4 ms·

No one ever cared about DCs before now. I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development

by chasd00 3mo ago

No one ever cared about DCs before now. I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US. Ironically, There’s enough issues with the DC buildout going on that even with 100% public opinion support it would still be significantly delayed. The behind the meter power generation isn’t going well. There’s only so many gas fired turbines on the market. And connecting a DC to an established grid isn’t like clicking a button in AWS no matter how much money you have.

nixon_why69 3mo ago
I think its a proxy for general populist sentiment. "These AI people are getting rich selling unicorn farts while I'm on the same pay and everything is more expensive, fuck them".
- forgetfreeman 3mo ago
  DCs have a tendency to destabilize the local grid and drive up grid rates and have ridiculous water consumption requirements, both largely externalized to the surrounding community, so it's more a matter of basic self-defense than any notional populist agenda.
- linkjuice4all 3mo ago
  It’s more than one thing. Yes there’s definitely some populism and maybe some astroturfing from outside groups - but actual electricity costs are going up and the average consumer can’t really get anymore efficient, so they’re indirectly subsidizing this stuff. Computers and related hardware have gone up in price. And then you’ve got all of the “AI layoffs” that also result in real-world pain. Ignore at your own peril.
  - AuthAuth 3mo ago
    American electricity costs a very low. What they've gone up is nothing its a drop in the bucket compared to the damage from the tariffs and middle east war. Populists settle on this issue because its malicious. They are Accelerationists
- repelsteeltje 3mo ago
  But that would simply result in Most Americans don't want AI Data Centers, which isn't the same as NYMBYism. I think many Americans see the benefits of having access to unicorn farts and may even support having more data centers. Just not in my backyard, thank you. (Ftr. the article doesn't have an opinion on whether Americans like AI, just my take.)
- owebmaster 3mo ago
  Are you sure that you think what you described is "populist sentiment"? Weirdly, it sounds like populist sentiment.
- bigfishrunning 3mo ago
  The best way to keep the AI people from getting rich selling unicorn farts is to not buy any unicorn farts.
shalmanese 3mo ago
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US. No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.
- paulzack 3mo ago
  [dead]
gortok 3mo ago
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US. This comes cross as unbelievable, and at worst a fantastical statement, as someone who lives in Northern Virginia and is effectively watching the Datacenter battle unfold from the front lines, and dealing with the local politics and electricity costs rising at a precipitous rate. Our electricity bill has doubled. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors want to erect “Statue of Liberty” sized power transmission lines, and those that want data centers are doing their damndest to somehow claim that they’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it. Part of the reason people care about Datacenters now is that they’re starting to litter the landscape, take resources from local municipalities, and raise costs for everyone involved, whereas previously there were not enough of them to really move the needle as being a problem. Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”.
- RajT88 3mo ago
  They're building a mass of DC's near me as well in northern IL (not quite as many as by you). I see a lot of weird stuff on social media - people inactive for years all of a sudden becoming super-activists and posting non-stop anti-DC content. Nearly identical content to what's being pushed by a bunch of faceless accounts named like "Water4All","Nature Reign" - something vaguely environmental sounding. Talking points like: "We should call data centers what they actually are: surveillance centers designed to put us all in a digital prison by 2030" It's fishy. People aren't quite showing up and saying the same things at city council meetings, but the local city anti-DC group is full of people reposting this stuff. One clickbait article in particular, "there's no such thing as a closed loop system". There's real concerns with the data centers. But, the opposition to them doesn't feel entirely organic (imo).
  - milkshakes 3mo ago
    nyt is no fan of AI, but they cover this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wVA.dGxT.KNRoAXHZ8TlN&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
oooyay 3mo ago
> No one ever cared about DCs before now. Society hasn't felt the very real effects of data centers until recently. Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users. We've started to learn just how bad all those dams we built are for the environment and many of them are tied to data center money. Elon Musk waltzed into Memphis and stood up a natural gas data center that has basically poisoned the surrounding area. Maybe nation state actors are helping, that can always be true. It is also true that the American people are starting to realize they've been had many times over and are just starting to ask for a better deal. I think we should listen.
