and, you know, confirmed and managed appropriately. And in this particular situation, it seems almost like, eh, nothing's gonna happen.

Well, I, you know, they, maybe they didn't wanna alert them by by putting it, but, but here's the fact. It's not just state and local governments or critical infrastructure. Yes, critical infrastructure will absolutely be a target, but what would a lot of the Iranian activist type of activity is more about sowing chaos, discorded go aggravation, attacking healthcare kind of things, trying to bring down a healthcare network, uh, you know, just like, not, not just what you would think of as your typical public utilities critical infrastructure.

They, they want to just create chaos and havoc and, and, and, uh, annoyance, if you will, even. Um, but you know what, jp, I, I hear where you're coming from and, and you think about, you know, what were the real goals of this US venture? Were they accomplished?

What will be the fallout? And we can debate that on the political spectrum all till the cows come home. But I gotta believe that there are some smart people in the government who either before this or as soon as it was announced, went to DEFCON five or whatever the level of preparedness is, and, and we're on this.

I mean, we, we, it would still there bogle my mind if we did It. We've lost a lot of good people in the government with, I Have, I, I know we have Jen, Jen Easterly being one of them. I, you know, and Chris Krebs another, but there's still good people there and there, and the NSA are not sleeping at the wheel.

So, and I think side of the command, The other thing I think that we need to be wary of is sponsored terrorist organizations. Yes. By Iran.

It's not just Iran that is likely to operate. And in fact, if I were Iran, I certainly would play a little bit of, uh, Don Corleone here, and my hands are clean. I didn't do anything right.

No, I, I think you're absolutely gonna see the Houthis and the, the groups in Iraq, right? Because for all intents and purposes, for the billions of dollars we spent in Iraq, rid them of Saddam Hussein, it, it's become somewhat of a proxy state for Iran and the, these private militias and so forth, the Shia Shia militias there, I think they represent the biggest threat, especially the US troops who are in bases throughout the Middle East. So that will remain to be seen anyway, though.

It is, uh, one last aspect, and we don't have a lot of time I wanted to cover was the, the technology for the actual attack itself. You know, could say what you want about America, but we make a damn good weapon. You know, no one does weapons better than America.

No one does these kinds of bombs with stealth bombers. And you know what, even with the, the current f troop in charge of, of the Pentagon and everything, it was an as near as can be told, a flawless execution here with top flight technology. And, you know, we could probably do a whole segment on that, that the, the tech involved, whether it be the GPS and the, the bombs and, and, you know, NA shot was fired at these planes from what, what's been said.

So kudos to American technology, especially when it comes to making weapons. We may not make the best cars in the world anymore, but g*****n, we make the best weapons. Um, all right, let's take a break here at text Drunk Guy.

We'll come back and talk about an AI land grab. Hey folks, we're back in shifting gears to some more traditional technology coverage, but there is an AI land grab underway, SoftBank mochi. Maan is pitching a notion called Project Crystal Land, a proposed $1 trillion AI robotic center in someplace in Arizona.

I'm not quite clear exactly where, but, um, apparently we also have already seen these things in China, and the Europeans are talking about building their own. So, jp, what's going on here is, is everybody gonna be basically looking for some large amount of land to build some sort of AI complex, and this is the next big thing in real estate, or is this the next big bubble? It's, um, So the first thing is, it's, it's still undergoing, you know, certain approvals to get a, you know, to pass and become, uh, an actual initiative, right?

Uh, it has a certain government, uh, you know, allocations that it's looking for certain waivers, uh, in order to be approved. But the concept is interesting. They do this in China today.

Uh, it is, you know, this concept of a manufacturing center for the most part, where the, they're leveraging the technology for artificial, uh, of artificial intelligence and robotics to build out next generation manufacturing. Now, if we look at what's happening in the us, uh, I I, it, it's a really interesting time. We, we have, and, and it is attached to our political stature at the moment.

