December 2025 Archives

Edited and updated from the version originally published on December 25, 2012

Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today.

My Christmas Eve was spent doing a little bit of last-minute shopping, including a visit to the Nut House for some pecans and to Persnickety Consignments in Catoosa for one of their hand-painted, glow-in-the-dark Christmas ornaments celebrating the Blue Whale and the Route 66 Centennial. I picked up some barbecue from Rib Crib just an hour before they closed at 5 (out of ribs, of course) for an early dinner.

My wife and I and our two local children attended our church's Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols candlelight service, which once again featured a Nativity-themed poetical homily written and recited by our pastor. I wore a green sweater over a red shirt for a family photo after the service, but it was only for appearance's sake; it was warm and muggy as we left the building, reminding us of our Christmas 2013 in Sarasota, Florida. I drove home through several midtown neighborhoods to look at lights. A favorite extravagant display on 30th Place east of Utica is missing this year, replaced by a For Sale sign, a sign with a sad story behind it.

Christmas day will be quiet, and just the four of us. We'll make phone calls to connect with far-flung family. With such a small group, we've decided on dinner out, although we'll make our traditional breakfast casserole for the morning.

At some point, we will listen to this year's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, and enjoy the solo chorister sing the opening verse of "Once in Royal David's City," the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, and the bidding prayer that opens the service.

While Lessons and Carols is an Anglican tradition, it is encouraging to see how it has escaped its cradle and found a home in Bible-believing churches of many different denominations.

As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge. My 8th grade year was the first year I was required to attend, and I expected to be bored. Instead, I was entranced. My last two years in high school, I was a member of the Concert Chorus and was privileged to join in the singing of Tomas Luis de Victoria's setting of O Magnum Mysterium, an ancient poem about the wonder that "animals should see the newborn Lord lying in a manger." As a senior, I was one of the 12 Madrigal Singers. The six ladies sang the plainsong setting of Hodie Christus Natus Est (Today Christ Is Born), repeating it as the students processed into their places. Then all 12 of us sang Peter J. Wilhousky's arrangement of Carol of the Bells, with the 3 basses landing on the final satisfying "Bom!" on that low G.

At the beginning of Trinity's service, after the processional, Father Ralph Urmson-Taylor, who served as Holland Hall's Lower School chaplain, would read the bidding prayer. Confessing Evangelical has it as I remember it. It's worth a moment of your time to ponder.

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child.

But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese.

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore.

These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...

The bidding prayer was written by Eric Milner-White, dean of the chapel of King's College, who introduced the Lessons and Carols service there on Christmas Eve 1918. Jeremy Summerly describes the prayer as "the greatest addition to the Church of England's liturgy since the Book of Common Prayer."

In some versions, the prayer for "all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love" is dropped, perhaps because of political correctness and religious timidity, but they seem to have been restored in recent years. Who needs prayer more than those who reject the Way, the Truth, and the Life?

The phrase "upon another shore, and in a greater light" always gives me goosebumps as I think about friends and family who are no longer with us, but who are now free from pain and delighting in the presence of the Savior they loved so dearly in this life. As he wrote those words, Milner-White, who had served as an army chaplain in the Great War before his return to King's College, must have had in mind the 199 men of King's and the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who never returned home from the trenches of Europe.

This year that number includes my father, who was Christmas cheer personified for our family and for many Tulsans for the last two decades. The staff at Philbrook Museum, where he held court every year since 2005 that they'd had a Santa, very kindly invited my sister and me and our families to one night of the Festival and presented us with Christmas ornaments honoring his memory. His successor at Philbrook is a fine gentleman and was a good friend and colleague to Dad, and it was nice to Dad's custom-built throne still in good use.