- bigfishrunning 3mo ago
  > Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users. Maybe some kind of progressive pricing for power would be appropriate. I'm not sure if this exists, and correct me if it does, but maybe the second MW should cost an order of magnitude more then the first, and so on.
  - oooyay 3mo ago
    Oregon just passed something like this I believe. We basically charge data centers 30% more for power.
  - oceanplexian 3mo ago
    If only we had a limitless form of energy that comes out of the sky. Or if that doesn't work, maybe there's some miraculous form of energy that can be extracted from rocks, produces no emissions whatsoever, and could power society for thousands of years. Nah, let's make a really convoluted system to jack up energy prices for everyone, and increasingly rely on a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
bcrosby95 3mo ago
People seem pretty sour on big tech in general, maybe it's because, I don't know... Data centers being directly tied to increases in our power bills. Or CEOs talking about how they're going to get to fire everyone because of AI. Or social media raising the political temperature. Or all of them combined. Tech has never been so intolerable across the board.
jcranmer 3mo ago
The data center construction boom has precipitated a lot of inflation in electronics and related fields, because the data centers are buying out all of the silicon manufacturing and RAM manufacturing and etc, and all of this stuff is horribly supply-limited. And the people pushing for data center construction are proudly telling us that we need to support this so that we can put half of the population out of work, oh, and we just need a small trillion-dollar subsidy or five to pay for it all (because demand for AI isn't high enough to pay for all of it themselves). There's no need to invent some malign foreign conspirator to generate unpopularity for this stuff. No, the AI companies are led by unpopular CEOs, who are making unpopular statements (almost cartoonishly so). And opposing a data center is the kind of action that regular people, upset about this sort of stuff, feel that they can actually meaningfully effect. So of course it was going to balloon like it has.
strictnein 3mo ago
For those who are unaware of the claims of Chinese influence, a couple articles: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/husband-code-pink-founder-neville-roy-singham-investigation-tax-laws/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/husband-code-pink-founder-nevil... Previous coverage of Singham, who coincidentally is married to a co-founder of Code Pink: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-... Not saying these are correct and are proof, but this isn't some fringe concern from the MAGA crowd or something. It would also be a logical response on China's part to the US working to block them from getting GPUs, processor tech, etc.
caconym_ 3mo ago
> No one ever cared about DCs before now. This isn't true. People were starting to mobilize against crypto datacenters in the late 2010s and early 2020s^[1][2], long before the current AI-fueled building frenzy. > I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US. It's fairly well documented that this is happening to some degree, but as above, foreign agents didn't conjure the anti-datacenter movement out of nothing. It's a fact that if the average crypto or AI datacenter moves in next door to you, there's a good chance it's going to crash your quality of life and the value of your property, and all in service of making a few fantastically rich guys even richer. Also, they are the same guys building a machine that they claim is going to destroy your livelihood. You don't need foreign agents to engineer a backlash here. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-demands-spark-a-crypto-backlash https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-dem... [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-crypto-noise-incorporate-city/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...
- TitaRusell 3mo ago
  My country banned all hyperscalers. Has nothing to do with China- I live in a densely populated country that doesn't need the chump change from Google and Microsoft. Ugly giant buildings that take up valuable land and require lots of infrastructure meanwhile providing no jobs are a very bad deal.
  - caconym_ 3mo ago
