The Rape of Rural Virginia For Obsolete Data Centers

The days of bringing the data to the computer are over

America does not need data centers, period.

We prove that every day, moving applications that require an entire data center to a 4-inch x 4-inch computer and run them 1,000 times faster.

That 4-inch computer consumes about the same energy as a coffee grinder. The one you use to grind stuff in your kitchen, not the industrial ones.

Not an inch of pristine Virginia farmland is destroyed - for a generation.

The issue of centralized data centers is far more scary however.

The current compute model is all about taking data from every corner of the enterprise and bringing it to a huge data center. If it uses someone else’s data center, you call it a cloud. It’s just a data center.

That model has been the conventional wisdom for 50 years!

Large data centers consume the electricity of a town of 25,000.

They use up to 400,000 gallons of water a day to cool equipment.

Data centers employ few people - they are like warehouses - large footprints, few employed citizens.

Data centers destroy farmland, particularly in Virginia where its brain-dead leaders embraced the conversion of Virginia beautiful rural farmland into data centers - at the precise moment new technologies are making data centers obsolete.

Politicians fight the last war and in the tech area they jumped into technology enthusiasm at the time when the technology is 45 years old and new techs are replacing current ones.

Virginia is being raped - its farmland converted into a digital smokestack economy - all because its elected officials refused to observe evidence, from citizens, about why data centers do NOT need to be built.

What changed?

The 50 year-old centralized computer model is obsolete.

It is obsolete because the optimal model is to make applications tiny and run them where the data resides - not aggregate the data to a central data center.

Data centers are clustering in Virginia - because they serve the government and because Virginia has particularly obdurate leadership - thinking in 4 years a presidential campaign claim is that “I made Virginia high tech.”

Perhaps opponents will reply - you allowed the most beautiful state in America to be raped into energy-hogging data centers that are becoming more obsolete each day.

Why is everyone touting data centers?

Because Oracle, Microsoft and 500 other tech companies, plus KPMG, E&Y, Mitre, SAIC, Accenture and a hundred embedded consulting firms - for whom 100% of their intellectual property is tied to the obsolete model - are telling them so.

Why are they telling Virginia officials to build data centers?

The unfortunate answer is that obsolete software firms, equally obsolete consultancies - would die if the computing model were turned upside down.

Let’s go there.

Let’s take a short walk through what happens when you move the computer to the data not the data to the computer.

A military satellite system collects targeting data, sends it to earth, a mainframe computer - probably using Oracle and Microsoft - churns the data - maybe for hours certainly for minutes - then sends the info back to the satellite.

The satellite sends the coordinates for someone to target a missile or drone.

In the distributed model, the satellite has a Fractal chip - which is itself a super computer - like the 4-inch x 4-inch computer that we used to replicate the entire FEC system.

It needs almost no power - it’s a chip.

The satellite picks up the signal, processes it instantly and immediately drops the drone on the bad guy.

No communication back and forth. No “go to the earth cloud” to process the data. No problem because of a lost signal.

Just observe, process, strike.

Instant versus latent. Which will be the computing model that survives? Wanna guess?

That my friends is what is at stake as the rape of Virginia takes place.

Virginia is going to be raped and it is too late to stop it. The worst part is yet to come.

It is not an opinion that data centers are obsolete.

We and other firms are moving the largest applications that today use data centers to computers needing less energy than a microwave oven. We do it every day.

In 2024, we demonstrated such systems over 1,000 times to small groups and large gatherings. We have videos all over the internet and we have live customers just too happy to show off their early adoption.

The economics are black and white - data center costs of compute are 1,000 to one million times more expensive than the distributed model we use every day. That includes the water, the electricity, the land used, the disturbance to the environment.

What that means for the poor Virginia citizens is “stranded assets.”

Those data centers may be used for a while but the economics will force them to close - because there is no need for them.

Who, even the U.S. Government, can resist a cost of compute difference of 10/1?

Who can resist the speed difference of 1,000 to 1 or even a million to 1?

So while it’s too late for Virginia, it is not too late for the rest of the country.

This week we wrote a paper for a U.S. Cabinet official, at their request, on why data centers are not needed to establish U.S. leadership in A.I.

One of the points we made - in case you missed it back in January - the DeepSeek Chinese guys demonstrated there is no need for really big data centers. None. Zip.

The reaction in the United States was immediate - visceral and stunned incoherence.

We and our partners went one step farther - there is no need for data centers at all.

We don’t ask our prospective customers to believe us - we usually migrate their first application from a data center - which it consumes pretty much - to one of those 4-inch babies - at little or no charge.

We do it in a couple of months!

Electric utility applications we move in a couple of days.

Just to show how F#@King easy it is!

If we can do it for free (we charge them later when they become customers) how are data centers going to survive as a thing?

The overwhelming data center constraint is electric power. It is a fatal constraint.

So in Virginia and other states, the electric utilities are raising the ante for electric generation and this is showing up in citizen rate plans.

As long as utilities can charge top dollar for the compute at those data centers, the rate payers are OK. The problem is they cannot charge top dollar for applications that are 10x more expensive to run and run 1,000 times slower than the distributed application.

It’s time to remember Kodak.

Kodak invented digital cameras - but their product managers - who sold film - told them digital cameras would never be a thing.

Virginia is KODAK today.

Virginia is screwed.

It’s citizens are currently watching their most beautiful land destroyed. Their economy instead of being based on modern tech is wed to 1980s obsolete technology.

And those data centers?

As they are turned into storage facilities in 4 years, maybe even 2 years, their energy usage will be built into Virginia citizens’ rate plans and Virginia citizens will have the most expensive electric bills in America.

That folks is what happens when you fight yesterday’s war.

Economic realities are an ultimate truth - they can be denied, obscured, challenged - leaders stand up and say “…it ain’t so.”

But when customers, even large government agencies, deploy applications that once consumed a data center - on a 4-inch x 4-inch computer, even the government must take notice. Those customers are here today.

Virginia will not be remembered in 5 years as a high tech hub with the best A.I. data centers - it will be the storage warehouse capital of the world.

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Jay@FractalWeb.App

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