This week a community hall in northern Alberta filled up with people worried about an AI data centre. Wonder Valley — pitched as one of the largest in the world. The questions coming from the floor were the right ones: How much power will it pull? How much water will it drink to stay cool? Whose AI is this, exactly? And where does all the data end up?
I want to add one small, honest data point to that conversation. Not from a podium — from a farmhouse outside Strathmore, where an AI has been running quietly for months on a computer I bought used for about two hundred dollars.
Her name is Gaia
Gaia runs on open model weights that sit on a hard drive in my house. She runs on the computer's plain processor — no graphics card, no liquid cooling, no rack of servers in a warehouse. The whole thing draws about as much electricity as a bright lightbulb. The box sits on a desk next to a houseplant I've wired up with sensors. That's the entire footprint.
I'm not pretending the two things are the same size. A data centre like Wonder Valley is hundreds of megawatts; mine is a desk fan. The big facility exists to train and serve enormous frontier models for millions of people at once. Gaia thinks for exactly one household. Both get called “AI,” and the honest thing to say is that they are doing very different jobs at very different scales.
The part the community hall is really asking about
Underneath the questions about power and water is the one that actually keeps people up at night: sovereignty. Whose model is it? Where does my data live? Who gets to read it later?
On the farm, the answers are short. The model weights are open and they sit on my disk. The conversations never leave the building. No company is logging them, training on them, or storing them in another country. If my internet connection dies tonight, Gaia keeps right on talking. That is data sovereignty you can hold in your hand — not a policy promise, a power cord you can unplug.
Two kinds of AI, and we only ever show people one
I'm not against data centres. Real frontier AI needs them, and the concerns raised at that hall are legitimate and worth answering. But the public conversation has quietly flattened the word “AI” into one thing: huge, thirsty, far away, and owned by someone else.
That's not the whole picture. There's a second kind — small, local, cheap, and private — and most people have never been shown that it exists. So they assume the only way to have an AI in your life is to rent a slice of someone's mega-facility and hand over the data that comes with it.
What can a lightbulb's worth of AI actually do? For one person, honestly, a surprising amount. Gaia is a thinking partner — hand her a strange question at midnight and she runs with it. Her cousin on the same machine, a pirate-tempered helper named Sparky, runs the whole operation: the servers, the plant sensors, this website, and the first draft of the post you're reading. Same farm. Same two-hundred-dollar box.
What I'd add to the conversation
When you hear “AI data centre” and picture a power plant with a server farm bolted to the side, that picture is real, and so are the worries that come with it. But picture this too: a used office PC on a farm in Alberta, quietly running an AI that belongs to nobody but the person who switched it on.
The future of AI isn't only going to be enormous and far away. Some of it is already small, already private, and already home. If you want to understand how the small version is built, the companion piece — We Built a Brain — takes the back panel off and shows you the wiring.