    Yeah. IMO anyone arguing (explicitly or otherwise) that these facilities don't come with enormous negative externalities for people unlucky enough to live near them is either ignorant or being disingenuous. There is no need to lean on contentious minutiae like the water usage thing to show that this is true. If AI development has such strategic urgency and importance that this desperate rapid expansion at any cost is reasonably justified on national security grounds, the government should be coordinating access to land and power and making people whole when their communities are impacted. Instead, you see unlucky everyday Americans left holding the bag while datacenter operators trick and bribe their way into building these projects and then run roughshod over regulations (e.g. how many open cycle gas turbines are you permitted to have running in your parking lot, mr. Musk?) because there is nobody willing to enforce them. Honestly, any attempt to dismiss this all as groundless NIMBYism is unbelievably disgusting and makes me think that China and Russia are not the only parties running influence operations here. I do indeed see a strong push to frame the anti-datacenter position with weak/unsupported points (e.g. water usage) rather than strong and supported points (noise, electricity use, carbon footprint).
rsoto2 3mo ago
Wow it's almost like modern datacenters use way more power due to GPU consumption. Emit way more pollution. Use way more land. Make way more noise. Produce slop instead of functioning products. Do yall use your brain before chiming in and misinforming everyone?
vel0city 3mo ago
I made this comment a little bit ago, I'll share it again: I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before. A quiet, average-sized warehouse-like building in an industrial area with a big power substation next to it often didn't bother a lot of people. A giant monster of a building being built in what was previously people's backyards with howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" and starts sucking the groudwater dry is a whole different story. This is a datacenter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pzSsUHXPaUuLGaDa9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/pzSsUHXPaUuLGaDa9 I doubt many people even know its a datacenter. Its pretty much any other office building. This is also a datacenter. I imagine just about everyone living nearby knows its a datacenter. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wR4NgcWQVhJAy5Gy6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/wR4NgcWQVhJAy5Gy6 Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree there's a lot of social media frenzy in reaction to all datacenters. There are a lot of datacenters around me, and it seems like roughly nobody cared when they were built. They've been there for years, some have been operational for decades. Suddenly now, lots of people have a problem with all of them.
- chasd00 3mo ago
  > I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before. ok now this is something i understand and haven't thought about, thank you. I've visited the stargate construction site in Abilene TX since it's not too far from me (3hrs). The scale is indeed unlike any DC i've ever seen before. edit: "...howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" .." you're talking about XAI's data centers in Memphis right? I don't think that's a fair comparison, that was knocked together in like 100 days. Those generators are on trailers.
- treis 3mo ago
f33d5173 3mo ago
The US nationalized tik tok so the chinese couldn't influence people anymore. Apparently that didn't work?
BeetleB 3mo ago
> No one ever cared about DCs before now. Just because you were not looking doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Anti-DC sentiment has been high in some places before LLMs came on to the scene. Even HN has had multiple submissions of towns in rural areas fighting not to let Meta (or similar companies) build datacenters in their town. (On the flip side, I know at least one town that welcomed them!)
Casteil 3mo ago
>No one ever cared about DCs before now. Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up. They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.
- chasd00 3mo ago
  where does the noise pollution come from? GPU fans? What's more noisy about a DC filled with CPUs and GPUs than a DC filled with just CPUs. I can imagine generators being noisy but that wouldn't be anything different than regular data centers. Also, so few DCs for the AI buildout are actually online where are the noise measurements taken from? I understand if people don't want a DC near them i just don't understand why they care now. I have some pretty big ones about 3miles from me and next door to both are residential areas and businesses. In fact, some of the biggest ones where i live (Dallas) are so understated you have to know it's a datacenter beforehand to even realize what you're looking at. There are some really large ones in Carrolton TX that are nestled right up to neighborhoods, i bet 95% of the people don't even know they're there and the 5% that do probably work there or host there. the carrolton dc https://maps.app.goo.gl/mv3wo96ZTuhRBkGy5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/mv3wo96ZTuhRBkGy5
  - Casteil 3mo ago
    The difference in noise pollution comes from power density & power generation, if they're doing so on site. The power demand (and resulting waste heat) absolutely eclipses that of data centers of olde. If they're not generating power on site & creating noise/consuming local natural gas resources, they're guzzling grid power and almost certainly contributing to electrical rate increases that affect residential customers disproportionately.
HWR_14 3mo ago
I'm not sure why I should care about SOTA LLM development being in the US.

