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Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country
- jayknight 5mo agoDirect Link: https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/ https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/
- canyp 5mo agoHow isn't this the actual link in the post? Have to go through all these loops and hoops and the post doesn't even link to the source from what I can tell.
- engineer_22 5mo agothe money being talked about is so large that eventually the lobbyists will get their checks and the politicians will pass laws forbidding local scrutiny of data centers
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bombcar 5mo agoMuch of the money is funny and doesn’t actually exist (yet).
- sometimelurker 5mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249747
- engineer_22 5mo ago[flagged]
- weaksauce 5mo agowhat's funny is the website looks AI generated though that's just the style of the time i guess.
- Papazsazsa 5mo ago[flagged]
- Aurornis 5mo ago> I also think Americans have the right to decide what happens in their neighborhoods. I agree with this. At the same time, all of the data center proposals in my state are in remote locations nowhere near any residences. They’re still the target of protests.
- didgetmaster 5mo agoJust because a data center is way outside your neighborhood; doesn't mean it can't have a direct impact on you personally. Electrical and water resources used can affect your utility bills. But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.
- zhivota 5mo agoI don't know that local control is an unalloyed good. The interstate highway system would never have been built if we followed this as a principle, for example. For another example, Californian voters consistently vote for state level increases in housing, yet locally consistently vote against increasing housing in their community. At some point national and state level goals must supercede local control if progress is to ever be made.
- Papazsazsa 5mo agoThe Federal-Aid Highway Act was built with local consent in most places, and modified by local control where consent failed. Also there's no evidence that more data centers = "progress".
- tqi 5mo ago"...investigating data centers is quickly becoming its own beat" ie it is in the economic interest of the writers to tap into (and foment) the FUD around "data centers."
- ai_critic 5mo agoc'mon now it's not nice to say mean things about ed zitron like that
- ares623 5mo agoThey should just make the entirety of Silicon Valley as a mega data center.
- regularization 5mo agoThat data centers are burning fossil fuels and burning up the earth is not FUD.
- ViktorRay 5mo agoI saw a comment from another site that a lot of the data center locations on this map aren’t accurate. Is there any truth to that?
- NDlurker 5mo agoI looked around North Dakota and there are several that say community reported. Pretty sure those either don't exist or aren't significant in size if they do exist.
- shagie 5mo agoThey're possibly bitcoin mines. https://www.governor.nd.gov/news/burgum-one-worlds-largest-data-centers-locate-williston-area-industry-targets-growth-nd https://www.governor.nd.gov/news/burgum-one-worlds-largest-d... > WILLISTON, N.D. – Gov. Doug Burgum today announced the construction of one of the largest data centers in the world near Williston as North Dakota continues to emerge as a hub for high-performance computing, including cryptocurrency mining. > The Atlas Power Data Center being built by FX Solutions Inc. is part of a $1.9 billion, multiyear project that will require more than 100 workers during the two-year construction period and create more than 30 permanent jobs, according to Richard Tabish, president of Missoula, Mont.-based FX Solutions. Atlas Power, an operator of high-density facilities serving cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing utilizing alternative power generation, will own and operate the data center following its completion. > ... > The first phase of the project will consist of 16 buildings, each 350 feet long by 30 feet wide, to house tens of thousands of servers that will conduct high-performance computing using 240 megawatts of electricity. Phases 2 and 3 call for expanding to 500 megawatts and then 700 megawatts, adding additional buildings and servers. And later... https://kfgo.com/2023/06/25/williams-co-residents-frustrated-by-noise-from-lack-of-action-on-crypto-mine/ https://kfgo.com/2023/06/25/williams-co-residents-frustrated... > WILLISTON, N.D. (KFGO) – Residents west of Williston were hopeful for a few hours on Tuesday, June 20, after the Williams County Commission voted unanimously to instruct the local power co-op to shut off electricity in a portion of a local cryptocurrency mine. But Corey Seidel said he knew the effort had failed by nightfall, when the servers were still operating at their usual levels.
- 5mo ago
- efnx 5mo agoIt’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?
- altairprime 5mo agoAre privately-held datacenters counted? Like, prssumably chipmakers have a few of their own in their home regions..?