We have an administration that's come in that's been, you know, uh, very pro let's bring manufacturing back to the us. Many advocates have said, there's no way you're going to get Americans to work in factories like you did in the old days without creating a product that's too expensive for Americans to buy. Um, this is an attempt to say, uh, and the interesting thing is, it's not Americans who are building these factories, right?

This is not US dollars that are coming in building these areas. But, you know, but it would still benefit a town or an area within, I believe it's Arizona, right? You're, you're building hundreds of square miles of factory that's gonna need administration.

It's gonna need people to, you know, be operations management around this. It can have the effect of building a, uh, community of people and schools and, and other, and businesses around the people that have to go there and live there. 'cause it's in the middle of nowhere right now.

Um, if it's electrical base, you would hope they bring with it a, a top-notch energy source, which would drive, uh, electric utility, vehicles, cars, things like that. Everything would be electric. So it wouldn't be necessarily a gas run.

You'd have all that operations around the, uh, just maybe even supplying the fuel to make this thing run and keep it going, right? So there's a, a tremendous upside to the concept. Uh, I I, I think the, you know, we, the example that is trying to follow it, it could work.

Has Demonstr been demonstrable to work in other areas? I think they have some other things they need to figure out. I, you know, we're a, we're a capitalist society.

Kind of hard to say that, uh, we're not gonna allow some, a non-American to do this. But I I, you know, if America, if the government wanted to drive with American initiative behind this, uh, they could say, no, you're not an American company. We're not giving you any dollars to, to fund this, right?

If you're an American company or you partner with a large American company to do this, then we might give you that, those dollars. So it's very, very entwined with policy and governance, uh, in order to, to get the, the full ROI to the US that it does. And then ultimately, it comes down to we raw materials, right?

Because now you're still up against that mentality of tariffs and bringing raw materials. We don't have raw materials. So now you, you know, the, you, if you automate the development building this product entirely, where are you getting the materials to build those products?

And what does that cost overhead gonna add to it? So, uh, uh, it's an interesting model to watch. I I don't know if it's gonna get kickstarted here with this group.

He has a great idea. He, maybe he could be one of the partners of a large group that is doing this, but I, I think that certain things need to change if it's gonna become reality. Steven, can we actually do this?

Or is this just a little bit, you know, wishful thinking? It's wishful thinking. Uh, No, I, I, uh, I always take things about, uh, when, when it comes from SoftBank, I always take them with a bit of a grain of salt.

This is a company that makes huge promises and, and made huge promises for an audience of one between 2016 and 2020. And now they're making those huge promises again. Um, essentially they're saying what the Trump administration, and Trump specifically personally wants to hear, you know, they're using huge numbers, a trillion dollars, uh, as a, uh, a suggestion of what they might do without actually having any kind of prospects or financial backing to make it happen.

I mean, uh, as of, uh, right now, soft banks, uh, actual, uh, liquid capital stands at about $23 billion, which by my, uh, calculations is somewhat less than a trillion dollars. Um, you know, they just raised a little bit more money by selling off part of T-Mobile. Uh, they do have, uh, over a hundred billion dollars in net assets, but not all of that is liquid.

And a lot of that is tied up in their ownership of arm, the chip company. Now, The interesting thing about this story is that according to the rumors, and again, this is all rumors, we don't know where it is, we don't know what it is, we don't know how it would be formed. Um, we, you know, the rumor says it's in Arizona, okay?

Um, where, uh, according to the rumors, the way that they would make this happen, that's the interesting part. They would make it happen the same way that we do infrastructure projects in the US by introducing and selling municipal bonds to fund this. Now, that is an interesting aspect.

And so if you combine the fact that essentially this is a company that's out there, um, saying what the administration wants to hear and then asking for municipal bonds, suddenly this thing might be a little more real, because that's something that the administration has the power to, um, perhaps bring to reality. And that would be a way to make this thing happen. But as JP says, it's probably that this would be a very, very, uh, automated system.

It would not provide a huge number of jobs. What it would do is bring, uh, some sort of manufacturing of some sort of something here, um, in the us and that would appeal to the administration's demands to reshore, uh, production. So I imagine that all of this is gonna be very attractive to Washington.

