Owner of ICE detention facility sees big opportunity in AI man camps

monkeydust 90 points 58 comments March 09, 2026
techcrunch.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (17 comments)

mothballed

These man camp style minimal housing seem like a good solution to the housing crisis, but my guess is some bean counter has made it illegal to use these economical SROs for anything other than despotism.

markus_zhang

Is it some sort of the camps in the Terminator movies? /s

vrganj

Work in a camp run by the people that also run concentration camps for undesirables, what a tempting proposition...

iainmerrick

I’d like to recommend Kate Beaton’s book Ducks to get a vivid feel for what these “man camps” are like. That book is about camps attached to oil fields in Alberta, but the “AI camps” described here sound very similar.

gmerc

Feels like one of the solutions to get rid of poor people as a whole? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA011569...

999900000999

Obviously they'll force detainees to build data centers in due time. This is the ultimate dream of Late Stage Capitalism. The vast majority of detainees are non violent, most aren't even 'criminals' aside from overstaying a visa. There's a parallel with California's prison firefighter brigades. In order to pay the merciful State for your own imprisonment, you shall work on the data centers. Oracle demands it. Sure on paper it's a voluntary program, but Oracle as promised better food in exchange for work . It's not completely out of the realm of possibility for a detainees to end up manning these detention facilities as well. You'd be surprised at how many skilled workers, many of which actually have status, end up getting detained anyway.

geremiiah

>AI man camps Anyone who studied Engineering or Computer science already knows what this is like, lol.

OJFord

View from across the globe: > Owner of ICE detention facility [...] Oh, right, of course these things are privately owned..!

Kipters

What kind of dystopian horror is this?

kashunstva

I wonder how long it will take them to link the dots to join their businesses.

Aurornis

They tried to fit a lot of ragebait into this article and headline, but the TL;DR appears to be that this company wants to build temporary housing near construction sites so workers don’t have to commute as far if they don’t want to. The only actually criticism of the temporary housing is that it’s “gray” but they note it has access to a gym. Clicking a link to the other article describing them says they have “free steaks” and access to golf. My cousin works in construction and some times gets job where the money is great but he has to drive 2 hours to the site and 2 hours home or even more. Temporary housing seems like it would be helpful while doing those jobs.

mikkupikku

Flagrant clickbait, flagged. Headline makes it sound like concentration camps with AI wardens, but actually it's just normal temporary housing for construction workers building data centers.

nahuel0x

Arbeit macht frei

dkackman11

Over/under on "all of these 'detainees' are sitting around doing nothing" converging with this?

jollyllama

If it's like fracking, the man-camps will become a hub for trafficking of camp-followers.

adolph

This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil fields. Its kinda weird to not see temporary workforce housing as some recent phenomena, especially given a recent TV show (I havn't watched it) about a particular railroad construction camp. Work that occurs in remote places requires holistic logistics for the workforce, similar to expeditionary warfare. Hell on Wheels is an American Western television series about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States [...] chronicles the Union Pacific Railroad and its laborers, mercenaries, prostitutes, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile encampment, called "Hell on Wheels", that followed the railhead west across the Great Plains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_on_Wheels_(TV_series)

samrus

Saint peter dont you call me cause i cant gooooo I owe my soul to the compary stooooore

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
3,471 stories · 32,344 chunks indexed