- jagged-chisel 5mo ago“Privately-held”? I don’t think governments are building them.
- DANmode 5mo agoCompanies that aren’t publicly traded, is another way to say that.
- cheschire 5mo agoThe US government has a lot. Just one random Google result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- altairprime 5mo agoAs opposed to “government”, though I suppose also as opposed to “DaaS” businesses.
- stock_toaster 5mo agoSeems under-reported to me (as far as PDX goes). For reference: https://www.datacenterjournal.com/data-centers/oregon/portland/ https://www.datacenterjournal.com/data-centers/oregon/portla...
- doodlebugging 5mo ago
- ada1981 5mo ago[flagged]
- doctorpangloss 5mo ago[flagged]
- wuyunhuo 5mo agoAI is good, but the impact of data centers on the environment cannot be ignored. Over a longer time scale, AI is just one wave, while the environment will take much longer to recover.
- doctorpangloss 5mo agoIt seems pretty insincere of a complaint, when in those communities, 100x more land and water is used for farming, just because farming is a heritage, no?
- NikolaNovak 5mo ago* if that's a sarcastic / troll comment, congratulations, you got me but good :-) * if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
- fc417fc802 5mo agoI purchase surplus xeons on ebay, grind them into powder, and mix them into my milkshakes. If you aren't going that route then the real question here is what you're supplementing with to get the necessary computational boost. I'm aware of the complaints that surplus gear has a lower overall nutritional value but you'll see that it's highly cost effective if you can just be bothered to do the math. Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
- kennywinker 5mo agoAh yes. If you don’t buy during the surge you’ll have to pay the price later when costs have come down. Makes sense.
- tiffanyh 5mo agoWhy go through the effort when such work has already been done? https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/ https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/ Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 5mo agoGiving equal weight to real data centers and 1000sqft telco switches on this map is sort of misleading.
- rcpt 5mo agoNeither have much impact on the local area so equal weight makes sense
- robwwilliams 5mo agoLiving downwind of Colossus I and Colossus II in Memphis has orders of magnitude more weight than even a convention large data center. On par with a large cargo airport like MEM (FedEx hub).
- jpster 5mo agoWhat does “has more weight” mean in this context?
- pchristensen 5mo agoImpact and externalities.
- rcpt 5mo agoSuch as
- ETH_start 5mo agoAI compute is a major emerging export industry that the U.S. could become the global leader in. Strong First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control also make the U.S. uniquely well-suited for AI, unlike, let's say, manufacturing, where authoritarian states seem to have an advantage.
- btbuildem 5mo ago> First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control In what fairytale land does this describe the US today?
- brightball 5mo agoDescribes the US since founding. It’s the Constitution.
- ETH_start 5mo agoThe U.S. has much stronger free speech protections than any peer. Have you seen the speech (chat) control laws being instituted in Europe in the last few years?
- 866-RON-0-FEZ 5mo ago[flagged]
- kennywinker 5mo agoKeep kind lud’s name out your damn mouth. Failure to understand history, doomed to repeat. > I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 They of course call them “hyperscalers” because they’re the same size as all the other things. /s
- esikich 5mo agoThey do. All of my friends are non-tech and I've given up trying to explain any of this. The average person just does not understand how "the internet" gets into their phones, what makes a website tick, how their iPictures get backed up, etc. It's all magic. If they haven't had a lifetime of at least a passing interest/curiosity in tech, all of my explanations sound like bullshit. Watch their eyes glaze over as you try to explain how Netflix uses CDNs or how their catering website is a VM in AWS. It's just too fucking abstract coming from 0 tech knowledge, which is where the average person is. It's really sad how rabid people have gotten over this. When I was a kid in the 80s I was excited at the progress of PCs and thought how cool will it be when everyone can compute! We will be so empowered! It seems the exact opposite happened and no one knows or appreciates how any of it works. "I just want to consume digital content, use it in all aspects of my life, and also fuck data centers! I want this awesome digital life but I don't want those jobs in my state!" I feel bad because a data center was just rammed through in a city near me and I thought "good, the people protesting this shit don't know what they're talking about anyway." There's a lot of current issues where I honestly think the public has no business chiming in on because they don't have the expertise to have an opinion on it anyway, which feels gross to me, but here we are.
