12/01/2026
The US Trump administration is said to be getting close to a trade deal with Taiwan, a move which would cut the tariff rate on goods from the island to 15%. This coincides with what might be seen as a public relations opportunity for the People’s Republic to invade the island after US acts of illegal adventurism in Latin America. More to the point such a deal is said to include a commitmentof the Taiwanese company TSMC to build five more chip manufacturing in Arizona. The importance of TSMC’s unique chip manufacture process and which is Nvidia’s go-to chipmaker was recently shown by a 20% rise in its quarterly revenue as a consequence of the AI boom. This too involves the boom’s thirst for power. Meta has signed several deals for its data centres that could see it accumulate 6 gigawatts of nuclear power.
Scientists Are reported to have created replica human womb lining and implant early-stage embryos. The usual fanfare of how it would be beneficial was made with the specific claim that it will perhaps time, prevent miscarriages. For anyone liable to suffer such distress it must be welcomed an thus by everyone else, But there is a context of the continual over-jumping of what were supposed to be ethical barriers in such research. The fantasies both of master race creation and replacing the demographic dependency on women are alive and well financed.
Whatever the reality and potential of “green” energy technology in a capitalist-dominated world it has provided rationale for the Imperialist-era search and grab for at least 30 energy transition minerals and metals, such as lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements. form the material basis of the shift to green energy. However many are being funnelled into the armaments business and national defence stockpiles.
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26/11/2025
Will You Won’t You Will You Join the Dance: Interested parties have and had their say as to whether the AI “boom” will burst or not. One day Nvidia’s profit projection “cheered the market”; two days later the cheer was downgraded a little as the “intelligent bourgeois” asked as WealthofNegations did as while back, where are the revenue streams to pay up and make profit for those billions of investments. While this dance continues the “market” has given a fresh OK to the “boom” Nvidia’s own sustainability report of 2024 revealed that last year the company’s carbon emissions rose from 3.8 million tons to 7.15 million tonnes; a rise of 87 per cent in one year alone. It is not just the notorious environmental costs of data centres (see below) but advanced semi-conductor factories to make the actual chips the boom depends on, require electricity power at gigawatt scale, and vast amounts of water. But semi-conductor fabs also produce thousands of tonnes of contaminated water and waste, including huge amounts of PFAS “forever” chemicals. In South Korea a 10-gigawatt semi-conductor “mega-cluster” is being built, that will require a 7th of South Korea’s electricity and will consume half the water of Seoul.
The real effects of data centres are felt acutely in Mumbai where the scale of the presence of the world’s biggest data centre operator, Amazon has been revealed. It has created justification for the reprieve of two coal plants plant run by the Indian multinationals Tata Group and Adani which were due to close last year in a government push to cut emissions. The health effects of the consequent air pollution are city-wide and “hell” for its inhabitants.
The dependence of data centres even that through which the Will You Won’t You dance is conducted when the one close to Chicago with at least $25 quadrillion of notional trade volume passing through it daily had to close on the 124th November due to a ”malfunction of the cooling system”.
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07/11/2025
The fall in the valuation of AI-related stocks, as predicted in this column a while back, has begun as questions arise as to the source of future revenues. The top dog of Open AI has even floated the idea of US state support. As also previously reported here, the Trump Administration has been accused of national socialism in the case of the fallen-behind Intel company. Around the same time, Nvidia was proudly proclaimed as the first $5 Trillion company, but with no reference to its dependence for the actual manufacture of the chips on the $1 Trillion valued Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TMSC) revealed in a headline in which the Taiwanese company was asked for more “wafers” by Nvidia to meet strong AI demand.
This shoring-up of US national interest, “socialist” or otherwise, along with the capital accumulation “expansionary” compulsion of TSMC, has led to new facilities being set up in Arizona as well as in Japan and Germany but US workers, lack the necessary “skill and devotion”, it’s claimed. It seems likely that for this reason alone, Taiwan will remain a geopolitical hotspot. Likely too, as in the dot com collapse at the start of the century, there will be a crash in stock valuations, while an AI infrastructure will exist regardless as the “telecoms” infrastructure came into being over 20 years ago.
Meanwhile Meta, having achieved a $4 Trillion valuation, secured a $60 billion loan to build more of the data centres that AI requires. However half of it won’t show up on the social media giant’s balance sheet as debt. This off-balance accounting is reminiscent of another early century collapse, that of the energy entrepreneur Enron which left no material legacy except for brim-full spectrum oligarchic media dominance.
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09/10/2025
WealthofNegations has little sympathy for the Belgian dentist, British middle-manager, Brazilian cosmetic surgeon, Chinese pornography entrepreneur or any other “small investor” aiming to get rich from the labour of others, putting their money into the AI boom. Wiseguys like Jamie Dimon boss of the giant JP Morgan Chase Bank are smugly assuming a crash to come of overvalued stocks but with them well out of it in good time leaving the small investor to take the losses. As in the Dot-com boom of 2000, whatever financial crash takes place, real infrastructure will have been created.