Added this year to the number of those who rejoice on another shore and in a greater light are several other men who were fathers in the faith: Brother Gerald E. Dyer, the pastor at First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills who baptized me in 1972 and who went on to serve pastorates in Baxter Springs, Kansas, and Miami, Oklahoma; Dr. Donald R. Vance, a world-renowned expert in Hebrew and Semitic languages, co-editor of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: A Reader's Edition, a former professor at ORU and teacher at ACA, and a faithful friend; and Ray Rose, who was my boss at Burtek back in the late 1980s, and who set an example of living out his Christian faith both in and out of the workplace.

On the very same day that my dad left this life, my Aunt Gerry, my mother's youngest surviving sister, left us, too. Aunt Gerry was a voracious reader. When I was young she would lend me her favorite sci-fi novels, and she gave me albums that introduced me to Monty Python and Willie Nelson (and Willie Nelson introduced me to the Great American Songbook). She spent several years as a reporter and editor at small-town newspapers in southeastern Oklahoma and was a skilled grant writer.

Remembering those who have gone on before leads us to the final verses of the Epiphany hymn, "As with Gladness, Men of Old", which describes "another shore" as "the heavenly country bright":

Holy Jesus, every day
Keep us in the narrow way;
And, when earthly things are past,
Bring our ransomed souls at last
Where they need no star to guide,
Where no clouds Thy glory hide.

In the heavenly country bright,
Need they no created light;
Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown,
Thou its Sun which goes not down;
There forever may we sing
Alleluias to our King!

The final verses of the processional hymn also speak to that blessed hope:

And our eyes at last shall see Him,
Through His own redeeming love,
For that Child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in Heaven above;
And He leads His children on
To the place where He is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable,
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see Him; but in Heaven,
Set at God's right Hand on high ;
When like stars His children crowned,
All in white shall wait around.

MORE:

"Once in Royal David's City," the processional hymn from King's College Lessons and Carols, was Christmas 2023 Hymn of the Week at Word and Song by Debra and Anthony Esolen.

This year's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge marked its 107th anniversary. You might be able listen to the service for the next four weeks on the BBC Sounds website, but this year, because of changes in BBC policy, you might need to use a VPN and a private browser tab and an account registered to a UK address to listen. A pre-recorded video of the service, called Carols from King's, is available internationally for download at a price of £8.33 (about $10 US).

You can view the booklet for the service and an article on the history of the service here. (Direct link to service booklet PDF. Direct link to history booklet PDF.)

The history of the Lessons and Carols service was presented in this 15-minute BBC program, Episode 8 of the series "A Cause for Caroling." Alas, it was not repeated this year, so it is not available through the BBC, but it is available through Audible and as an audio CD.) Edward White Benson, first Bishop of Truro, originated the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880. It was published in 1884 and began to be used more widely. From the 2018 service booklet:

The 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from an order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the large wooden shed which then served as his cathedral in Truro at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1880.

A. C. Benson recalled: 'My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve - nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop'. The idea had come from G. H. S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.Very soon other churches adapted the service for their own use. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Milner-White decided that A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be a more uplifting occasion at King's than Evensong on Christmas Eve. He used Benson's plan, but wrote the now-classic Bidding Prayer to set the tone at the beginning. Since then the spoken parts, which provide the backbone of the service, have only occasionally changed.

MORE: John Piper explains what Christmas is all about in 115 words:

Christmas means that a king has been born, conceived in the womb of a virgin. And this king will reign over an everlasting kingdom that will be made up of millions and millions of saved sinners. The reason that this everlasting, virgin-born king can reign over a kingdom of sinners is because he was born precisely to die. And he did die. He died in our place and bore our sin and provided our righteousness and took away the wrath of God and defeated the evil one so that anyone, anywhere, of any kind can turn from the treason of sin to the true king, and put their faith in him, and have everlasting joy.

STILL MORE:

Author William Federer, on the Eric Metaxas Show, explains the evidence that establishes December 25 as the date of Christ's birth.

