SerpApi.Org
This is an opinion column.
Ostensibly, the Farnborough International Airshow is supposed to be about planes, but Tommy Tuberville couldn’t help but talk about other things.
This week, Tuberville spoke to an Alabama delegation in London. However, the topic of the day in London wasn’t planes, trains or automobiles, but artificial intelligence and data centers. These things are topics of discussion back home in Alabama, too, but not in such rosy terms.
In London, Tuberville again said AI is the future and there’s no use fighting it.
“We want our kids to stay in this state,” Tuberville said. “We don’t want them to go to Nashville.”
That’s a reasonable concern for someone who once lost to Vandy.
Under a Tuberville administration — which the senator speaks of in certain, measuring-the-drapes-already terms — students will start learning to use AI in elementary school.
“I’m going to tell you this: The one thing that we will start doing, starting this time next year, our kids will start taking — in elementary school — AI,” Tuberville said. “AI is the future of this country. No other state is doing it.”
In any other scenario, nobody-else-is-doing-this might be cause for concern and further consideration, but not for Tuberville. Speaking in cryptic “we” pronouns, he said the deal’s all but done.
“We’ve already pretty much got a group hired that’s going to train the teachers how to teach it,” Tuberville said, again putting the cart before the November horse.
He wants Alabama to “do data centers” and not someday but right now. As he did last week, when he called public concerns over data centers “bullcrap” and Chinese disinformation, Tuberville dismissed critics, saying data centers recycle their water and will use the same water “when they close down 100 years from now.”
They do use electricity, Tuberville acknowledged. But don’t worry. He’s already talked to the power companies about it, he told the folks in London, and they’ve got this covered.
“We’re going to build gas lines,” Tuberville said. “We talked to a group this week about grants for gas lines across the state.”
Tuberville did not say who would fund the grants for the gas lines across the state — whether that would be AI companies or taxpayers footing the bill.
Some data centers might make use of solar power, too, and Tuberville is bullish about a Huntsville company that could soon build the solar panels.
“They don’t want engineers,” Tuberville said. “They don’t want people that have been brainwashed. They want people that work.”
Recently, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul adopted the first statewide data center moratorium, and Tuberville’s opponent, Doug Jones, has said he would adopt one, too, on the outside chance he were elected in November.
Tuberville said he is delighted to see other states turn poop trains … sorry, I mean … data centers away.
“I love it that a lot of these states are saying, ‘Oh, we’re not going to put in data centers,’” Tuberville told the group. “Good. We’re going to take them. Bring them to us.”
If any of this comes as a surprise, this is what happens when a primary is a coronation instead of a contest. Trump blessed Tuberville early, the field cleared, and nobody made him answer a hard question on his way to the nomination. Alabama Republicans bought a pig in a poke. Now the pig is out of the sack and ready to make Alabama stink of methane.
If the Alabama GOP might assume this is a fight it can win without a contest, it should ask Georgia how that goes. In last year’s Public Service Commission races, power bills and data centers did something few issues can do anymore. They moved Republicans to vote for Democrats.
Because a power bill doesn’t check your voter registration before it comes due. Water doesn’t run redder or bluer depending on who’s pumping it. The incessant whine of gas-powered turbines sounds the same, no matter whose ticket got punched.
Tuberville says “we” already talked to the power company.
Tuberville says “we” already picked someone to teach the teachers how to teach AI.
Tuberville seems to have talked to everybody about this, now including business leaders on a London junket.
The only folks Tuberville hasn’t talked to yet, it seems, are the people who might have to live next door to these things, or send their kids to school with it.
You know. Voters.
And I don’t know about him. But I can’t wait to hear what they have to say.
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