8 ms·

Americans don't know how to fight AI so they're fighting data centers

122 points by stalfosknight 4mo ago

AngryData 4mo ago
You know what the largest cost of any goods are? The energy cost. You know what these datacenters are demanding massive amounts of? Energy. Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. But I can't afford to tack on 30% more costs onto ever material object I need as someone not earning 6 figures doing tech work. There is a reason the US doesn't process tons of aluminum or supply the world with fertilizer, we don't have all that cheap of energy. Go to Canada and build a hydroplant, or build a solar field. And that is before we get into the fact that many people think the LLM boom is a massive crash waiting to happen when it inevitably doesn't change the world overnight to justify the trillions in investments.
- tomrod 4mo ago
  > Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. Hear hear. LLMs can generate a lot of great value. But the pouring of resources like gasoline on a wildfire is dumb. Continuing the analogy, fire is great when controlled and terrible when let loose without regard for impact. I think a Doctorow-style setup of domain-specific AI and edge compute are where real value with AI will exist in ways our grandchildren may enjoy -- and it happens to be antithetical to the ridiculous overvaluation we in the "hyperscalers" (which seem to just want to pump and dump the market by extracting cash from US 401ks via indexes and IPOs).
- headcanon 4mo ago
  I would definitely agree that data center investments would need to be coupled with energy investments. If this could act as a catalyst for more (sustainable) energy production that would be a net win for all IMO.
t_sawyer 4mo ago
This is paywalled. Without reading the article, I don't think Americans are fighting data centers because of AI. I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.
- forinti 4mo ago
  Exactly. There are many costs associated with data centers regardless of the type of data processing they do.
- add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
  The term "data center" was not even in the typical person's consciousness before the current AI era.
- jsrozner 4mo ago
  https://archive.ph/DqPNZ https://archive.ph/DqPNZ
phendrenad2 4mo ago
I realized that the belief that datacenters are bad for the water supply (either evaporating it or polluting it) is weaponized self-delusion. People don't care if it's true or not, because it gives people a way to fight back against (perceived) AI job losses.
everdrive 4mo ago
Well realistically both are bad. Right now our government is purely dysfunctional, so I'm not sure anyone knows how to fight anything. We have a eunuch Congress, and in response each party just tries to push executive power as far as possible, never once considering that someone they dislike could get elected in the future and use that expanded power in a negative way. I'm sure that right at this moment at least some people are thinking "if only we had a different executive, then we could rein in this AI problem." That is wrong at best. You could rein it in for ~4 years until you lost the next election. With a completely feckless Congress, very little can get done.
- sailfast 4mo ago
  We do not have a eunuch congress - but we do have a Congress that believes their balls have been removed despite being there the whole time. This is a solvable problem, happily. It does, however, require some will and for folks to remember they actually have some power as elected representatives to the highest legislative body in the land.
  - LightBug1 4mo ago
    Remember? ... Memories have a price. Nothing's changing any time soon while the elected represent money, and paid-for interests. Of the dollar, by the dollar, for the dollar ...
  - sheikhnbake 4mo ago
    The only power congress theoretically has to impact the administration is that of the purse. But the admin has repeatedly ignored such restrictions. This check on power also loses it's teeth when the oligarchs align themselves behind the executive branch.
    - xnx 4mo ago
      They can also impeach
      - 4mo ago
verdverm 4mo ago
The politics of anti-* is tiring. Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision? The issues with data centers are manageable. It's quite hard to bring X back to America if Americans oppose the buildings we need (factories, power gen, data centers). I wonder how much of this is the powerful and adversarial poisoning the discourse so America continues to stumble and fall from hegemony?
- mcmcmc 4mo ago
  The US has always had reactionaries, especially around topics construed as existential threats
- 8note 4mo ago
  > The issues with data centers are manageable. are they? whats been done to solve the infrasound pollution? governments haven't even managed to get datacenters to follow clean air regulation
  - verdverm 4mo ago
    Yes, a few issues / approaches, largely around politics and regulation. The discourse mainly focuses around the bad cases and extrapolates to all data centers (incorrectly). I run our company workloads in a data center that is 95% renewables (mainly wind). 1. About 25% of data centers use close water cycle systems [1]. This could be part of the approval process. It costs more, but these companies are flush with cash. 2. Where they go matters for water table impact and energy generation mix, both geographically and per zoning laws. There are good and bad places to put data centers. 3. Energy shouldn't be a problem, but we have under/mis-invested. A world with limitless energy is possible, what happened to that vision for massive renewables to realize that? 4. A responsive government is required, which seems to be what is happening (as evidenced by the significant pushback). We should be more reasonable (the middle path), but that seems not within the politics of our times. [1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961 https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
    - 4mo ago
snek_case 4mo ago
I think people are also literally fighting datacenters. As others have said the increase in energy costs is a problem for the average person. Not only is AI potentially competing for your job, it's also competing for your access to energy to power your home or your vehicle. Energy costs also affect the price you pay for basically every good and service. Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?
- morley 4mo ago
  Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.) If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.
- mjr00 4mo ago
  > Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay? Sure but you can say this about everything. Where are the protests about the wine industry in California? 500,000 acres of land for vineyards, far more water used for growing grapes than cooling data centers, all so a handful of people can make fortunes selling empty calories to the rich? If you want to focus purely on utilitarian "optimal land use for essentials only" arguments there's way worse offenders than datacenters, the anti-DC sentiment is purely part of the anti-AI wave.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - runtime_terror 4mo ago
    Please, tell how much energy an equal sized vineyard uses compared to a data center?
krunger 4mo ago
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superkuh 4mo ago
AI the technology isn't the problem. It's just a tool like anything else. Corporate persons as legal persons and the shielding of the people within that corporation from the consequences of their crimes and malicious actions are the problem. The ability to control elections by dumping unlimited amounts of money is a problem. We need states to change their articles of incorporation to make them accountable. We need states to start revoking corporate charters. Hawaii is leading the way on this. Of course this doesn't help that much when most corporations incorporate in states which are already co-opted and controlled totally by these non-human persons; like Delaware, which is now even given corporations the right to vote in state and local elections.
- runtime_terror 4mo ago
  This is why we have a federal government. Too bad it's been gutted by decades of neoliberalism and corporate lobbying
jmyeet 4mo ago
No, it's not a proxy fight about AI. The data centers are just bad, for several, easy-to-explain reasons: 1. They get massive tax breaks; 2. Everyone else pays for the electricity infrastructure that they need to suppor tthem; 3. They pollute water supplies; 4. Everybody's electricity prices go up while the DC has a sweetheart deal that, again, everyone else is paying for; 5. There are no jobs unlike, say, if someone used that same money to buuild an auto plant; and 6. They tend to very far noiser than you might think, such that they probably violate noise ordinances when built near residential property but nobody enforces that. We have industrial areas for this reason but that zoning just gets completely ignored. AI is a whole separate debate. That one, too, is pretty simple. AI is selling labor displacement and wage suppression. That's the only product. Getting rid of the data centers won't get rid of that. The DCs are just going where it's cheapest, where local officials don't have the resources to fight it and where people can be bullied or bribed into approving it. Move them somewhere else slightly more expensive and it'll still be displacing labor.
- causal 4mo ago
  It's also absurd how few jobs or income they provide to the community that is expected to host htem
- mattas 4mo ago
  In theory, let's say that a data center was proposed that: 1. got no tax breaks 2. self-generated electricity with greenest of green generation 3. did not pollute water supplies 4. made electricity prices go down somehow 5. (can't figure out a theoretical version where there are lots of jobs, sorry) 6. was extremely quiet Would people still be mad about them? I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. Or if it's really more about "AI bad."
  - Ensorceled 4mo ago
    > I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. The list is long and includes things like people not being able to afford AC anymore; why are you trying to figure this out?
hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
This article is bullshit. It downplays the real, valid concerns people have about data centers themselves as more "ahh, poor uniformed populace" BS: 1. Electricity costs in Maryland jumped 89% over the past year, much more than anywhere else, largely due to an AWS data center expansion: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-electricity-prices-jumped-the-most-in-america/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-electricity-pr... 2. At their heart, data centers are extractive. Their boosters always overstate the jobs they will create, but they basically take land and resources from one place and create the vast majority of the wealth somewhere else. They are giant windowless boxes, they don't support their community in any way, and in fact with AI they basically add to more job destruction in their communities. While I agree that some downsides of AI are overstated (like water usage), this whole article smacks of paternalistic "the peons just don't understand what's really going on" nonsense. The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works.
- sailfast 4mo ago
  This. 100% this. Data centers drive up our energy costs and are external to the local economy for the most part. Blocking them should be a priority until rates are negotiated with your G&T / major provider (PJM and FERC in Maryland and many other states) RE blaming the peon reader: you’re talking about Vox so that is expected unfortunately.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  I think a lot of the cost increases come from utilities being in bed with government and both going "aha we've found our scapegoat" more than the demands of the data centers themselves. But yes this article is absolutely the "usual sort" of paternalistic garbage.
- andsoitis 4mo ago
  > The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works. The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally. It should be noted that modern globalization (post 1945), with Bretton Woods, GATT/WTO, container shipping, and eventually the internet creating the integrated global economy we have today, is but the latest milestone in a long history. Industrial wave of 1829 - 1914 radically reduced the cost of moving goods and information. The first globalization happened 1490s - 1800s, when Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 route to India created the first truly intercontinental trade and migration networks, linking the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe for the first time.
3sk_ask8 4mo ago
"Yet widespread cynicism about AI, I think, doesn’t stem from any inherent property of the technology itself, but rather from our politics." No, AI is partly rejected as mind numbing, it produces SEO slop, it produces bad code, it steals IP. Is this author living under a rock? She then proceeds to parrot the industry that we'll have arrangements that go in the direction of UBI. This whole article sounds like a trojan horse for Vox readers to distract them from the real issues. EDIT: The pre-IPO downvotes get aggressive again. Mentioning how the press works is strictly forbidden.
raincole 4mo ago
