First, the infamous “put glue on pizza” incident happened in May 2024, when Google rolled out its AI Overviews feature. The feature used Gemini, but the incident wasn’t some demonstration of what a $50 billion AI data center does. Google AI Overviews pulled information from the web, including a years-old sarcastic Reddit comment about putting Elmer’s glue on pizza—and presented it as legitimate advice. Google subsequently acknowledged the problem and changed the system.
Second, a $500 million public-transit project and a $50 billion AI data-center investment aren’t alternatives to one another. They’re different projects, funded through different mechanisms, involving different entities, serving completely different purposes, and subject to completely different economic and political considerations.
Saying “they spent $50 billion on AI instead of $500 million on public transportation” is like saying “the government bought a $50 billion aircraft carrier instead of building a $500 million bridge.” The existence of one expenditure does not demonstrate that the other was rejected because of it.
And finally, the claim that an AI data center will “make the quality of life worse for everyone living there” is simply asserted rather than demonstrated. There can absolutely be legitimate arguments about the environmental, electrical-grid, water, tax, and infrastructure impacts of large data centers. Those are worth debating. But “AI bad, therefore public transportation good, therefore this $50 billion project is why we don’t have the transportation project” isn’t an argument. It’s a meme wearing a hat pretending to be an economic analysis.
The pizza-glue incident is also almost completely irrelevant. It was a Google AI search failure from 2024. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a particular AI data center should be built in 2026.
You can oppose a particular data-center project. You can support public transportation. You can criticize AI’s environmental costs. But none of those positions become more intellectually defensible by pretending they’re connected to Google’s pizza-glue hallucination.
This meme is nonsense.
First, the infamous “put glue on pizza” incident happened in May 2024, when Google rolled out its AI Overviews feature. The feature used Gemini, but the incident wasn’t some demonstration of what a $50 billion AI data center does. Google AI Overviews pulled information from the web, including a years-old sarcastic Reddit comment about putting Elmer’s glue on pizza—and presented it as legitimate advice. Google subsequently acknowledged the problem and changed the system.
Second, a $500 million public-transit project and a $50 billion AI data-center investment aren’t alternatives to one another. They’re different projects, funded through different mechanisms, involving different entities, serving completely different purposes, and subject to completely different economic and political considerations.
Saying “they spent $50 billion on AI instead of $500 million on public transportation” is like saying “the government bought a $50 billion aircraft carrier instead of building a $500 million bridge.” The existence of one expenditure does not demonstrate that the other was rejected because of it.
And finally, the claim that an AI data center will “make the quality of life worse for everyone living there” is simply asserted rather than demonstrated. There can absolutely be legitimate arguments about the environmental, electrical-grid, water, tax, and infrastructure impacts of large data centers. Those are worth debating. But “AI bad, therefore public transportation good, therefore this $50 billion project is why we don’t have the transportation project” isn’t an argument. It’s a meme wearing a hat pretending to be an economic analysis.
The pizza-glue incident is also almost completely irrelevant. It was a Google AI search failure from 2024. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a particular AI data center should be built in 2026.
You can oppose a particular data-center project. You can support public transportation. You can criticize AI’s environmental costs. But none of those positions become more intellectually defensible by pretending they’re connected to Google’s pizza-glue hallucination.