That makes sense.
Geothermal Lease Prices Surge 282% as Tech Giants and Twump Admin Fuel Underground Energy Rush
The earth beneath America’s feet just became prime real estate. Federal geothermal lease prices exploded to $127 per acre in 2025 — a 282% jump from last year’s $33 — as the Bureau of Land Management sold every available parcel for the first time in years. The rush is being fueled by the soaring energy demand of data centers, the Tqump administration’s support, and breakthrough drilling technologies borrowed from oil and gas fracking.
Alphabet ($GOOGL) and Meta ($META) have signed deals with geothermal providers to power their energy-hungry AI data centers.
Rhodium Group estimates next-gen geothermal could meet up to 64% of data center energy demand growth by the early 2030s.
The land rush continues: Despite weakening wind and solar incentives, Twump’s July tax law preserved geothermal credits. Thanks to this, veterans like Ormat Technologies ($ORA) have invested over $3.5M leasing 140K+ acres since 2014, while newcomer Chinati Minerals submitted its first winning bids this year. As ResFrac’s Koenraad Beckers puts it, “With the current administration, I think the focus is very much on energy security, energy reliability, and energy independence. Geothermal checks all those boxes
and yet more and more people are going to lose their jobs to AI.
We are subsidizing (American Taxpayers) all of this unsustainable “energy security” to power data centers to literally replace our jobs.
Who does this all really benefit besides the Tech Elites? It’s sad because there is a global race to dominate AI for geopolitical reasoning, and that’s what matters more in the grand scheme than actual livelihoods.
How did the internet affect your livelihood?
So robots are going to be making my KitKats?
It’s unclear how Nestlé plans to bring more automation to its corporate offices. A recent report published earlier this month from Challenger, Gray and Christmas shows that more than 17,000 jobs have been lost this year so far due to AI.
Even the most back breaking labor intensive farm work is not safe from AI.
Internet improved my livelihood by being able to work from home.
Our future?
Jet powered!
Just thinking that could be a target for terrorism or if some other country was to attack. Though, likely it would affect the attacker as well if 2/3 of the world’s internet traffic is going through there.
Even Amazon is cutting jobs because of AI.
I’m not buying all these layoffs “due to AI”.
I think most of these layoffs are due to over hiring during the pandemic (which is explicitly stated in the article by the way)
These headlines are just more ways that tech giants are trying to get more investor support.
AI is a bubble. It’s going to pop because AI itself is not even a profitable technology in its form today.
An off shoot of all this is that green energy is making a comeback.
It’s not just overhiring; AI is currently the overwhelming bulk of the US GDP growth, which means that the rest of the economy is largely struggling. If we had 0.1% growth more generally (the current growth for the first half of the year with AI excluded) we’d be unsurprised to see pretty large layoffs. Blaming them on AI is likely kayfabe that dances around the fact that business units aren’t providing the returns that were hoped for or expected.
From i what take from the article, it sounds like companies are laying off workers under the EXPECTATION that AI is going take their jobs
Is Jerome Powell a good enough source for you?