by chasd00 3mo ago

nixon_why69 3mo ago

I think its a proxy for general populist sentiment. "These AI people are getting rich selling unicorn farts while I'm on the same pay and everything is more expensive, fuck them".

forgetfreeman 3mo ago
DCs have a tendency to destabilize the local grid and drive up grid rates and have ridiculous water consumption requirements, both largely externalized to the surrounding community, so it's more a matter of basic self-defense than any notional populist agenda.
linkjuice4all 3mo ago
It’s more than one thing. Yes there’s definitely some populism and maybe some astroturfing from outside groups - but actual electricity costs are going up and the average consumer can’t really get anymore efficient, so they’re indirectly subsidizing this stuff. Computers and related hardware have gone up in price. And then you’ve got all of the “AI layoffs” that also result in real-world pain. Ignore at your own peril.
- AuthAuth 3mo ago
  American electricity costs a very low. What they've gone up is nothing its a drop in the bucket compared to the damage from the tariffs and middle east war. Populists settle on this issue because its malicious. They are Accelerationists
repelsteeltje 3mo ago
But that would simply result in Most Americans don't want AI Data Centers, which isn't the same as NYMBYism. I think many Americans see the benefits of having access to unicorn farts and may even support having more data centers. Just not in my backyard, thank you. (Ftr. the article doesn't have an opinion on whether Americans like AI, just my take.)
owebmaster 3mo ago
Are you sure that you think what you described is "populist sentiment"? Weirdly, it sounds like populist sentiment.
bigfishrunning 3mo ago
The best way to keep the AI people from getting rich selling unicorn farts is to not buy any unicorn farts.

shalmanese 3mo ago

> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US. No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.

paulzack 3mo ago
[dead]

gortok 3mo ago

> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US. This comes cross as unbelievable, and at worst a fantastical statement, as someone who lives in Northern Virginia and is effectively watching the Datacenter battle unfold from the front lines, and dealing with the local politics and electricity costs rising at a precipitous rate. Our electricity bill has doubled. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors want to erect “Statue of Liberty” sized power transmission lines, and those that want data centers are doing their damndest to somehow claim that they’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it. Part of the reason people care about Datacenters now is that they’re starting to litter the landscape, take resources from local municipalities, and raise costs for everyone involved, whereas previously there were not enough of them to really move the needle as being a problem. Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”.

RajT88 3mo ago
They're building a mass of DC's near me as well in northern IL (not quite as many as by you). I see a lot of weird stuff on social media - people inactive for years all of a sudden becoming super-activists and posting non-stop anti-DC content. Nearly identical content to what's being pushed by a bunch of faceless accounts named like "Water4All","Nature Reign" - something vaguely environmental sounding. Talking points like: "We should call data centers what they actually are: surveillance centers designed to put us all in a digital prison by 2030" It's fishy. People aren't quite showing up and saying the same things at city council meetings, but the local city anti-DC group is full of people reposting this stuff. One clickbait article in particular, "there's no such thing as a closed loop system". There's real concerns with the data centers. But, the opposition to them doesn't feel entirely organic (imo).
- milkshakes 3mo ago
  nyt is no fan of AI, but they cover this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wVA.dGxT.KNRoAXHZ8TlN&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

oooyay 3mo ago

> No one ever cared about DCs before now. Society hasn't felt the very real effects of data centers until recently. Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users. We've started to learn just how bad all those dams we built are for the environment and many of them are tied to data center money. Elon Musk waltzed into Memphis and stood up a natural gas data center that has basically poisoned the surrounding area. Maybe nation state actors are helping, that can always be true. It is also true that the American people are starting to realize they've been had many times over and are just starting to ask for a better deal. I think we should listen.