At the end it's a facility that costs the locals and benefits non-locals. Even if AI is the truly greatest productivity booster, the benefits are still distributed over all its customers, and the environmental impacts are mostly local. It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.
- pantsforbirds 4mo ago
  Except datacenters are actually very low environmental impact. As long as they provide their own power, they have MUCH lower impact than most farms would.
  - cratermoon 4mo ago
    But the farms! is the new but her emails!
    - nancyminusone 4mo ago
      Even unprofitable farms can produce edible food. A datacenter is a machine that uses electricity to make heat and no other physical prouducts. That's a tough justification to make to people who live near one.
      - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
        I really dont get this. The US is nowhere close to facing a food shortage. If all the desert farms in the west closed beef and a few vegetables would get a tiny bit more expensive. People act like if we didnt do destructive desert farming we'd have to implement rationing.
        nemomarx 4mo ago
        Food prices rising has been a political hot topic for the last few years. Voters would have your head for any obvious action that made beef get more expensive, especially NIMBY groups and current ranchers.
ath3nd 4mo ago
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jsrozner 4mo ago
> How can technology be used to make our society freer and more equal, and to augment human agency rather than diminish it? The past 20 years of surveillance capitalism and the general deployment of technology against consumers should make everyone question whether this could ever be possible.
- yoyohello13 4mo ago
  Yeah whenever I hear someone say this I can’t help but think they are delusional. Like, have you looked around? What rational person could possibly believe this tech will lead to MORE freedom.
hackeraccount 4mo ago
Isn't "data centers are using all the electricity" the same as "we're not pricing electricity correctly"? Instead of a ban just make sure they pay what's needed to keep capacity where it needs to be.
- everdrive 4mo ago
  On this note, I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs. Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure? If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?
  - john_strinlai 4mo ago
    >I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs electrical supply is not infinite. datacenters have high electrical demand. more demand + same supply = increase prices. >Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure? the problem is that added infrastructure is not built instantaneously. it lags behind. so costs will be high until more supply-side infrastructure is in place. i agree that there should be some sort of stipulation that when you build your mega datacenter that you also have to build out electrical infrastructure at the same time. but unfortunately, that is not how it is.
    - everdrive 4mo ago
      Thanks, that's really useful. I guess in my head I had the impression that costs could potentially be static. eg: if you had 10 customers total, each needed to pay $1 to generate electricity to serve their needs. So when you scale up to 100 customers, you can still have everyone pay $1 and come out to the same place. I totally get the general principle that not everything scales linearly like that. But, I also know very little about electricity generation, so I have no idea where the breakpoints are. (I would also guess that if the demand dips low enough, there could be a case where after decreasing costs for a while, costs actually start to rise again as there is some minimum infrastructure needed but fewer customers to bear the cost.)
woeirua 4mo ago
Data centers are easy to fight against because there is no constituency really pulling for them. They create only a handful of jobs. Ultimately the entire thing is a waste of time, data centers can be built basically anywhere, and that's why a lot of them are moving to rural red states where they welcome the construction. The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage. We should also tax the hell out of anyone using AI as an excuse for layoffs. It's far past time to ban buybacks and dividends for any company doing layoffs. We also should have a requirement, you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.
- triceratops 4mo ago
  Banning buybacks and taxing dividends like earned income (or at least with higher tax brackets for higher dividend income, just like earned income) is basically the same thing as taxing tokens. I'd go even further and reduce income taxes by the same amount that is raised by taxing dividends.
- catigula 4mo ago
  It should be illegal to lay workers off for AI like it is in China, where sensible policy exists.
  - philipwhiuk 4mo ago
    You just lay them off for another reason I mean if AI is really powerful the reason is "profitability as our competitor steals our contracts at a fraction of the price". Your competitor just doesn't hire in the first place of course.
    - catigula 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - philipwhiuk 4mo ago
        Well done, you've saved human jobs at a cost of lowering the salary to fractions. (Until the bots are still more efficient)
feverzsj 4mo ago
When a right wing party pushes a new tech really hard, it's usually a bad thing.
- yoyohello13 4mo ago
  It’s actually insane they call themselves conservatives when the whole platform has been instituting sweeping social changes and embracing new technologies.
gyanchawdhary 4mo ago
[flagged]
gamerslexus 4mo ago
If you fight either of those things in the US, you should do so carefully, as it may get you to be targeted by FBI and DHS as an extremist actor as per current government's policy as of approximately a week ago. This is a wall of text but genuinely worth skimming: https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism/ https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
- goatlover 4mo ago
  This is one way you know billionaires have too much sway over the government.
  - Henchman21 4mo ago
    Only C-suite members and billionaires have political representation in the US.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4mo ago
  All the more reason for everyone who can speak up to do so.
vmg12 4mo ago
I think its a mistake to fight datacenters and AI. Taking a step back, if the US unilaterally stops producing AI will other countries stop? The answer is clearly no. Datacenters and ai can be built and trained anywhere. If you want control over AI you should want it to be built in your own country where you have political representation. All preventing datacenter buildout will do is ensure that the price remains high and only really rich organizations can access it.