- ronnier 5mo agoThere’s lots of anti ai and anti tech coming from hn and in general lately. I guess this is start of the hit list.
- jason_oster 5mo agoReference Cipolla's basic laws of human stupidity. The commenters are genuinely unaware of how they are harming others and themselves.
- falsaberN1 5mo agoPeople have gotten so intense with the anti-AI sentiment that I hope this doesn't end up guiding people to places where they can exercise violence "for a just cause".
- noosphr 5mo ago[flagged]
- Aurornis 5mo agoThat’s not violence. The word “violence” doesn’t mean anything you don’t like. I don’t understand why some people want to call everything violence. Watering down the meaning of a word doesn’t help anything.
- noosphr 5mo agoKilling you slowly is very much violence.
- fc417fc802 5mo agoTIL that the air I breath is committing violence against me.
- pesus 5mo agoIf it's being poisoned, the people poisoning it sure are.
- Aurornis 5mo agoThat is also not violence. I think you should look up the dictionary definition of violence, because none of your usages of the word match the definition.
- noosphr 5mo ago
- AuthAuth 5mo agoThis datacenter stuff is such populist brainrot.
- october8140 5mo agoI take it you don't live next to a data center.
- pesus 5mo agoIt does seem most of the pro-AI people aren't actually affected by any of the negative aspects of it. It's a lot easier to be in favor of something that doesn't actually affect you or anyone you care about.
- rcpt 5mo agoMost everybody isn't affected by data center build outs.
- pesus 5mo agoMaybe not, but the people near them sure are. And the majority of people are definitely impacted by the downstream effects.
- rcpt 5mo agoThey really aren't.
- pesus 5mo agoVery well thought out argument, I'm sure spamming it some more will really convince people. You're telling me people aren't affected by AI in any way whatsoever? That's a very bold and obviously untrue claim. No wonder people don't trust AI sycophants, you can't even keep your story straight.
- luxuryballs 5mo agoI don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.
- fc417fc802 5mo agoNobody is complaining about the acreage used. The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. If they were just purchasing 100 acre lots of land and letting it sit vacant I don't think anyone would really care for the most part.
- Gormo 5mo ago> The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. That seems a bit bizarre, since people opening new facilities are usually responsible for paying for their inputs with their own funds -- if merely increasing demand for power or water is itself generating externalities, that implies that there's a much more fundamental economic problem that needs to be resolved.
- luxuryballs 5mo agothe one gripe I do have is with the power companies in one state building new infrastructure for a neighboring state to pipe power out for data centers but then raises rates on the locals to fund it, something def needs to be done about that
- Gormo 5mo agoAgreed. I don't know whether that's a significant problem, though, or if it's being overblown in the media, given that most states already have oversight mechanisms for utility pricing from monopoly service providers. Where I live, for example, consumer rate increases above a certain level have to be validated by the state's Public Service Commission.
- thiagoperes 5mo agoIt's poetically beautiful that the tool was very very clearly built mostly if not entirely using AI
- thefourthchime 5mo agoA lot of the copy also looks like AI. The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
- shantnutiwari 5mo ago"The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. " Not this shit again. Someone writes in clean English, people on HN are like iT muST bE Ai caUSe NoONe wouLD wrITe lIKE tHAt
- WatchDog 5mo agoIt might be, I'm not sure. The code is interesting though, it's not minified, it's very readable, and nicely indented with lots of comments. The curated data center list is just some inline JSON. The javascript uses var instead of let or const, I'm not sure if this is just style choice, or there is some code post processing. It doesn't use react, AI seems to almost always opt for react for front end design, unless told otherwise.
- eleventen 5mo ago[flagged]
- WatchDog 5mo agoI think it's absurd to pretend like you can know how a stranger thinks. If I had to predict either way, I would guess that it is significantly AI generated, but that isn't the same thing as being sure. Almost every link submitted to HN has a comment about the content being AI generated, many of which are not, I would rather talk about the "tells" rather than make confident assertions that I can't prove.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoOpposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?
