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NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media. Always easier to boost something already exi

• WarmWash 3mo ago
  There are 22 golf courses within a 30 minute drive from me, and people here a losing their minds over datacenter water usage...
  • bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    People can care about more than one thing Personally I would happily close down all golf courses and put them to better use as literally anything else. Even just making them public parks would be great
    • throwup238 3mo ago
      People can pretend to care about more than one thing. Whether they actually actively oppose those things to the point of impacting building permits, that's a completely different matter. It really doesn't take much legislation to make golf courses economically unviable and force them to close, especially if you've got enough population within 30 minutes to support 22 of them (I speak from experience, I helped write a water reclamation ordinance that shut down at least one in my SoCal city) If anyone actually bothered to talk to their local reps instead of posting internet comments about how much they "care", they'd get something done. If they don't, their care is just a fart in the wind for all the good it will do.
    • mysterydip 3mo ago
      Coming in for a landing on a flight recently, I was amazed at the contrast I saw between a housing development of 50+ homes and a golf course across the road that took up the same amount of space.
    • trollbridge 3mo ago
      I attended an auction of a golf course a few years ago. It went for a few thousand an acre. You could have shown up and bid on it. The winner ended up just choosing to keep the current employees and keep operating it. Nobody, I mean nobody, wanted the land for development. It was in an era with basically no zoning either.
      • viccis 3mo ago
        No, in fact, most of us could not have just shown up and bid on it with any expectation of a meaningful outcome.
        • trollbridge 3mo ago
          I'm saying that if you don't like how a golf course is being used, then attend an auction of one, because they are rapidly going out of business and the assets being auctioned off. America is not suffering from too many golf courses being constructed. They are, rather, going extinct, and I don't really think the mass loss of green spaces and third spaces is necessarily a good thing, even though I'm not someone who enjoys playing golf and don't really spend any time at golf courses.
          • bluefirebrand 3mo ago
            > I don't really think the mass loss of green spaces and third spaces is necessarily a good thing Maybe we could make them public green spaces and third spaces, instead of exclusive clubs? Many golf courses are really expensive. Golf itself is dying like you said, because it's a very expensive sport Idk. There's something like 35 golf courses where I live in Calgary and it's a city of less than 2 million people. That seems super unnecessary to me and they don't seem to be going extinct here
            • trollbridge 3mo ago
              There are also 132 Tim Horton's, which aren't "necessary" either, but people like having leisure activities. One golf course per 55,000 people doesn't seem that excessive either.
    • akudha 3mo ago
      I don’t get the appeal of golf. Hitting a ball into a hole with a crooked stick? But hey, that is just my personal preference. People can play whatever sport they want, or do whatever they want and call it a sport. That said, it would be nice if the so called sport didn’t take so much land, water etc. Especially in prime locations
  • supern0va 3mo ago
    People are scared about the personal impact from AI, then backfill in justifications without even realizing they're doing it. If the equivalent numbers for electricity and water usage were being being used for streaming video, I seriously doubt people would be demanding no more Netflix data centers. The news story would immediately die.
    • trollbridge 3mo ago
      Nobody wants their electric rates to go up, the local water utility to have to raise rates to build a bigger plant, all in exchange for also losing good white collar jobs. That’s currently what AI data centre builders are selling.
      • supern0va 3mo ago
        Not exactly. There are some data centers being built in places that don't have the power and water to support them, and obviously it's rational for the locals to oppose them. But I live in a place where we have plenty of water and relatively cheap power (lots of renewables). There's not much risk to data center construction, but people are opposing it here, too. Because for most people, it's not actually about that.
        • trollbridge 3mo ago
          An obvious question is if the cheap power is going to stay cheap after a large power-user comes in who has a proven track record of trying to make everything cheap for themselves with no regard for anyone else. Or another question to ask is - how does this data centre benefit the people who live there? If it doesn't, there's no reason they should want one to be built. Rubbish tips are necessary. I still don't want one built next to my house and would fight such a thing tooth and nail.
          • supern0va 3mo ago
            Here's a better question: as we've had nearly as large of a data center build-out happen between 2005 and 2020 for non-AI purposes, with similarly high electricity and water demands...where has the concern been? Why is it only in the last 2-3 years that people are suddenly up in arms, as a very specific application is being deployed?
  • swatcoder 3mo ago
    People have a dozen reasons to refuse data centers being built in their communities and zero reasons to encourage it. They're little more than post-industrial mines that take limited resources (power, land, water, quiet) from a community, sell them for profit as compute, and siphon those profits away onto the books of far-flung megacorps with no community reward. Meanwhile, golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community gather for both work and leisure. They're not ideal themselves, but they at least provide some benefit against which their negatives can be weighed. If all you hear from critics of data center building is water use complaints, that's strictly because you've chosen not to listen to people.
    • marcosdumay 3mo ago
      When mines pay a sizeable share of their profits as local taxes, and obey environmental regulations, people suddenly start to like them.