- conartist6 4mo ago
  You could say the same of human intelligence and competence and social trust. I think it's a mistake to stop producing those things.
  - bpodgursky 4mo ago
    Uh yes you could but what's your point. If we make ourselves dumber, it doesn't make China dumber, human intelligence will just leave us behind.
  - Abh1Works 4mo ago
    Fair point, but you dont produce intelligence, competence and social trust. Essentially a society earns it. Is the reason that competence and social trust are declining because of AI? Maybe, but not only that.
- catigula 4mo ago
  There's no such thing as 'control over AI'; that goes double for someone who is a complete nobody plebian with a little baby stock portfolio. You know, basically everyone except for a select few.
  - goatlover 4mo ago
    The industry can be regulated and taxed like anything else.
    - 4mo ago
mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago
They're fighting the centralization of the means of production, surveillance, and control*
atomic128 4mo ago
Poison Fountain on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
- headcanon 4mo ago
  Do you feel poison fountain is actually effective? To me it seems like free chaos engineering for ingestion platforms. Wouldn't it paradoxically harden data ingestion?
  - xyzal 4mo ago
    Not sure about flawed code logic, but it is embarassingly easy to plant false information into models. Make a few static sites with random info, crosslink them, reference them on reddit a few times, then plant the payload there. I know it because i tried ...
lifestyleguru 4mo ago
Backblaze increased the price per TB (we should be getting emails "ten times the storage for the same price"). Reliable VPS for 5EUR/month are basically gone. Affordability of assembling own PC is back to maybe late 1990s. Tear it all down.
antibull 4mo ago
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emsign 4mo ago
Well to be fair AI scaling and large compute are the real problem. It's just another enshittification scheme. And data centers are the black holes that suck the industry dry like a vacuum.
paul7986 4mo ago
It's easy everyone needs to stop using AI, yet the response is "China....." Let them destroy themselves maybe or they thrive more. A double edge sword we (U.S.) created!
ehellknight 4mo ago
I agree with the datacenter hate in spirit, but the thing that always bothers me is that most of us working in tech have been telling John Q. Public for DECADES not to trust big tech. Don't put all your data in the cloud, switch to open source alternatives, keep your physical media (or copy it) and don't rely on streaming, etc. I personally have offered my time and knowledge on numerous occasions to help someone make the switch from say, Windows to Linux, Google Drive to a NAS, etc. I've always tried to be as helpful as I can, avoiding jargon, breaking everything down into simple terms, making it easy to understand, being excited to teach people a way to interact with technology without being abused by a corporation. You know what I learned? Nobody wants to. People will always choose the more convenient option no matter how bad it is in the long run, even when the far more ethical option is only just slightly less convenient. They choose instant gratification every time. They'll whine about it, they'll swear each new enshittified update or price hike is the last straw, but they will keep paying the bill. And don't even get me started on trying to get people to donate money to open source projects. So maybe it counts as victim blaming, and the sociopathic techbros that run these companies are certainly responsible for their own behavior, but, at a certain point... it's hard to blame the lion when the tourists keep walking into its den. Ya'll wanted the cloud, you wanted Ring doorbells, you wanted Alexas, you wanted Kindles, you wanted ChatGPT to write your emails for you, you wanted iPhones... We've been telling you for years: It's just someone else's computer.
scythe 4mo ago
Electricity costs make the headlines, but I have also heard that the datacenters apparently make a loud perpetual buzzing noise that is audible from a large distance. That sounds like reason enough to oppose one being built near me.
- gamerslexus 4mo ago
  Data centers behave as acoustic weapons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
  - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
    This video is pseudoscience https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
    - gamerslexus 4mo ago
      The article you linked doesn't do much to refute "data centres are acoustic weapons", just insists that symptoms are explainable by audible noise pollution. Sure, that makes it better?
      - dogleash 4mo ago
        It's simple. Noise based nuisances from datacenters fall in one of two categories: A) don't exist, therefore not a concern B) known to exist, therefore not a concern
- starkparker 4mo ago
  Data centre noise is a mix of low- and high-frequency intake and exhaust fan noise at the structure level, diesel or turbine generators for the centres supplementing their own power or running backups (sometimes with cooling towers), and no real investment in sound damping. Combine them with the tendency to build them in open, flat rural areas that have few or no trees or other buildings to baffle the sound, then run them 24/7, and it becomes a chronic issue for people who live nearby (even miles away, if the acoustics are just right). That shouldn't have been as much of a problem in the US as it's become, but data centre projects get built near where people live because the infrastructure is already there. That naturally raised it as an issue in the UK, where there's less unpopulated space, before data centres of that scale were built: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/31/data-centre-noise-pollution-threatening-british-countryside/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/31/data-centre-...
eddyg 4mo ago
From 27 years ago... you could almost search-and-replace "PCs" with "agents" and re-publish it today... Dig more coal -- the PCs are coming https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html
amai 4mo ago
Americans shouldn't fight data centers or AI, but billionaires. No kings!
mancerayder 4mo ago
They're fighting higher costs, and data centers use energy, increasing costs. There's no need to make simple things complex - people who aren't engineers or executives with a large equity stake or millions in FAANG money aren't invested in changing the world in the way SV dreams about it. And it doesn't help that we are "low value capital" to these people.