- fc417fc802 5mo agoNo one is stopping them from building out their own renewables and if they were doing that while also _fully_ accounting for water usage and any other externalities I don't think there would be much (if any) opposition to them. But that's really expensive so they (by and large) aren't doing that so there's opposition. Seems normal and expected to me.
- bowmore 5mo ago[dead]
- hunterpayne 5mo agoThen it will be nuclear or natural gas then. Probably natural gas. We price it as a waste product in the US anyway. Should be nuclear but the same type of ill-informed people will be protesting the NPP too.
- Gormo 5mo agoIf water usage is an externality, there's some other and more fundamental problem going on, since under normal circumstances, users of infrastructure are expected to pay for what they are consuming. Opposing data centers themselves, rather than whatever is going on that's artificially turning them into uncompensated externalities, makes little sense.
- kennywinker 5mo ago> We need as many data centers as possible Why? So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware? The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing. Jobs aren’t a left-right thing.
- Papazsazsa 5mo agoI love this. Yeah there's some FUD out there about water usage and whatnot, but using the internet to spread actual awareness about local concerns is a fine demonstration of free speech at work. If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
- delichon 5mo agoUnfortunately Sturgeon's Law predates AI.
- Papazsazsa 5mo agoSturgeon's Law measures ratio, not volume :\
- tptacek 5mo agoThe Erin Brockovich page itself repeats the canard, on the front page, that these sites endanger ecosystems with their water consumption.
- kennywinker 5mo agoBecause they do.
- BenFranklin100 5mo agoNot inherently they don’t.
- kennywinker 5mo agoSure, but we don’t live in theory, we live in reality. Here in reality, they usually do.
- alterom 5mo agoInherently, they don't. The way they are operated, they do.
- cryptoegorophy 5mo agoIf water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage in comparison if we measure in per person consumption
- jmye 5mo agoIs this a serious comment? No one, in an environmental discussion, ignores how much water beef needs. It’s a central part of most vegan/vegetarian commentary. But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.
- 5mo ago
- mannanj 5mo agois there one to store bunker locations?
- didgetmaster 5mo agoWhat makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
- pishpash 5mo agoDifferent I/O, power and cooling requirements for majority GPU workloads?
- didgetmaster 5mo agoGPUs have been in high demand since cryptocurrency became a thing? Are you saying that something built for AI can't be used for other workloads?
- pishpash 5mo agoDid crypto workload ever take over an entire data center?
- rcpt 5mo agoBitcoin Mining is 138–205 TWh annually. Surely that's more than a few data centers.
- shagie 5mo agoYes. https://www.riotplatforms.com/bitcoin-mining/corsicana/ https://www.riotplatforms.com/bitcoin-mining/corsicana/ > Riot Platforms has initiated a large-scale, 1 gigawatt development to expand its Bitcoin mining and hosting capabilities in Navarro County, Texas with its new Corsicana Facility. > Development of the Corsicana Facility has begun with an initial 400 megawatts of capacity on a 265-acre site. The substation was energized in April 2024 and mining operations have begun. https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/archive/2022/aug/crypto-tx.php https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/archive/2... > In 2008, the city of Rockdale lost about 80 percent of its workforce following the closure of the Alcoa steel plant. Today, the old Alcoa plant is occupied by Riot Blockchain’s Whinstone facility, believed to be the largest single Bitcoin mining operation in North America. As an industry that relies on high levels of electricity, the company was drawn to the facility due to its existing power infrastructure, including valuable high-voltage transmission lines and large substations.
- Razengan 5mo agoIs there a map of munitions plants and spy centers and other facilities whose sole purpose is to active oppress, harm and outright kill people? Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
- kennywinker 5mo agoFalse equivalencies, you can be against ai and imperialism and ads. Go make those maps if you think they’re problems, otherwise you’re just shutting someone down for caring about something that impacts them but you don’t care about
- Razengan 5mo agoIt's odd that we don't see this kind of ra.. resistance against much worse evils that have been objectively fucking everyone up for far far longer.