At her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker has written a great many articles about the Anglo-Saxon commemoration of the Christian year. This Twitter thread and this blog entry will lead you to a series of articles on the "O Antiphons," the Latin poems of praise to Christ that are read at vespers over the week prior to Christmas day, each one naming a title of Christ reflecting a different aspect of His glory -- Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring (Morning Star), King of Nations, and Emmanuel (God with us).

Her essay from 1st Sunday in Advent 2020 reflects on Advent, Christmas, and time, on 2020's lack of holidays, the impossibility of "pressing pause" on life, the origins of Christmas and claims of cultural appropriation, the emotional impact of the season. A worthwhile ramble on a gray day. It's all worth reading, but this passage stood out to me, and it cites that wonderful phrase from the bidding prayer that undoes me every year:

The British festival year used to involve numerous seasons and holidays when people could gather together, in extended families and in local communities; now for many people in that 90% it's almost all concentrated on Christmas, and that's a lot of pressure. Of course advertisers exploit that pressure for their own ends, so many of us have a vision in our heads of the 'perfect family Christmas' which may bear little or no relation to how we have actually experienced the season. (I'm sure the journalists are attacking the imaginary advertisers' Christmas more than anything they've seen in real life.)

It's typical of the modern Christmas, most of all in its focus on family and childhood, that it leads people to places of strong emotion, both good and bad. Whether your memories of childhood Christmas are happy or unhappy ones, when Christmas comes round there's no escaping them. Whatever your family is or isn't, or whatever you want it to be, this is the time when you are insistently pushed to think about it and to compare yourself to others. Any sense of loss or deficiency in the family is made worse by the contrast with images of other apparently perfect families, or by remembering past happiness, or imagining what could or should be. Grief is harder. Absences are more keenly felt. It's a season when one phrase or one note of a song can open floodgates of emotion, calling forth profound fears, griefs, and longings which in ordinary time we might manage to contain. Christmas used to be a season of ghost stories, and it's certainly a time when it's hard not to be haunted by memories - even happy memories, of 'those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light'.

You can call that sentimental, or irrational, but it's very powerful all the same. And it's no coincidence - of course it isn't - that this is all intensified because it takes place at midwinter, when the days are very short and the nights very long; when the weather is cold and hostile; when light is lowest, and the shadows longest. There's a reason we call this season 'the dead of winter', with all the sterility and hopelessness that implies. That makes the Christmas brightness all the brighter, or the darkness all the darker - the lights and the warmth and the company all the more welcome, or their absence all the more painful.

It's a bleak and lonely and isolating time of year, at the best of times; and these aren't the best of times. How much more endless the empty evenings seem now in November than they did in April, now they begin at four o'clock in the afternoon! The 'it's just one day' people can go on saying that as much as they like, but this particular day, after nine months of isolation or separation from family, is going to be hard for a lot of people.

Just remember: If you didn't fulfill every Christmas tradition you wanted to honor, give every gift you wanted to give, sing every carol on or before December 25, there are still eleven days of Christmas remaining!

RELATED: Tom Holland writing in Unherd in December 2020 on The Myth of Pagan Christmas. Holland takes us back to the Christmas feast at the court of King Athelstan in Amesbury in 932, and looks back from there to the idea of measuring time from the birth of Christ:

Bede, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, had recognised that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier, he had fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, by Bede's reckoning, were properly measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. The effect was to render the calendar itself as Christian. The great drama of Christ's incarnation and birth stood at the very centre of both the turning of the year and the passage of the millennia. The fact that pagans too had staged midwinter festivities presented no threat to this conceptualisation, but quite the opposite. Dimly, inadequately, gropingly, they had anticipated the supreme miracle: the coming into darkness of the true Light, by which every man who comes into the world is lit.