122 points by stalfosknight 4mo ago

You know what the largest cost of any goods are? The energy cost. You know what these datacenters are demanding massive amounts of? Energy. Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. But I can't afford to tack on 30% more costs onto ever material object I need as someone not earning 6 figures doing tech work. There is a reason the US doesn't process tons of aluminum or supply the world with fertilizer, we don't have all that cheap of energy. Go to Canada and build a hydroplant, or build a solar field. And that is before we get into the fact that many people think the LLM boom is a massive crash waiting to happen when it inevitably doesn't change the world overnight to justify the trillions in investments.

tomrod 4mo ago
> Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. Hear hear. LLMs can generate a lot of great value. But the pouring of resources like gasoline on a wildfire is dumb. Continuing the analogy, fire is great when controlled and terrible when let loose without regard for impact. I think a Doctorow-style setup of domain-specific AI and edge compute are where real value with AI will exist in ways our grandchildren may enjoy -- and it happens to be antithetical to the ridiculous overvaluation we in the "hyperscalers" (which seem to just want to pump and dump the market by extracting cash from US 401ks via indexes and IPOs).
headcanon 4mo ago
I would definitely agree that data center investments would need to be coupled with energy investments. If this could act as a catalyst for more (sustainable) energy production that would be a net win for all IMO.

t_sawyer 4mo ago

This is paywalled. Without reading the article, I don't think Americans are fighting data centers because of AI. I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.

forinti 4mo ago
Exactly. There are many costs associated with data centers regardless of the type of data processing they do.
add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
The term "data center" was not even in the typical person's consciousness before the current AI era.
jsrozner 4mo ago
https://archive.ph/DqPNZ https://archive.ph/DqPNZ

phendrenad2 4mo ago

I realized that the belief that datacenters are bad for the water supply (either evaporating it or polluting it) is weaponized self-delusion. People don't care if it's true or not, because it gives people a way to fight back against (perceived) AI job losses.

everdrive 4mo ago

Well realistically both are bad. Right now our government is purely dysfunctional, so I'm not sure anyone knows how to fight anything. We have a eunuch Congress, and in response each party just tries to push executive power as far as possible, never once considering that someone they dislike could get elected in the future and use that expanded power in a negative way. I'm sure that right at this moment at least some people are thinking "if only we had a different executive, then we could rein in this AI problem." That is wrong at best. You could rein it in for ~4 years until you lost the next election. With a completely feckless Congress, very little can get done.

sailfast 4mo ago
We do not have a eunuch congress - but we do have a Congress that believes their balls have been removed despite being there the whole time. This is a solvable problem, happily. It does, however, require some will and for folks to remember they actually have some power as elected representatives to the highest legislative body in the land.
- LightBug1 4mo ago
  Remember? ... Memories have a price. Nothing's changing any time soon while the elected represent money, and paid-for interests. Of the dollar, by the dollar, for the dollar ...
- sheikhnbake 4mo ago
  The only power congress theoretically has to impact the administration is that of the purse. But the admin has repeatedly ignored such restrictions. This check on power also loses it's teeth when the oligarchs align themselves behind the executive branch.
  - xnx 4mo ago
    They can also impeach
    - 4mo ago

verdverm 4mo ago

The politics of anti-* is tiring. Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision? The issues with data centers are manageable. It's quite hard to bring X back to America if Americans oppose the buildings we need (factories, power gen, data centers). I wonder how much of this is the powerful and adversarial poisoning the discourse so America continues to stumble and fall from hegemony?

mcmcmc 4mo ago
The US has always had reactionaries, especially around topics construed as existential threats
8note 4mo ago
> The issues with data centers are manageable. are they? whats been done to solve the infrasound pollution? governments haven't even managed to get datacenters to follow clean air regulation
- verdverm 4mo ago
  Yes, a few issues / approaches, largely around politics and regulation. The discourse mainly focuses around the bad cases and extrapolates to all data centers (incorrectly). I run our company workloads in a data center that is 95% renewables (mainly wind). 1. About 25% of data centers use close water cycle systems [1]. This could be part of the approval process. It costs more, but these companies are flush with cash. 2. Where they go matters for water table impact and energy generation mix, both geographically and per zoning laws. There are good and bad places to put data centers. 3. Energy shouldn't be a problem, but we have under/mis-invested. A world with limitless energy is possible, what happened to that vision for massive renewables to realize that? 4. A responsive government is required, which seems to be what is happening (as evidenced by the significant pushback). We should be more reasonable (the middle path), but that seems not within the politics of our times. [1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961 https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
  - 4mo ago

snek_case 4mo ago

I think people are also literally fighting datacenters. As others have said the increase in energy costs is a problem for the average person. Not only is AI potentially competing for your job, it's also competing for your access to energy to power your home or your vehicle. Energy costs also affect the price you pay for basically every good and service. Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?

