The chant has been running for forty minutes, and Laura stopped hearing the words somewhere around minute twenty. Now it is weather.
“Not one drop! Not one drop!”
Forty-odd people line the shoulder of Old Mill Road, facing a chain-link fence and eleven acres of graded red clay. Behind the fence, steel frames climb out of the ground in rows, and a banner zip-tied to the gate reads PROJECT KESTREL: FUTURE HOME OF THE PIEDMONT DIGITAL CAMPUS. Laura takes inventory: a retired couple in matching camp chairs, a man with a snare drum and no apparent sense of tempo, three teenagers from the high school environmental club, a church van’s worth of Methodists, and a farmer in a feed-store cap who has parked his tractor on the shoulder, which she assumes is a statement.
Her editor wants six hundred words and a quote with water in it. She thumbs her phone to record and holds it out at chest height, the way she has held it at zoning hearings and house fires for eleven years.
The woman nearest the gate is wearing white sneakers so new the tread has not picked up any clay.
“Can I ask your name?”
“Evie. Evie Harmon.” She glances at the phone, then at the fence. “I’ve never done this before. My husband thinks I’m at Target.”
“What brought you out?”
“My kids are on well water. Both of them, we all are, the whole road is.” Evie points down the line as if the wells were visible. “They’re saying this thing will drink five million gallons a day. That comes out from under my house.” She counts on her fingers. “And the power bill went up eleven percent in March, and they’re asking for another rate case. And the noise. A woman from Virginia came to our meeting, she lives next to one, she said it drones all night like a refrigerator the size of a mall.”
Behind her the chant swells again, and Evie joins it, a beat late, as if checking that she is allowed.
A few yards down, a man in a fleece vest holds one of the group’s stenciled signs: PROTECT OUR WATER. He holds it slightly lower than everyone else, at an angle that lets him read it himself. Laura guesses mid-thirties. He gives his name as Clark and his job as controls engineer.
“Ms. Harmon says the campus will use five million gallons a day.”
“It won’t.” Clark says it the way someone gives directions. “They filed for closed-loop cooling. After the initial fill it’ll draw less than the golf course across the highway. The rates are a real fight, but that fight is with the utilities commission. The noise, maybe. Mostly the stuff on the signs is wrong.”
Laura lowers the phone an inch. “You’re holding one of the signs.”
“I’m pro-AI, too, if it helps. I use these models eight hours a day. I’d be slower at my job without them.” He shifts the sign to his other hand. “I’m against this building.”
“Why?”
He looks past her at the steel. “Do you know the scaling laws?”
She does not, and says so.
“Three things make these models smarter. Algorithms, data, compute.” He ticks them off against the sign’s wooden handle. “The labs found that if you multiply the compute by ten, the model’s error drops by a predictable amount. Straight line on a log plot. It has held across about seven orders of magnitude. So they keep multiplying.”
“And algorithms?”
“Algorithms are ideas. Somebody in Zurich posts a paper on a Tuesday and every lab has it by Friday. Nobody can fence an idea.” Second finger. “Data is already spent. They scraped the internet years ago. You can’t unpublish it.” Third finger, and he lifts the sign toward the fence. “Compute is concrete. It needs land and a rezoning and a substation and three hundred megawatts and a county commission vote on a Tuesday night. It’s the only one that has to ask permission.”
“People use AI, though. Doesn’t it need somewhere to run?”
“The models we have run fine on what’s already built, and answering questions gets cheaper every year. A campus this size is for training. It’s for the next model, the one ten times bigger than the last one.”
“And you don’t want a smarter one.”
“Eventually, sure. I’d take it in 2045. Cancer will still be there to cure.” He watches the teenagers trade a bullhorn. “Nobody has given me a reason it has to be 2029.”
“What’s the risk, in your view?”
“Of this going very badly, for everybody? I’d say five percent.” He nods toward the gate, toward the white sneakers. “She has two kids. Would she buckle them into a car that crashed one trip in twenty?”
Laura looks at her phone. The waveform crawls along, recording. Her quote with water in it is eleven minutes back on the file, and she has stopped thinking about it.
“Then why chant about water?”
“Because ‘flatten the pretraining curve’ doesn’t fit on a sign. And because she’ll be at the commission meeting in December, and she would never come for my reason.” Clark tilts his head down the line, past the Methodists to the tractor. “Every person here is a vote against a permit. Congress has had three years to slow this down. The labs are racing each other. A treaty takes a decade. A hundred people on Old Mill Road can delay one campus by eighteen months, and they can do it this year.”
The drum loses the beat and finds it again. Laura realizes the phone has drifted down to her hip. She raises it back to her chest.
“Is there anything you’d like to close with?”
Clark lifts the sign to the same height as everyone else’s and fills his lungs.
“Not one drop!”