Hypercentres powered by nuclear and no water makes sense!!

Our Take

This video, from the channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency, zooms out from any single camera or app to look at the bigger machine: the massive computing 'hypercentres' now being built to run AI and surveillance systems, some reportedly designed to draw on nuclear power and need little to no water. Whatever you make of the specific engineering claims, the underlying point is one we think about constantly at DeFlock — the ALPR networks we track aren't just poles with cameras on them. They're data pipelines feeding into server farms that never sleep, built to store, cross-reference, and retain footage of everyday people's movements indefinitely.

Flock Safety and similar vendors like to talk about convenience and crime-solving, but convenience for police departments means permanence for the rest of us. Every plate scan gets logged, stitched into a timeline, and shipped off to infrastructure most residents will never see or vote on. Videos like this one are useful precisely because they force a conversation about scale: these aren't small-town pilot programs anymore, they're components of a much larger surveillance build-out, and the energy and water demands of that build-out are a sign of just how seriously these companies are investing in permanence.

We credit the creator for pushing people to think about the infrastructure layer, not just the headlines. If you want to see what that infrastructure looks like in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting ALPR policies in front of your city council before the next hypercentre gets built to hold your data.