morley 4mo ago
Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.) If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.
mjr00 4mo ago
> Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay? Sure but you can say this about everything. Where are the protests about the wine industry in California? 500,000 acres of land for vineyards, far more water used for growing grapes than cooling data centers, all so a handful of people can make fortunes selling empty calories to the rich? If you want to focus purely on utilitarian "optimal land use for essentials only" arguments there's way worse offenders than datacenters, the anti-DC sentiment is purely part of the anti-AI wave.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- runtime_terror 4mo ago
  Please, tell how much energy an equal sized vineyard uses compared to a data center?

krunger 4mo ago

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superkuh 4mo ago

AI the technology isn't the problem. It's just a tool like anything else. Corporate persons as legal persons and the shielding of the people within that corporation from the consequences of their crimes and malicious actions are the problem. The ability to control elections by dumping unlimited amounts of money is a problem. We need states to change their articles of incorporation to make them accountable. We need states to start revoking corporate charters. Hawaii is leading the way on this. Of course this doesn't help that much when most corporations incorporate in states which are already co-opted and controlled totally by these non-human persons; like Delaware, which is now even given corporations the right to vote in state and local elections.

runtime_terror 4mo ago
This is why we have a federal government. Too bad it's been gutted by decades of neoliberalism and corporate lobbying

jmyeet 4mo ago

No, it's not a proxy fight about AI. The data centers are just bad, for several, easy-to-explain reasons: 1. They get massive tax breaks; 2. Everyone else pays for the electricity infrastructure that they need to suppor tthem; 3. They pollute water supplies; 4. Everybody's electricity prices go up while the DC has a sweetheart deal that, again, everyone else is paying for; 5. There are no jobs unlike, say, if someone used that same money to buuild an auto plant; and 6. They tend to very far noiser than you might think, such that they probably violate noise ordinances when built near residential property but nobody enforces that. We have industrial areas for this reason but that zoning just gets completely ignored. AI is a whole separate debate. That one, too, is pretty simple. AI is selling labor displacement and wage suppression. That's the only product. Getting rid of the data centers won't get rid of that. The DCs are just going where it's cheapest, where local officials don't have the resources to fight it and where people can be bullied or bribed into approving it. Move them somewhere else slightly more expensive and it'll still be displacing labor.

causal 4mo ago
It's also absurd how few jobs or income they provide to the community that is expected to host htem
mattas 4mo ago
In theory, let's say that a data center was proposed that: 1. got no tax breaks 2. self-generated electricity with greenest of green generation 3. did not pollute water supplies 4. made electricity prices go down somehow 5. (can't figure out a theoretical version where there are lots of jobs, sorry) 6. was extremely quiet Would people still be mad about them? I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. Or if it's really more about "AI bad."
- Ensorceled 4mo ago
  > I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. The list is long and includes things like people not being able to afford AC anymore; why are you trying to figure this out?

hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago

This article is bullshit. It downplays the real, valid concerns people have about data centers themselves as more "ahh, poor uniformed populace" BS: 1. Electricity costs in Maryland jumped 89% over the past year, much more than anywhere else, largely due to an AWS data center expansion: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-electricity-prices-jumped-the-most-in-america/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-electricity-pr... 2. At their heart, data centers are extractive. Their boosters always overstate the jobs they will create, but they basically take land and resources from one place and create the vast majority of the wealth somewhere else. They are giant windowless boxes, they don't support their community in any way, and in fact with AI they basically add to more job destruction in their communities. While I agree that some downsides of AI are overstated (like water usage), this whole article smacks of paternalistic "the peons just don't understand what's really going on" nonsense. The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works.

sailfast 4mo ago
This. 100% this. Data centers drive up our energy costs and are external to the local economy for the most part. Blocking them should be a priority until rates are negotiated with your G&T / major provider (PJM and FERC in Maryland and many other states) RE blaming the peon reader: you’re talking about Vox so that is expected unfortunately.
cucumber3732842 4mo ago
I think a lot of the cost increases come from utilities being in bed with government and both going "aha we've found our scapegoat" more than the demands of the data centers themselves. But yes this article is absolutely the "usual sort" of paternalistic garbage.
andsoitis 4mo ago
> The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works. The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally. It should be noted that modern globalization (post 1945), with Bretton Woods, GATT/WTO, container shipping, and eventually the internet creating the integrated global economy we have today, is but the latest milestone in a long history. Industrial wave of 1829 - 1914 radically reduced the cost of moving goods and information. The first globalization happened 1490s - 1800s, when Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 route to India created the first truly intercontinental trade and migration networks, linking the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe for the first time.