He concludes with this:

This year of all years [2020] -- with a clarity denied us in happier times -- it is possible to recognise in Christmas its fundamentally Christian character. The light shining in the darkness proclaimed by the festival is a very theological light, one that promises redemption from the miseries of a fallen world. In a time of pandemic, when the festive season is haunted by the shadows of sickness and bereavement, of loneliness and disappointment, of poverty and dread, the power of this theology, one that has fuelled the celebration of Christmas for century after century, becomes easier, perhaps, to recognise than in a time of prosperity. The similarities shared by the feast day of Christ's birth with other celebrations that, over the course of history, have been held in the dead of winter should not delude us into denying a truth so evident as to verge on the tautologous: Christmas is a thoroughly Christian festival.

Today, I stopped to do some Christmas shopping at the new Decopolis Tulsarama Station on Historic Route 66 at 5717 E. 11th St. The Decopolis Discovitorium has been open since 2020 at 1401 E. 11th St. in the Meadow Gold District, but Tulsarama just opened on November 22, 2025, a bit less than a year before U.S. Highway 66's centennial on November 11, 2026.

Tulsarama, named after Tulsa's 1957 celebration of Oklahoma's semi-centennial, is like a collection of little specialty shops in one location. The building was originally Creech's Cafe, but for most of its existence was McCollum's Restaurant, sitting just west of the Will Rogers Motor Hotel and amidst a mile of motels on what was then Tulsa's eastern outskirts. Just inside the door from the parking lot, you'll see displays with photos and text on the history of the building and the area, and even an old menu.

Every room is beautifully and imaginatively decorated by owner William Franklin, who is an accomplished painter of murals, portraits, and trompe l'oeil, with work installed around the globe.

Right along 11th Street is the bright and sunny Tulsarama ice cream parlor, serving a dozen hand-dipped flavors from Tulsa's Big Dipper Creamery. The booths are decorated with owner William Franklin's whimsical Tulsarama Gang comic strips, each one illustrating an aspect of Tulsa's history, and with artwork and articles from Oklahoma's 50th anniversary. 1957 was the high-water mark of Route 66 and the post-World War II great American road trip, when locally-owned small businesses dominated the two-lane roads that took Americans across the country.

In the corner of the ice cream parlor, there's a Tulsa Visitor Center, with free maps and brochures, as well as books for sale about Route 66, Oklahoma, and Tulsa. They've got the new Route 66: The First Hundred Years by Jim Ross and Shellee Graham.

The complex also encompasses FableRealm Bookstore, which has books, toys, and gifts related to popular fantasy fiction series.

Just beyond the bookstore, you reach William's Tulsey Town Art Gallery, with prints celebrating Art Deco and Tulsa history. There are prints of historic Oklahoma maps, of architect Paul Corrubia's evocative 1937 charcoal sketches of Tulsa landmarks, and of William Franklin's own paintings of Tulsa's architectural gems. There are plans to offer painting classes in this room early next year. You can also find handmade, leather-bound journals, and the pottery of Jezz Strutt, who offers some Tulsa and Route 66-themed items.

Decopolis, a combination gift shop and museum devoted to celebrating Tulsa's Art Deco heritage, first opened in a storefront in the parking garage at 6th and Boston in 2012. In 2016, the store moved a block north into the Thompson Building at 5th and Boston. The downtown location closed at the end of 2020, but Meadow Gold District location had opened in October of that same year and is still thriving today. The Discovitorium features dinosaur, sci-fi, and fantasy-related gifts, toys, and books. It includes a mini Tulsa Art Deco museum where you can pick up a free Tulsa Art Deco downtown walking tour map.

William's dream is to add a new and bigger Discovitorium and a full-fledged Tulsa Art Deco museum to the new Tulsarama complex. In a Facebook post from last week, he talks about the tourism impact of many individual small-business initiatives, but they need local support to succeed and grow:

[Tourism as an industry] is a new thing for Tulsa that I believe has huge promise and potential for growth. Go to the Meadow Gold District and check out the "Route 66 Giants" and the fun shops and restaurants that have sprung up there in just the last couple of years. This is just one, small part of what promises to be a whole new, vital industry which could bring fun, excitement, money and jobs, to Tulsa, to you.

