Talk Day

Morning routine. One last run-through of the Salon talk. An hour of work in the wine cellar. A rainy walk to Tacovore and WinCo. Set up the living room. Hosted the Philomath Salon and gave my data center talk. Good discussion afterward.

A rehearsal, a rainy walk, and a living room full of good questions

Events and activities that occurred on Sunday, October 25, 2026

Talk day started the way I'd promised myself it would, with one full run-through of the Salon talk, out loud and start to finish, without stopping to fix anything. The deck had been getting sharper with each pass on Saturday, and the rule for Sunday morning was to stop polishing and start trusting it. By late morning it was as close to ready as it was going to get, and I made myself walk away from it.

I spent an hour in the wine cellar, part of the slow work of getting the collection catalogued, and finished the shelf checks later in the afternoon. That work had a practical payoff, since the evening needed wine. I pulled a 2016 Girardet Sangiovese, a 2014 Sun Mountain Lodge Winemaker's Red, and a 2020 Maryhill Albariño from the Otis Vineyard, and set out the open Montinore Riesling to finish alongside them. I skipped the afternoon workout and walked to Tacovore in the rain for lunch instead, then across to WinCo for Tostitos Scoops and home on foot. The scoops became smoked pork tostada bites, which turned out to be the hit of the night.

Seven of us gathered in the living room, with Steve joining by Zoom. The Salon's theme was "Size, Place, and Who Pays," and my talk, "What a Place Can Carry," argued that whether a data center is good or bad for a town depends less on its size than on its size compared with the place that hosts it. I started small, with the little data center in my own basement, which draws about 800 watts (the offer of a tour still stands), and worked up to the gigawatt-scale campuses now being built for AI. Oregon turns out to be second in the world for this kind of capacity, with roughly 3.6 gigawatts spread across Hillsboro, The Dalles, and Prineville. The Dalles provided the cautionary tale of a city that tried to keep its largest water customer's usage out of the newspaper and lost. Memphis provided the starker contrast, with an xAI campus running dozens of gas turbines that were permitted only after the fact, and neighbors being bought out rather than heard.

The talk ran about 45 minutes, and the discussion that followed ran nearly as long. We talked about backup power and the fact that gas turbines have simply sold out, about private equity's appetite for ten- and twentyfold returns, and about the NAACP in Memphis as one of the few real sources of pushback. Someone drew the line back to the railroads, the robber barons, and the breakup of AT&T, which felt like exactly the right historical frame for a build-out on this scale. Others pushed toward alternatives, from wave energy to solar on old EPA cleanup sites, and toward the difference between training models and running them. A few questions caught me without answers, among them total US power use, why the industry doesn't simply build in cold places like Canada and Alaska, and why transmission lines take so long to build. Those went into a summary afterward, with each one researched and answered, so the conversation can keep going.

A talk like this is never quite the one you rehearsed. The parts I'd worried over mattered less than the questions I hadn't anticipated, and the room did the work of turning a presentation into a conversation, which is the whole point of a Salon. The leftover pizza and the open bottles on the counter were a fair measure of the evening: not everything got finished, but everyone had been fed, and the best of it came from the people in the room.