3sk_ask8 4mo ago

"Yet widespread cynicism about AI, I think, doesn’t stem from any inherent property of the technology itself, but rather from our politics." No, AI is partly rejected as mind numbing, it produces SEO slop, it produces bad code, it steals IP. Is this author living under a rock? She then proceeds to parrot the industry that we'll have arrangements that go in the direction of UBI. This whole article sounds like a trojan horse for Vox readers to distract them from the real issues. EDIT: The pre-IPO downvotes get aggressive again. Mentioning how the press works is strictly forbidden.

raincole 4mo ago

At the end it's a facility that costs the locals and benefits non-locals. Even if AI is the truly greatest productivity booster, the benefits are still distributed over all its customers, and the environmental impacts are mostly local. It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.

pantsforbirds 4mo ago
Except datacenters are actually very low environmental impact. As long as they provide their own power, they have MUCH lower impact than most farms would.
- cratermoon 4mo ago
  But the farms! is the new but her emails!
  - nancyminusone 4mo ago
    Even unprofitable farms can produce edible food. A datacenter is a machine that uses electricity to make heat and no other physical prouducts. That's a tough justification to make to people who live near one.
    - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
      I really dont get this. The US is nowhere close to facing a food shortage. If all the desert farms in the west closed beef and a few vegetables would get a tiny bit more expensive. People act like if we didnt do destructive desert farming we'd have to implement rationing.
      - nemomarx 4mo ago
        Food prices rising has been a political hot topic for the last few years. Voters would have your head for any obvious action that made beef get more expensive, especially NIMBY groups and current ranchers.

ath3nd 4mo ago

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jsrozner 4mo ago

> How can technology be used to make our society freer and more equal, and to augment human agency rather than diminish it? The past 20 years of surveillance capitalism and the general deployment of technology against consumers should make everyone question whether this could ever be possible.

yoyohello13 4mo ago
Yeah whenever I hear someone say this I can’t help but think they are delusional. Like, have you looked around? What rational person could possibly believe this tech will lead to MORE freedom.

hackeraccount 4mo ago

Isn't "data centers are using all the electricity" the same as "we're not pricing electricity correctly"? Instead of a ban just make sure they pay what's needed to keep capacity where it needs to be.

everdrive 4mo ago
On this note, I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs. Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure? If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs electrical supply is not infinite. datacenters have high electrical demand. more demand + same supply = increase prices. >Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure? the problem is that added infrastructure is not built instantaneously. it lags behind. so costs will be high until more supply-side infrastructure is in place. i agree that there should be some sort of stipulation that when you build your mega datacenter that you also have to build out electrical infrastructure at the same time. but unfortunately, that is not how it is.
  - everdrive 4mo ago
    Thanks, that's really useful. I guess in my head I had the impression that costs could potentially be static. eg: if you had 10 customers total, each needed to pay $1 to generate electricity to serve their needs. So when you scale up to 100 customers, you can still have everyone pay $1 and come out to the same place. I totally get the general principle that not everything scales linearly like that. But, I also know very little about electricity generation, so I have no idea where the breakpoints are. (I would also guess that if the demand dips low enough, there could be a case where after decreasing costs for a while, costs actually start to rise again as there is some minimum infrastructure needed but fewer customers to bear the cost.)

woeirua 4mo ago

Data centers are easy to fight against because there is no constituency really pulling for them. They create only a handful of jobs. Ultimately the entire thing is a waste of time, data centers can be built basically anywhere, and that's why a lot of them are moving to rural red states where they welcome the construction. The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage. We should also tax the hell out of anyone using AI as an excuse for layoffs. It's far past time to ban buybacks and dividends for any company doing layoffs. We also should have a requirement, you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.

triceratops 4mo ago
Banning buybacks and taxing dividends like earned income (or at least with higher tax brackets for higher dividend income, just like earned income) is basically the same thing as taxing tokens. I'd go even further and reduce income taxes by the same amount that is raised by taxing dividends.
catigula 4mo ago
It should be illegal to lay workers off for AI like it is in China, where sensible policy exists.
- philipwhiuk 4mo ago
  You just lay them off for another reason I mean if AI is really powerful the reason is "profitability as our competitor steals our contracts at a fraction of the price". Your competitor just doesn't hire in the first place of course.
  - catigula 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - philipwhiuk 4mo ago
      Well done, you've saved human jobs at a cost of lowering the salary to fractions. (Until the bots are still more efficient)

feverzsj 4mo ago

When a right wing party pushes a new tech really hard, it's usually a bad thing.

yoyohello13 4mo ago
It’s actually insane they call themselves conservatives when the whole platform has been instituting sweeping social changes and embracing new technologies.

gyanchawdhary 4mo ago

[flagged]

gamerslexus 4mo ago

If you fight either of those things in the US, you should do so carefully, as it may get you to be targeted by FBI and DHS as an extremist actor as per current government's policy as of approximately a week ago. This is a wall of text but genuinely worth skimming: https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism/ https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...

goatlover 4mo ago
This is one way you know billionaires have too much sway over the government.
- Henchman21 4mo ago
  Only C-suite members and billionaires have political representation in the US.
sjsdaiuasgdia 4mo ago
All the more reason for everyone who can speak up to do so.

vmg12 4mo ago

I think its a mistake to fight datacenters and AI. Taking a step back, if the US unilaterally stops producing AI will other countries stop? The answer is clearly no. Datacenters and ai can be built and trained anywhere. If you want control over AI you should want it to be built in your own country where you have political representation. All preventing datacenter buildout will do is ensure that the price remains high and only really rich organizations can access it.