There is a saying, You can make a big splash in two ways, throw in a big boulder, or throw in a lot of coordinated pebbles. All the little tourism related attractions and businesses along Route 66 in Tulsa, and in our neighboring towns, could make a wonderfully big, fun, neon colored splash!

BUT this is still a nascent enterprise and we are facing what looks to be a tougher year than normal. Right at the time when a lot of small Tourism related businesses on Route 66 in Tulsa have just started, or expanded. So we could use a little extra attention this week and next from the good people of Tulsa to help us out.

Our BIG dream? We would like to add a full fledged Museum, the DECOPOLIS Tulsa Art Deco Museum, a new bigger Decopolis Discovitorium and Mesmer Island Dino Adventure, to the same TulsaRama & FableRealm Books property. A wonderful new attraction for you to visit and enjoy! Scheels? Once we achieve our plans, we will leave them in the dust.

Over the last year, amidst exciting concept sketches and photos of construction progress, William shared the frustrations of the City of Tulsa permitting process, which slowed everything down and put hopes of opening for the Route 66 Centennial year in jeopardy. Individual entrepreneurship, individual owners each with their own quirky vision, is what built Route 66 and made it memorable, and yet city leaders focus their attention on top-down, government-funded "attractions" like the Cry Baby statue. People like William don't need government subsidies, they just need the city to make the permitting process as painless, predictable, and quick as possible. Redirecting weird statue money to improving government services would be a good start.

I hope you'll take time to visit Decopolis's two locations and the many other locally owned businesses along Tulsa's Route 66. Both stores are open 10-6 tomorrow, Christmas Eve, and remember, there are twelve days of Christmas, starting with Christmas Day, so you can keep shopping and giving gifts through Epiphany.

I tend to keep browser tabs around for a long time. I find an interesting story that I want to write about, but never get around to it. I'm going to try to get through a few in this entry, but will not let myself spend more than an hour. Here are a few recent stories on new laws passed this year by the Oklahoma legislature.

OK property owners can repurchase seized land after Nov. 1: This Fox23 story from October 28, 2025, reported on State Rep. Tom Gann's (R-Inola) bill to force the Oklahoma Transportation Commission (aka ODOT) to give the previous owners an opportunity to buy their land back if it is surplus to requirements. This was already being done if the previous owners still had a remnant of the land adjacent to the land that was taken; this bill requires that opportunity for a total taking as well. HB1103 was authored by Gann and sponsored by Sen. Ally Seifried in the Senate, and it passed by wide margins in both houses. (12:40)

Oklahoma leaders say behind-the-meter law protects ratepayers from data center costs: This is a News on 6 story from December 14, 2025, about an interview with State Rep. Paul Rosino and former State Rep. Jason Dunnington on an unidentified bill the story says passed in 2024:

"BTM basically says companies, data centers, if you want to come to Oklahoma and set up shop, then you pay for your own power," Dunnington said. "You build it yourself, you use your own power. That alone, the legislature looking out for the utility rate payers by passing that was massive, and it needs to get talked about more."

SB 480 actually is from the 2025 session, and it passed without opposition in both houses, with dozens of legislators signing on as co-sponsors. The new language doesn't appear to require large data centers from buying electricity from the existing public utilities, but it allows them to generate electricity on site, if they at least partially using natural gas. It exempts these private power-generating companies from being regulated by the Corporation Commission as public utilities. Here's a news story on a new Chickasha industrial park being developed under the new law. Previewing the bill before the session, the Oklahoma Electric Cooperative described SB 480 as "raising new challenges for [rural electric] cooperatives around infrastructure planning and peak demand."