- kennywinker 5mo agoobjectively, this is a new thing. And new things mean you have a chance to stop them before they’re normal
- pesus 5mo agoCan you be more specific? There has been opposition against most things. AI is also the new thing currently being forced on basically every person and upending society. It shouldn't be surprising it's on the forefront of people's minds or that they might want to try to prevent it.
- xnx 5mo agoDo real people genuinely care about this more than CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) (for example)?
- kennywinker 5mo agoI can eat animals off a feedlot. I can’t eat anything that comes out of an ai data center. Why are you ok with spending $100 on groceries but not $100 on poison?
- nickpp 5mo agoSoftware running modern farming runs in datacenters. For example, AI checking images from drones monitoring health of crops, then directing drones with treatment. Software ate the world, now the world eats software.
- kennywinker 5mo agoNah. Not buying it. Nobody needs ai checking or drone-based pesticide dispersal. Sure maybe those tech are used here and there, but not widespread enough to say that I am eating stuff that only exists because of datacenters that haven’t been built yet. In top of that you can run all the image processing you need on a $500 consumer GPU, and afaik crop dusting drones are human operated for the most part
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ioadk 5mo agoI started a project similar to this early this year [1] when I got frustrated with the lack of decent free resources documenting data centre build out. The plan was to focus on AI build out specifically, the ones costing billions and the recipients of all the Nvidia chips rather than the boring 'normal' datacenters. I also wanted to add useful and accurate tools on things like local noise, water or grid impact. In addition to actually monitoring progress via satellite imagery and building a basic graph model for filling in missing attributes. The reason why I stopped was that I significantly underestimated the effort required to complete such a project to the standards that I wanted to. As you can probably tell the site itself is AI assisted but all of the information was collected by hand which just takes time that I no longer had (~30 mins per site). The only way this would have made sense was as research project or something which sadly didn't line up. [1] https://investigationsofadifferentkind.com/ https://investigationsofadifferentkind.com/
- Escapade5160 5mo agoBen Jordan did a fantastic piece on how harmful data centers are to the people living near them.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo agoit's a mind boggling delusion to believe that fighting data centers will defeat proliferation of AI. they'll just be built in Romania instead, or maybe even in Russia after the war - electricity and water are borderline free there. there is almost no reason to build them in the US even without this luddite bullshit.
- kleton 5mo agoIt's amazing how Karen Hao's (Empire of AI) confusion of cubic meters with liters of water for datacenters continues to get amplified, even after this error was publicly revealed.
- twoodfin 5mo agoWelcome to the memetic discourse! Something like 20 years on we’re still hearing that “most” bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, even though that study (authored in part by Elizabeth Warren of all things!) was methodological nonsense.
- sio8ohPi 5mo agoIt's very weird that what was once a site about technology and entrepreneurship has come to hate both.
- hokkos 5mo agoAnd its own map is obviously vibe coded (each Key Concerns box raises when hovered).
- Markoff 5mo agoTIL Erin Brockovich is still alive and only 65 (born 1960), she got famous pretty young in 1993 (33yo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich
- grunkolsky 5mo ago[dead]
- protocolture 5mo agoGod I hope this idiocy stays within the United States. I have heard some rumblings about a protest against a local equinix expansion. I just cant tolerate living on a planet with this level of instant, reactive stupidity to the latest trendy thing to hate.
- andyreagan 5mo agoI'm not sure why but my reaction to this is pretty negative. This page must be hosted from a data center as well...they could add a star to the map for their own hosting? How much electricity does their site use, etc? I've seen counters like this before, I think, about the electricity a site uses based on the weight of the page, etc.
- valbaca 5mo ago"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent" "...you said on an iPhone. Heh. Gotcha."
- andyreagan 5mo agoFair enough, not a rational response on my part
- scarab92 5mo agoI don’t care about the hypocrisy as much as the entire anti-datacenter Luddite movement being based on anti-intellectualism to begin with. Datacenters provide very high utility with very low per capita externalities. There’s really no reason to care this much about them.
- andyreagan 5mo agoPerhaps comparing the anti-datacenter sentiment with the Luddite movement is being unfair to the Luddites (the more I read about the actual movement).