Um, all of it is gonna create a lot of economic activity that SoftBank can take advantage of. I don't know what real benefits it's gonna create, um, if any, if, if it's really gonna come to fruition. I wanna say, oh, just one thing about the, the location of Arizona, which is so interesting for this project, because the tremendous, we're talk more about water in the next block, but specifically when it comes to, for, to this process, the amount of pure water that would be needed to do intermittent cleanings, you know, throughout this production process is immense.

Arizona's facing an ongoing drought, and it's obviously, uh, water is an issue. So it's just interesting to me that's where they chose to do it. Desalinization.

But, you know, I, I do, I do like Stephen's representation of this is what the Trump administration wants to hear. It's very much like telling him how wonderful he is. Oh, trillion, all you have to mention is the match works.

Trillion dollars. It's trillion dollars. Well, no, JP, a trillion here.

A trillion there. Before you know it, you're talking about real money. Um, but, but guys, let, let, let's, let's look at this couple of different aspects.

Number one, as someone mentioned, this is not a new concept. This has been done in China, right? Shenzhen has, has this AI robotic kind of thing.

And, and in some ways, oh, But a lot of their manufacturers are not actually robots. They're actually people. Uh, I, I think that was true.

It's becoming less true every day. I think when you go to their most modern factories and everything else, they're, they're using robotics. Steven, we, you know, let's not kid ourselves or fool ourselves into thinking they're not.

But here's the point. A project like this doesn't get done in a month or even a year. This is a multi-year project where you need to invest that trillion dollars over five years, 10 years, seven years, and you've got it.

And you gotta understand, you may not see the benefits, you may not reap the benefits for seven to 10 years. And when you're running a centrally managed economy, such as the Chinese Communist Party runs, you can afford to make those kinds of bets because you don't worry about your stock, you don't worry about, you know, the consumer price index. You don't worry about a lot of things we worry about here in the West and in a capitalist society.

And so they're, they may be better suited to do this maybe kind of project, but is Don Barini and Godfather part two sets? After all, we are not communists. Okay?

So we have the ability to do things, maybe not that kind of 10 year out scope, but, but Steven, I think you're right. You're onto something with municipal bonds. Those would be tax free municipal bonds at a locality, not necessarily at the federal level.

Um, and, and that could be something like Barney, to your point, I don't know if Arizona's the right place. What is the best place to build data centers and research for these kinds of things? We've got an article in Techstrong It on it.

Yeah, it's Supposed to be North Dakota, Right? Natural Cooling couldn't be any of that. But here's, hold on, Mike, I wanna point out one other thing.

The notion that you're gonna have all these foreign companies come in and do it. Hey, let's be clear in the us bring your money, leave the people out there, but bring your money, right? But the whole thing that we've been talking about with Sovereign, it runs against that.

What the same way, why would foreign companies wanna put that payload, that capital into American projects that could be nationalized or that they could be shut out of, or they could be tariffed on or these other things. And ultimately that could be what winds up killing this? 'cause I don't know if we could do this without foreign companies.

I think this is gonna be great for Arizona tourism. 'cause right after you go to see Tombstone, the town that was too tough to die, you can go over and visit the AI ghost town that's gonna be there in about five years. Very cool.

With the dinosaurs. Well, what I also think that, you know, when you talk about Arizona, and I, I understand the water issue, definitely. I mean, a Colorado, and they, they like our Colorado River, so do a lot of other states, but you know, they have a, a trending there of developing manufacturing.

And, um, they also have with that, they also have the college educated people that are, that are that, that, that, that, that they're building that strength. So when you're looking at the placement, you're looking at, yes, I'm looking at, you know, the, who's gonna put the money in? And Arizona has been embracing these type of tech type of build outs.

Um, they wanna see that and, and grow there. No, Look, they built out Phoenix, Right? And, uh, and they're looking at, you know, and they've been pretty wise about how they use the water.