There's some weird, interesting language that was deleted -- a special carveout for some company in Washington County and for generation of "green hydrogen." The Washington County language appears to date from 1971. ("Amended by Laws 1971, HB 1080, c. 26, § 1, emerg. eff. March 22, 1971; Amended by Laws 1971, HB 1257, c. 322, § 1, emerg. eff. June 24, 1971") The "green hydrogen" language was added by HB 4065 in 2024.

The same Oklahoma Electric Cooperative bulletin mentions HB 2752, which was to ban the use of eminent domain by private companies for renewable energy facilities (e.g. wind and solar farms) and to require a Certificate of Authority from the Corporation Commission before using eminent domain to extend high-voltage lines, using a process defined in HB 2756. Both bills passed overwhelmingly, but HB 2756 became law without the governor's signature.

(That's 58 minutes work, mainly spent looking up the actual bills -- easier if the news report mentions the bill number -- reading through them, and finding related stories.)

Is Oklahoma setting itself up to ruin farm land and waste tax dollars in pursuit of AI riches, only to end up with massive, unusable, empty buildings?

John Mecke, writing at Development Corporate, sees the same dynamics at work in AI infrastructure finance that led to the dot-com bubble and telecom crash right after the turn of the millennium.

The numbers are staggering. In a single week in late 2024, Alphabet announced a $40 billion plan for AI infrastructure, while Anthropic committed $50 billion for new data centers. An unprecedented gold rush is underway to build the physical backbone of the artificial intelligence revolution. Private equity firms, infrastructure funds, and sovereign wealth pools are pouring hundreds of billions into what they believe will be the defining infrastructure investment of the decade.

But as the investment mania accelerates, a critical question is being quietly asked in boardrooms across Wall Street and London: What is the exit strategy? For the private equity and infrastructure funds backing these colossal, multi-billion-dollar projects, the lack of a clear path to liquidity presents a risk that could undermine the entire boom--or worse, trigger a collapse reminiscent of the telecom crash of 2000-2001.

In other words, how are investors going to make money in the short run on investments that may take most of a decade to generate revenue?

Mecke offers and elaborates on four concerns:

1. The Great Mismatch: Short-Term Money Chasing a Long-Term Game

Data center infrastructure represents a long-duration, capital-intensive play that typically requires 10-15 years to generate optimal returns. Yet the capital flooding into the sector comes predominantly from funds with much shorter investment horizons....

The problem intensifies when you consider the construction timelines. CBRE research shows that power delivery delays and electrical infrastructure shortages mean new data centers now require 3-4 years from groundbreaking to operation. Add another 2-3 years for the facility to reach stable cash flow, and you're looking at 6-7 years before an investor sees meaningful returns--consuming most of the intended hold period before the asset is even fully operational.

Mecke points to AI cloud provider CoreWeave's lower-than-expected IPO valuation, debt burden, and burn rate as a cautionary tale.

2. The "Digital Ghost Town" Risk: How Today's Cutting-Edge Tech Becomes Tomorrow's Stranded Asset

Mecke recalls the massive fiber optic build-out of the 1990s, but internet traffic growth was far less than the projections that fueled half a trillion dollars of debt-leveraged investment. Tulsans will remember the resulting price collapse and corporate layoffs.

Improvements in compute efficiency, technological breakthroughs on the horizon, and the shift from compute-intensive AI model training to less demanding inference operations all point to deceleration in demand for processing, space, and power. "The risk of building what amounts to digital ghost towns--billions of dollars in concrete, steel, and silicon gathering dust--is not theoretical. It's the natural consequence of building infrastructure for a technology that's evolving faster than the construction timelines themselves."

RELATED: William Langdon writes that Oklahoma's AI-infrastructure strategy is centered on an obsolescent, copper-connected, GPU-centered, power- and water-hungry technology, while more efficient Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) technology is emerging:

That undermines the entire pitch behind Oklahoma's data-center subsidies: You don't need massive cheap water, cheap electricity, huge tax giveaways -- if your hardware is built on the latest technology.