It will have consequences. The International Monetary Fund predicts that AI will cause the loss of four out of every ten jobs, though not presumably the incomes of those much-needed small investors. While Bloomberg Business News anticipates a $350 billion investment boom in nuclear power in the USA alone to power the AI revolution regardless of the climate-change induced cooling water loss.
Meanwhile a process of state and corporate oligarchic concentration is well under way. Not wishing to be left out, the here-there-and-everywhere self-proclaimed Nazi, Elon Musk’s Colossus 2 project will look to chip-maker Nvidia with its trillions to finance it. The financing includes equity and debt in a special purpose vehicle that will buy Nvidia processors and rent them to xAI for use in Colossus 2.
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20/09/2025
Albania has appointed a minister created by AI to oversee public tenders and contracts. “Diella” is the first member of the country’s Cabinet who is not physically present. Its role is to avoid future corruption scandals as Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence of Albania.
Nvidia the “chip” producer and the highest capitalized company in the USA announces it will invest $100 billion in Open AI to help it expand ChatGPT computing power. The same company has been willing to pay a bonus to the ISA government to be allowed to sell certain approved chips in China. Along with the Trump regime’s direct investment in the much smaller Intel chip-making company it has led to accusations of socialism being levelled at it. National socialism might be more to the point. The “free market” does not seem to mind but then its dominant propagandists at the University of Chicago long ago found that, after all, monopolies were no infringement in the free market.
The long-lasting one-party state of Equatorial Guinea cut off social media links in the face of mass, mostly youthful rebellion against i/ As in the recent case of Indonesia and the attempt to do it in Nepal this is now an automatic response of such regimes to protest mobilization.
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02/09/2025
’The Cyborg Insects and the Sargasso. The Sargassum and the Entrepreneur’ (2024) comprises of 24 collages (30cm X 30cm each), a looped video on an I-pad and a text panel.
The text panel is a preamble to the underpinning narrative; a fabulation, rendered as a ’Tableau Vivant’ and feeding off a tension within the script. It entails a gathering of Cyborg Insects, escaped / discarded from US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA laboratories, that have taken refuge in the Sargassum weed floating around the Sargasso Sea. They surround a small screen that shows in close up the manically swivelling eyes of a comatose man – the Entrepreneur. The Entrepreneur fronts an Eco start-up, a dubious Carbon Capture scheme designed to repeatedly farm and sink the Sargassum. Consigning it and anything residing in it to oblivion… David Jacques. 2025.
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10/08/2025
CATI, the worlds biggest battery producer has halted operations at its Jianxiaon lithium mine in China. Lithium is the crucial element in batteries like those in electric vehicles (EVs). Halting operations with the support of the Chinese state follows a dramatic fall in the price of the substance as a situation of over-supply became apparent.
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20/07/2025
The tech giants of the immaterial/digital economy are all rushing downstream into the dirty world of Energy to supply their AI splurge. Meta’s Zuckerberg is building a nuclear power station; Google is making a $3 billion deal for US hydropower electricity. This while $25 billion is earmarked for the water and power consuming data centres planned to make AI work.
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23/06/2025
Consistent “unprecedented” high temperatures in India have made for a demand for air-con and an accompanying demand on its electricity grid. These grids are suddenly in the news everywhere as vulnerable. The Indian solution involving state intervention is to work with appliance makers to standardise the cooling range of air conditioners to ensure that the minimum temperature is not set below 20C (68F), in an effort to cut the energy use of these power guzzlers which increase public air pollution as well as making their own contribution to global warming.
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20/06/2025
The sacking of workers in favour of AI is all the rage. Microsoft is planning for thousands of sackings, particularly in sales, to make way for heavy spending on AI. The dismissals are expected to be announced early next month, following the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year. These will follow mass sackings by the company last month last month, which were mostly in its product and engineering departments.
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11/06/2025
The majority of judges on Brazil’s Supreme Court have agreed to make social media companies liable for “illegal” postings with reference to cases involving child pornography and violence. The USA’s Secretary of State Rubio condemned the decision, threatening a host of punishments of the whole country in the name of Free Speech
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06/06/2025
Meta is to buy nuclear power from Constellation as artificial intelligence accelerates energy use. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp signed a 20-year contract to buy 1,121 megawatts from an Illinois plant starting in mid-2027, when a state subsidy expires. Under the deal, Constellation will invest in boosting the plant’s output; the company is also considering plans to build another reactor as well. Nuclear power has emerged as one of the biggest winners from the AI-fueled surge in electricity demand; Meta’s electricity consumption nearly tripled from 2019 to 2023.
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29/04/2025
The lengths to which the present ecosystem catastrophe is denied, from trivialization to censorship, physical threat and imprisonment is all too real. In the last week the UK government has gone a step further. Some smart-arse has come up with the idea of blocking the sun instead of stopping CO2 emissions and the government has approved the project. The desperate attempt to not address the real causes of ecocide & multi-species extermination is increasingly reckless.
It’s as if Unintended Consequences were impossible when experience tells us they are all too real.
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