LINCOLN, NE—Citing a “critical lack of vertical scale” in current hardware clusters, a coalition of the world’s most powerful technology companies announced Wednesday that they would be liquidating the State of Nebraska to make room for a single, state-sized data center.
The project, which received immediate federal approval under the National Computational Eminence Act, will require the total evacuation of all 1.9 million Nebraskans to allow for the installation of a 77,000-square-mile graphene motherboard.
“When we looked at the geography, it became clear that the presence of people, livestock, and unpaved topsoil was significantly hindering our ability to process petabytes of garbage data at light speed,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking from a podium constructed entirely of repurposed heat sinks.
“By clearing the land of its legacy biological components, we can finally build a server room that doesn’t have to account for things like property lines or human rights,” Altman added.
Beginning Monday, residents of Lincoln and Omaha will be funnelled through “Transition Corridors” on I-80, where they will be processed for relocation. As compensation for the permanent loss of their homes, ancestral land, and statehood, the Consortium confirmed that every displaced Nebraskan will receive a $50 Amazon gift card and a lifetime “Pro-Tier” subscription to a unified suite of AI platforms.
Architectural renderings of the site depict an “Infinite Computational Plane,” a featureless expanse of matte-black server housing. The only breaks in the geometric surface are the “Sector Vents”—cooling fans the size of utility-scale wind turbines. Engineers noted that the combined rotation of the 400,000 fans will generate a permanent, Category-1 Westerly wind across the Great Plains, ensuring that any residual heat is pushed directly into Iowa.
A 3D architectural visualization of the Infinite Computational Plane. Massive, industrial cooling fans resembling solid black turbines spin under a hazy, heat-shimmered sky.
Visualizing the ‘Data-State’ project: AXIS & VOID’s winning bid for the tri-state cooling cluster. Thorne’s firm successfully argued that replacing the existing state with a ‘tectonic slab of pure compute’ was a necessary evolution of the local landscape’s ‘negative potential.’
“I’ve lived here for forty years, but the tech guys made a very compelling point about how my living room was occupying the exact GPS coordinates needed for a tier-three cooling stack,” said local resident Arthur Vance, while watching a fleet of autonomous bulldozers flatten his neighborhood to make way for the first mile of air intake ducting.
“They said my sacrifice would help a chatbot write a better haiku about a cat, and frankly, I didn’t have a rebuttal for that,” Vance continued, staring at a voucher for his lifetime AI subscriptions. “The best part is, whenever I feel homesick, I can just ask the AI to describe what Nebraska used to look like. It usually hallucinates a few extra mountains and some palm trees, but it’s still nice to know the compute power for those hallucinations is being generated right where my kitchen used to be.”
The Consortium confirmed that while the physical state of Nebraska will cease to exist, its name will be preserved as the “NE-1 Virtual Workspace” on Google Maps, though users are cautioned that zooming in will reveal nothing but a flat, grey expanse of high-tensile carbon.
At press time, the governors of Iowa and Kansas were reportedly engaged in a bidding war to see which of their states could be paved over next.
Hilarious, and perhaps not as tongue in cheek as we might hope.