They've got much like Vegas, um, they have developed systems for water, for water management, and maybe not all the purification, because I'm not up to snuff on that, kind of, that, that area. But then you also look at, one of the beauties of Arizona is they're pretty well disaster free. They don't have earthquakes, you know, hurricanes, they don't have hurricanes, dust storms.

Yeah, no, they don't have any of those. So They don't have fires. There's nothing to burn.

Right. In fact, They do a big, they do a big sandstorm though, that, Yeah, yeah. But it's there, there there's a, unless the dam, one of the dams broke, you know, a meter lake Powell, you know, the water, there's not gonna be a, there's no, no real, real, real stairs.

So all of those things make it a positive place to go. Um, and that is, the weather is decent if outside of May, through September, I think. Um, so you can attract, It's kinda hotter than hell.

Yeah. Well, this message was brought to you by the Arizona Board of Commerce. There you have.

Oh, you go. Well, a part of this is because I worked with a company that I, I did, I did a turnaround with a company that was a colo, um, you know, MSP kind of fun company. And one of the co several big, one of the big pitches we had was going to California and tell 'em, relook your your data center, your stuff into to Arizona, because we don't have earthquakes.

And we did, we, we managed DR sites, you know, for people in, uh, this is so many years ago, it Remains to be seen of water cooled data centers. Yeah. Would be quite as attractive there.

Here. Fried water. Mike, you had a point.

And then we gotta wrap this one up. This project is so important and can't go to Arizona. It needs to be right outside.

Mar-a-Lago where the president can keep an eye on it. He thinks so with the hurricane. Yeah, because we have a large college educated group down here.

Um, okay, let on that note, let's take a break. As I said, this segment was brought to you by the I Arizona Chamber of Commerce. If you're looking to relocate, speak to Kimberly.

Uh, we'll be back here in Textron gang. We're gonna talk a little bit about it. Staying on point, AI water crisis.

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Well, we've been talking about AI and we even talked a little bit about water. But for water utilities, AI is only one of the issues that they're facing. There's been a rising, a threat of cyber attacks, especially last year in 2024 for large and small utilities.

New research shows that these two dual challenges are really posing a problem for water utilities in the short term and in their long-term planning. Let's take a look. Water utilities are facing a dual challenge, the rise of digital threats, along with surging demand as AI reshapes infrastructure needs.

These compounding pressures are reflected in black and veatch's 2025 water report, which finds that 95% of utilities now list cybersecurity as a critical investment priority. There's been a sharp rise in cyber attacks on water systems last year. Cyber incidents targeted both small and large providers according to the US intelligence community.

But it's not just attacks disrupting operations. A single 100 megawatt data center can consume up to 2 million liters of water per day, equivalent to the daily water needs of over 6,000 homes. When it comes to quantifying the future water needs of ai, research shows that water utilities grapple with uncertainty in long-term planning.

That's because data centers size and locations depend on private decisions. Cooling needs also vary based on hardware, climate, and designs that companies rarely disclose. Success will depend not only on resilience, but also on clear cybersecurity protocols, coordination with data centers and infrastructure planning that accounts for evolving water needs.

You know, it's interesting, we talk a lot about the grid and the surge that AI is going to have on demand, but water is also crucial as we were just discussing, because sometimes it's not just water, but it's also purified water, which might mean more water to, uh, to produce for these facilities. So I think that there's a big question mark looking forward, uh, for these utilities. Absolutely.

Bonnie and I, you know, back to our first block about potential, uh, critical infrastructure, you know, there was that attack on the water system. Was it in New York or is somewhere in the northeast potential attack on a water system? Water is, our water is probably one of the most vulnerable of our critical infrastructure, uh, delivery, uh, systems.

You know, I, I don't want to even say anything to give people ideas out there, but it, it is, it's, it's scary when you think about it. So mon, where is the water gonna come from? Because having visited places like Arizona Water is a ongoing debate and there's fights over who owns the Colorado River, and people are trying to redirect the river, and Southern California wants it to grow almonds and all kinds of stuff.