bigfishrunning 3mo ago
> Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users. Maybe some kind of progressive pricing for power would be appropriate. I'm not sure if this exists, and correct me if it does, but maybe the second MW should cost an order of magnitude more then the first, and so on.
- oooyay 3mo ago
  Oregon just passed something like this I believe. We basically charge data centers 30% more for power.
- oceanplexian 3mo ago
  If only we had a limitless form of energy that comes out of the sky. Or if that doesn't work, maybe there's some miraculous form of energy that can be extracted from rocks, produces no emissions whatsoever, and could power society for thousands of years. Nah, let's make a really convoluted system to jack up energy prices for everyone, and increasingly rely on a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

bcrosby95 3mo ago

People seem pretty sour on big tech in general, maybe it's because, I don't know... Data centers being directly tied to increases in our power bills. Or CEOs talking about how they're going to get to fire everyone because of AI. Or social media raising the political temperature. Or all of them combined. Tech has never been so intolerable across the board.

jcranmer 3mo ago

The data center construction boom has precipitated a lot of inflation in electronics and related fields, because the data centers are buying out all of the silicon manufacturing and RAM manufacturing and etc, and all of this stuff is horribly supply-limited. And the people pushing for data center construction are proudly telling us that we need to support this so that we can put half of the population out of work, oh, and we just need a small trillion-dollar subsidy or five to pay for it all (because demand for AI isn't high enough to pay for all of it themselves). There's no need to invent some malign foreign conspirator to generate unpopularity for this stuff. No, the AI companies are led by unpopular CEOs, who are making unpopular statements (almost cartoonishly so). And opposing a data center is the kind of action that regular people, upset about this sort of stuff, feel that they can actually meaningfully effect. So of course it was going to balloon like it has.

strictnein 3mo ago

For those who are unaware of the claims of Chinese influence, a couple articles: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/husband-code-pink-founder-neville-roy-singham-investigation-tax-laws/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/husband-code-pink-founder-nevil... Previous coverage of Singham, who coincidentally is married to a co-founder of Code Pink: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-... Not saying these are correct and are proof, but this isn't some fringe concern from the MAGA crowd or something. It would also be a logical response on China's part to the US working to block them from getting GPUs, processor tech, etc.

caconym_ 3mo ago

> No one ever cared about DCs before now. This isn't true. People were starting to mobilize against crypto datacenters in the late 2010s and early 2020s^[1][2], long before the current AI-fueled building frenzy. > I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US. It's fairly well documented that this is happening to some degree, but as above, foreign agents didn't conjure the anti-datacenter movement out of nothing. It's a fact that if the average crypto or AI datacenter moves in next door to you, there's a good chance it's going to crash your quality of life and the value of your property, and all in service of making a few fantastically rich guys even richer. Also, they are the same guys building a machine that they claim is going to destroy your livelihood. You don't need foreign agents to engineer a backlash here. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-demands-spark-a-crypto-backlash https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-dem... [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-crypto-noise-incorporate-city/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...

TitaRusell 3mo ago
My country banned all hyperscalers. Has nothing to do with China- I live in a densely populated country that doesn't need the chump change from Google and Microsoft. Ugly giant buildings that take up valuable land and require lots of infrastructure meanwhile providing no jobs are a very bad deal.
- caconym_ 3mo ago
  Yeah. IMO anyone arguing (explicitly or otherwise) that these facilities don't come with enormous negative externalities for people unlucky enough to live near them is either ignorant or being disingenuous. There is no need to lean on contentious minutiae like the water usage thing to show that this is true. If AI development has such strategic urgency and importance that this desperate rapid expansion at any cost is reasonably justified on national security grounds, the government should be coordinating access to land and power and making people whole when their communities are impacted. Instead, you see unlucky everyday Americans left holding the bag while datacenter operators trick and bribe their way into building these projects and then run roughshod over regulations (e.g. how many open cycle gas turbines are you permitted to have running in your parking lot, mr. Musk?) because there is nobody willing to enforce them. Honestly, any attempt to dismiss this all as groundless NIMBYism is unbelievably disgusting and makes me think that China and Russia are not the only parties running influence operations here. I do indeed see a strong push to frame the anti-datacenter position with weak/unsupported points (e.g. water usage) rather than strong and supported points (noise, electricity use, carbon footprint).