      • swatcoder 3mo ago
        Can you point to some examples of where that's happening? These data centers are specifically being scouted for communities whose governance is too weak to negotiate for some "sizeable share of their profits" and too ill-prepared to have suitable environmental regulations on the books already. The Ivy League sharks planning these buildout initiatives are sharp people who are looking out for the interests of their employers and know how to pick locations where they have the best opportunity to exploit locals unprepared for their kind of esoteric deal-making, political lobbying, and lawfare. They'd be failing at their job if they did what you're suggesting, and that's why we don't really see that happen. For any benefit to national or global society AI data centers might provide to someone, the buildout looks a lot like the dirty and exploitative stories of rail expansion in the 19th century. That rail infrastructure proved a good thing for the US, but that doesn't mean the process of making it happen was honest or good for the people immediately affected.
        • marcosdumay 3mo ago
          > Can you point to some examples of where that's happening? You mean the AI datacenters doing it? No, they are not doing it. They seem to be doing the opposite. They being loud is really hard to accept, decorrelating the fans cooling them would probably pay for itself in less than an year. It's like it's some Capitan Planet villain building those things.
  • dirtbag__dad 3mo ago
    Golf courses don’t have backup generators running 24/7, with humming you can hear from a meaningful distance away. They also don’t pollute the air. This is a poor comparison, but I do get what you’re attempting here. It’s also absurd that we are leveling land everywhere around me to build warehouses. No one is really complaining about that, either.
    • lordgilman 3mo ago
      A backup generator wouldn’t be running 24/7?
• coffeefirst 3mo ago
  These campaigns have historically amplified conflict. They do not care what the conflict is about. But unlike some of the others, I’m hearing anti-AI sentiment from a wide range of people who don’t even use social media.
  • dmix 3mo ago
    All news is influenced by what’s popular social media these days. And that becomes part of what people talk about through the grapevine. But no doubt there’s plenty of organic NIMBYism, anti tech growth stuff, and run of the mill fear of change and loss of control as society grows more abstract/centralized.
    • computably 3mo ago
      Applying the term NIMBYism to anti-AI and anti-DC sentiment is a gross abuse of terminology. Datacenters don't need to be in anybody's residential neighborhood.
      • dmix 3mo ago
        These developments are always facing local resistance. I previously lived in a place where they were building a quarry 30min outside of town and tons of houses had anti-quarry signs on their lawns. It was a big deal to appear anti-quarry even though it had little to do with their neighbourhood specifically (except maybe increased highway trucking traffic). Most industrial development face local protests like this and it's often has large crossover with those NIMBY who resist stuff like housing developments, and show up at town/city councils.
        • magicalist 3mo ago
          Seems like you ignored the GPs point to tell a NIMBY anecdote? They're questioning your premise, not asking what "NIMBY" means.
        • CamperBob2 3mo ago
          Living anywhere near a quarry is no joke. There will be a lot more heavy trucks on the road, with drivers who care very little about covering and securing their loads and even less about your windshield.
• trollbridge 3mo ago
  Russia and China aren’t the ones constantly telling us AI will put us all out of a job, here’s why that’s a good thing, and why the government should dedicate billions of dollars to incumbent AI providers.
• sublinear 3mo ago
  What choice does that rag have? Of course they're going to backpedal and try to launder blame.
• sometimelurker 3mo ago
  source needed. I'm not saying ur wrong, but source needed
• morpheos137 3mo ago
  Surprisingly enough the us constitution specifies a right to free speech. Meanwhile who is funding the past two decades of pie in the sky bullshit from silicon valley in the media? Is promoting and unpopular opinion illegal? Since when do we judge the merits of an argument based on who articulates it?
• mangogogo 3mo ago
  Source or link?
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
  Which then gives more ammunition to folks like Kevin O'Leary et al to pretend any objections to data centers or AI are Chinese plots, or "hysteria" as you put it. While I can admit some of the anti-data center arguments are overblown, many are more than valid in my opinion. Data centers are fundamentally extractive technologies. They are enormous, windowless boxes that take resources from one location to make someone else in a far off location enormously rich and powerful, with extremely few benefits to the local community. Plus, as another commenter mentioned, it's not exactly like the Chinese and Russians have been fanning the flames that AI is going to take all of our jobs - it's the leaders of the frontier AI companies in the US saying that. Remind me again why I think putting up a giant data center in my state, that was proposed to use more electricity than my state already currently uses, is a good thing for the average joe where I live?? Honestly, I feel like many commenters here are in their own bubble and don't understand how much AI and tech generally is widely viewed as a net negative for society by huge swaths of the the population, and I don't really think it's an unwarranted perception.
  • dmix 3mo ago
    Most of the issues with datacenters could be solved by a) investing in energy b) ramping up RAM and chip production, and c) enforcing already long established rules around industrial water management. These tech companies are already investing heavily into solar, natural gas, and nuclear https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/data-centers-love-solar-heres-a-comprehensive-guide-to-deals-over-100-megawatts/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/data-centers-love-solar-he... this would be normal stuff in China where they spend the last decade investing heavily in solar and are bringing something like 60 nuclear reactors online. These datacenters aren't particularly consumptive of water compared to most other industries in that regard and we've already seen states enforce rules against Meta who immediately paused their datacenter when water issues were detected (following mandatory monitoring). Chip production is lagging but most projections I've seen is it will normalize in about 5yrs. Not to mention there will be further demand for robotics and self driving cars, so ramping up chips should be a normal thing like ramping up green/nuclear energy. Delaying it won't solve any current issues.
• headsman771 3mo ago
  Nothing makes me dismiss and distrust a person or organization faster than hearing them say "russia/china are funding {controversial_thing}" Its boogeyman thinking.