But where are, there's only so much water, so where's it gonna come? You know, that's a great question. I think a lot of, um, a a lot of it's looking towards the climate tech solutions that I often talk about and ways of, um, creating more opportunities for water.

But once you start getting into those political battles, that, that is a tricky one. And I don't, I don't have the answer for that, but the water utilities themselves are not only dealing with that, but, but with this rising threat of cyber attacks, it's, it's a lot for them to take on plus the regulations. So, um, it's something to keep, keep watch on, especially as we keep talking about new data construction, you know, for data centers as Water, as much as new data centers, it's water cooled data centers.

Yeah. You could know these AI data centers that are being built cannot be cooled by air alone. And so the water demands there become exorbitant.

Um, me, you know, look to Israel, look to Saudi Arabia, companies that have put a lot of money into desalinization technologies, especially when you're talking about non-potable type of watered uses, such as in an AI data center. Um, I, I believe, you know, tech necessities, the mother of invention and politics isn't the answer here. Technology is, Well, that's, that's an interesting aspect too because, um, Mr.

Solar here, I gotta say it. Um, one of the nice uses of solar power, whether it's photovoltaic, solar, electricity, or just heat, is desalinization. And, um, one of the reasons for that is because it's, it's an asynchronous, um, use, uh, or, or load.

In other words, you don't really need batteries because you could essentially run desal, um, on whenever the sun is shining and just let it stop when the sun isn't shining because the water will just sit there and wait to be used. So yeah, desalinization actually works really, really well. There's a, there's been some really interesting, um, approaches to this using barges, uh, for example, um, with offshore water tanks.

Um, also, uh, water is nice because it is extremely, um, you, you can move it really easily. You can pump it in these magical devices called pipes that have been invented, uh, a little while ago. And, um, and, and you can store it in these incredible storage tanks called lakes.

And all of these things, um, are very appealing from an environmental perspective, but also because they solve a lot of problems well, As the ice melts, right? We, we could actually use it. It's a good thing we're shipping, it's a good thing we're shipping, you know, billions of gallons of water around in plastic bottles.

'cause you know, that really helps. Well, one of the curious things, okay, so we talk about, you're talking about water cooled, but we also talk about liquid cooled because there's other Yeah, Those are two different, two different things. Yeah.

Right. And when I was at, when I was at, um, the HBC conference, um, supercomputing last year, I met with the CTO of Lene. They had a big, huge booth there.

And, and the reason why I met with them is like a, he asked for, asked for the meeting. I'm like, going, I'm game. What the heck is Vaseline doing here?

And, and part of the premise of what they've been doing, they've been cooling engines forever. And you know, they have a lot of technology that's been involved with the F ones and everything else that goes along with so specialized technology that they're applying to this market. So ingenuity, creativity, expansion, you know, where do we go?

And it's not just, yes, the lakes and that kind of thing, but, and we will see what happens with, you know, desalinization. So I think there's a lot there that US has in terms of our creativity of how we tackle pro tackle problems like this. Absolutely.

Interesting stuff. Great report, Bonnie. Thank you.

Hey, we've gotta pull the plug on this one. We're over time. What a great text Hor Gang for this wonderful Tuesday.

Who knows what we'll have for tomorrow, for Wednesday, but, uh, keep our fingers crossed that all is well in the world. We do have a full text drunk TV lineup as usual following. So stay tuned for that.

You know, just a quick thing, a quick, uh, mention, we are now doing Text Drunk Gang deconstructed on YouTube and I believe on Text Drunk TV in the OTT channel where you don't have to watch all three blocks. If, if that's not your thing though, why you wouldn't is beyond me. But if you just want to catch one of these blocks, 'cause you only have a short amount of time, take your pick.

Watch one now. Watch one later, save one for tomorrow. But watch it.

Until next time, this is Alan Shimel. On behalf of Bonnie and Mike and Kimberly and JP, and of course Steven FoST, have a great day everyone. We're out.