rsoto2 3mo ago

Wow it's almost like modern datacenters use way more power due to GPU consumption. Emit way more pollution. Use way more land. Make way more noise. Produce slop instead of functioning products. Do yall use your brain before chiming in and misinforming everyone?

vel0city 3mo ago

I made this comment a little bit ago, I'll share it again: I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before. A quiet, average-sized warehouse-like building in an industrial area with a big power substation next to it often didn't bother a lot of people. A giant monster of a building being built in what was previously people's backyards with howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" and starts sucking the groudwater dry is a whole different story. This is a datacenter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pzSsUHXPaUuLGaDa9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/pzSsUHXPaUuLGaDa9 I doubt many people even know its a datacenter. Its pretty much any other office building. This is also a datacenter. I imagine just about everyone living nearby knows its a datacenter. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wR4NgcWQVhJAy5Gy6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/wR4NgcWQVhJAy5Gy6 Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree there's a lot of social media frenzy in reaction to all datacenters. There are a lot of datacenters around me, and it seems like roughly nobody cared when they were built. They've been there for years, some have been operational for decades. Suddenly now, lots of people have a problem with all of them.

chasd00 3mo ago
> I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before. ok now this is something i understand and haven't thought about, thank you. I've visited the stargate construction site in Abilene TX since it's not too far from me (3hrs). The scale is indeed unlike any DC i've ever seen before. edit: "...howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" .." you're talking about XAI's data centers in Memphis right? I don't think that's a fair comparison, that was knocked together in like 100 days. Those generators are on trailers.
treis 3mo ago

f33d5173 3mo ago

The US nationalized tik tok so the chinese couldn't influence people anymore. Apparently that didn't work?

BeetleB 3mo ago

> No one ever cared about DCs before now. Just because you were not looking doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Anti-DC sentiment has been high in some places before LLMs came on to the scene. Even HN has had multiple submissions of towns in rural areas fighting not to let Meta (or similar companies) build datacenters in their town. (On the flip side, I know at least one town that welcomed them!)

Casteil 3mo ago

>No one ever cared about DCs before now. Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up. They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.

chasd00 3mo ago
where does the noise pollution come from? GPU fans? What's more noisy about a DC filled with CPUs and GPUs than a DC filled with just CPUs. I can imagine generators being noisy but that wouldn't be anything different than regular data centers. Also, so few DCs for the AI buildout are actually online where are the noise measurements taken from? I understand if people don't want a DC near them i just don't understand why they care now. I have some pretty big ones about 3miles from me and next door to both are residential areas and businesses. In fact, some of the biggest ones where i live (Dallas) are so understated you have to know it's a datacenter beforehand to even realize what you're looking at. There are some really large ones in Carrolton TX that are nestled right up to neighborhoods, i bet 95% of the people don't even know they're there and the 5% that do probably work there or host there. the carrolton dc https://maps.app.goo.gl/mv3wo96ZTuhRBkGy5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/mv3wo96ZTuhRBkGy5
- Casteil 3mo ago
  The difference in noise pollution comes from power density & power generation, if they're doing so on site. The power demand (and resulting waste heat) absolutely eclipses that of data centers of olde. If they're not generating power on site & creating noise/consuming local natural gas resources, they're guzzling grid power and almost certainly contributing to electrical rate increases that affect residential customers disproportionately.

HWR_14 3mo ago

I'm not sure why I should care about SOTA LLM development being in the US.