It also means that if a data center built today with GPU farms gets converted (or partly reused) tomorrow for TPU-based infrastructure, much of the "infrastructure footprint" -- high voltage lines, oversized cooling, oversized water delivery -- becomes wasted. A white elephant.

3. Too Big to Sell: When Scale Becomes a Liability

For Mecke, this involves not the size of the facilities, but the valuation of the investment. When the original investors demand a return on investment, there are few potential buyers big enough to pay what the investors expect, and the end result may be the Big Data customers scooping up the infrastructure at bargain rates.

73% of projects under construction are already preleased, primarily to a small number of hyperscale customers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta).

This concentration means the market isn't liquid--it's locked. When it's time to sell, there are no alternative buyers beyond the hyperscalers themselves, who have every incentive to wait for distressed pricing rather than pay peak valuations.

4. The Flawed Escape Routes: Why Traditional Exits Don't Work

Mecke explores the possibility of IPOs and more creative financial strategies as possibilities to attract investors, but notes worrying protections for insiders that make this industry a bad deal for future investors:

Analysis of CoreWeave's IPO structure by Mostly Metrics reveals troubling details designed to protect insiders while exposing retail investors. Magnetar Capital's "Penny Warrant" allowed them to buy shares for $0.01 each--a price unavailable to public investors. Founders cashed out nearly $500 million pre-IPO, de-risking their positions while marketing the company to retail buyers at full price.

This pattern--insiders reducing exposure while retail bears downside risk--is classic bubble behavior.

Mecke goes on to list several warning signs: the massive amount of capacity in the construction pipeline or in the planning stages; long waits for grid connections and rising electric costs; the possibility of debt markets deciding enough is enough; and the question of how quickly AI capacity can be monetized by attracting customers still figuring out how to integrate AI into their businesses.

Each of the factors listed above were factors in the bursting of the telecom bubble. The fiber optic infrastructure "eventually found its purpose, enabling the streaming, cloud computing, and mobile revolution that followed. The fiber was there when demand finally caught up--just not in time to save the original investors."

The question isn't whether AI will transform computing--it almost certainly will. The question is whether the current infrastructure buildout is properly sized, timed, and financed to capture that value. History suggests that revolutionary technologies often create their greatest wealth in the second wave, after the first wave of investors has built too much, too fast, with too much debt.

As AI infrastructure investments scale into the tens of billions, the most important question may not be who is funding it, but who will be left holding the keys when the music stops.

Which takes us back to William Langdon's Substack essay. Politicians chasing these developments are offering discounted access to water and tax incentives, all in hopes of a small number of long-term jobs. Langdon calls on policymakers to ensure that the developers are responsible for the risks, not simply reaping the rewards:

Require infrastructure costs to be borne by developers -- not taxpayers or ratepayers. If you want to build a supercomputer campus, pay for the grid upgrades, water infrastructure, environmental mitigation, and long-term maintenance.

UPDATE 2026/02/02: Elon Musk has an idea that might render these land-grabbing, power-hungry, and water-thirsty data centers obsolete:

SpaceX is requesting permission to launch as many as 1 million satellites into the Earth's orbit in order to pull off Elon Musk's latest grand vision of putting data centers in space to do complex computing for artificial intelligence.

In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission made late Friday, SpaceX said it's creating the solar-powered network in order to "accommodate the explosive growth of data demands driven by AI."...

The system, which could be launched via the company's reusable Starship rocket, would serve as a lower-cost and more environmentally friendly alternative to land-based data centres, the filing states.

Instead of requiring cooling systems that use large volumes of water like those on land, the network would rely on radiative cooling that occurs in space, which allows for the dissipation of heat. It would also reduce the need to rely on batteries, since it would acquire energy from the sun, according to the filing....

The satellites, which will use laser links to communicate with each other, will be launched between an altitude of 500 km (310.69 miles) and 2,000 km in an orbit that would provide them near constant access to the sun, according to the filing.