conartist6 4mo ago
You could say the same of human intelligence and competence and social trust. I think it's a mistake to stop producing those things.
- bpodgursky 4mo ago
  Uh yes you could but what's your point. If we make ourselves dumber, it doesn't make China dumber, human intelligence will just leave us behind.
- Abh1Works 4mo ago
  Fair point, but you dont produce intelligence, competence and social trust. Essentially a society earns it. Is the reason that competence and social trust are declining because of AI? Maybe, but not only that.
catigula 4mo ago
There's no such thing as 'control over AI'; that goes double for someone who is a complete nobody plebian with a little baby stock portfolio. You know, basically everyone except for a select few.
- goatlover 4mo ago
  The industry can be regulated and taxed like anything else.
  - 4mo ago

mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago

They're fighting the centralization of the means of production, surveillance, and control*

atomic128 4mo ago

Poison Fountain on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/

headcanon 4mo ago
Do you feel poison fountain is actually effective? To me it seems like free chaos engineering for ingestion platforms. Wouldn't it paradoxically harden data ingestion?
- xyzal 4mo ago
  Not sure about flawed code logic, but it is embarassingly easy to plant false information into models. Make a few static sites with random info, crosslink them, reference them on reddit a few times, then plant the payload there. I know it because i tried ...

lifestyleguru 4mo ago

Backblaze increased the price per TB (we should be getting emails "ten times the storage for the same price"). Reliable VPS for 5EUR/month are basically gone. Affordability of assembling own PC is back to maybe late 1990s. Tear it all down.

antibull 4mo ago

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emsign 4mo ago

Well to be fair AI scaling and large compute are the real problem. It's just another enshittification scheme. And data centers are the black holes that suck the industry dry like a vacuum.

paul7986 4mo ago

It's easy everyone needs to stop using AI, yet the response is "China....." Let them destroy themselves maybe or they thrive more. A double edge sword we (U.S.) created!

ehellknight 4mo ago

I agree with the datacenter hate in spirit, but the thing that always bothers me is that most of us working in tech have been telling John Q. Public for DECADES not to trust big tech. Don't put all your data in the cloud, switch to open source alternatives, keep your physical media (or copy it) and don't rely on streaming, etc. I personally have offered my time and knowledge on numerous occasions to help someone make the switch from say, Windows to Linux, Google Drive to a NAS, etc. I've always tried to be as helpful as I can, avoiding jargon, breaking everything down into simple terms, making it easy to understand, being excited to teach people a way to interact with technology without being abused by a corporation. You know what I learned? Nobody wants to. People will always choose the more convenient option no matter how bad it is in the long run, even when the far more ethical option is only just slightly less convenient. They choose instant gratification every time. They'll whine about it, they'll swear each new enshittified update or price hike is the last straw, but they will keep paying the bill. And don't even get me started on trying to get people to donate money to open source projects. So maybe it counts as victim blaming, and the sociopathic techbros that run these companies are certainly responsible for their own behavior, but, at a certain point... it's hard to blame the lion when the tourists keep walking into its den. Ya'll wanted the cloud, you wanted Ring doorbells, you wanted Alexas, you wanted Kindles, you wanted ChatGPT to write your emails for you, you wanted iPhones... We've been telling you for years: It's just someone else's computer.

scythe 4mo ago

Electricity costs make the headlines, but I have also heard that the datacenters apparently make a loud perpetual buzzing noise that is audible from a large distance. That sounds like reason enough to oppose one being built near me.

gamerslexus 4mo ago
Data centers behave as acoustic weapons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
- HDThoreaun 4mo ago
  This video is pseudoscience https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
  - gamerslexus 4mo ago
    The article you linked doesn't do much to refute "data centres are acoustic weapons", just insists that symptoms are explainable by audible noise pollution. Sure, that makes it better?
    - dogleash 4mo ago
      It's simple. Noise based nuisances from datacenters fall in one of two categories: A) don't exist, therefore not a concern B) known to exist, therefore not a concern
starkparker 4mo ago
Data centre noise is a mix of low- and high-frequency intake and exhaust fan noise at the structure level, diesel or turbine generators for the centres supplementing their own power or running backups (sometimes with cooling towers), and no real investment in sound damping. Combine them with the tendency to build them in open, flat rural areas that have few or no trees or other buildings to baffle the sound, then run them 24/7, and it becomes a chronic issue for people who live nearby (even miles away, if the acoustics are just right). That shouldn't have been as much of a problem in the US as it's become, but data centre projects get built near where people live because the infrastructure is already there. That naturally raised it as an issue in the UK, where there's less unpopulated space, before data centres of that scale were built: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/31/data-centre-noise-pollution-threatening-british-countryside/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/31/data-centre-...

eddyg 4mo ago

From 27 years ago... you could almost search-and-replace "PCs" with "agents" and re-publish it today... Dig more coal -- the PCs are coming https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html

amai 4mo ago

Americans shouldn't fight data centers or AI, but billionaires. No kings!

mancerayder 4mo ago

They're fighting higher costs, and data centers use energy, increasing costs. There's no need to make simple things complex - people who aren't engineers or executives with a large equity stake or millions in FAANG money aren't invested in changing the world in the way SV dreams about it. And it doesn't help that we are "low value capital" to these people.