4 ms·
I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them. T
by redlewel 2mo ago
I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them.
The newer ones are using on-site generators that are insanely loud and require multiples more power than datacenters have historically needed. For a rack with traditional servers with just RAM/CPU/Drives, 5kW is sufficient in most cases.
When you have racks that are full of 4U GPU systems that pull 3-6kW each, the power requirements per rack shoot up to 60kW+(with whole rack setups blowing past 100kW). So an AI datacenter requires over 20x the power compared to what they needed in the past. This either strains the power grid near the DC or they need to create on-site power to fulfill demand, which has noise and other concerns.
I work near a datacenter and you can't hear significant noise from the outside, maybe a slight humming sound but quieter than traffic. This is a DC that has been around for over a decade and uses power from the grid since most of the loads are non-GPU based.
- ransom1538 2mo agoLol. A data center is no more than a industrial bread bakery (oddly specific i know). The entire anti-data US center is ran by China. EG. You can run a rack of servers in your closet. China is doing a great job.
- trollbridge 2mo agoAre you sure about that? I can't think of any bread bakeries pulling 2.2 gigawatts, which is us-east-1 pulls.
- cpburns2009 2mo agoIf you're complaining about us-east-1, you either moved into its backyard or didn't know it existed there for 20 years.
- dylan604 2mo agoDon't think there was a complaint as you're interpreting. It was just an example of known power usage.
- trollbridge 2mo agoI’m in -3’s future backyard, but -1 has been there a while and is kind of the archetype of what a gigawatt facility looks like (the 2.2GW is spread across quite a few AZs, to be fair).
- linksnapzz 2mo agoThere are industrial bakeries that burn that much natural gas (powerwise); although the bakery probably smells better.
- maccard 2mo agoWhat bakery are you thinking of that pulls the equivalent of a mid sized nuclear power plant? Because you’re off by an order of magnitude I think. (2.2MW maybe)
- linksnapzz 2mo agoI suspect the Nabisco plant in Chicago pulls about ~12 million therms worth of natural gas, at 30kwh per therm, that's pretty significant.
- NohatCoder 2mo agoYou "suspect", but your suspicion comes with a unit of energy, which simply does not make sense in the context. The rest of us are talking about effect.
- linksnapzz 2mo agoShrug You asked about energy usage; but I have no idea as to how that bakery's natural gas usage affects the people surrounding it. The smell of freshly baked fig newtons might offset the possible increased cost of gas-per-cubic-foot.
- NohatCoder 2mo agoI guess we can go the long way round. How often does the bakery use 12 million therms of natural gas?
- 8note 2mo agook, but like, my stove uses some therms of natural gas, but its not at all comparable in terms of scale to a data center. what makes this bakery comparable in terms of energy usage and pollution?
- rsoto2 2mo agoLol the entire pro-data US center is ran by elon musk and the other cronies that bribed the Trump admin to let them violate the clean air act. They use gullible losers that will swallow their propaganda whole and promise them "AGI."
- Natfan 2mo agohttps://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo
- unethical_ban 2mo agoAdversaries are happy to rule up democracies in any way possible, and it is foolish to think that there are zero concerns about placement of AI datacenters.
- redlewel 2mo agoYou need cooling, power, and at the data center I used to work at they literally ran out of power and couldn't get any more from the city. They actually built a new building in the parking lot so they had cause to request more power
- cosmic_cheese 2mo agoSite selection also isn't very thoughtful. A lot of pre-AI datacenters were placed a good distance away from places where people live, but time to operation seems to be the overwhelming priority now which is pushing them to build right in the middle of or next to developed areas.
- kranke155 2mo agoI don’t understand why they’re doing this? Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive they’d rather build on top or right next to housing? Is it the water supply ? I don’t understand why someone would do something so clearly self defeating
- cucumber3732842 2mo ago> Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive Yes. Source: learned more than I want to about solar farm development.
- Teever 2mo agoAnytime you see someone repeatedly doing a bad thing the reason they're doing it is because they want to do it and there are isn't sufficient push-back or consequences for doing it. Until a country that is defended by nuclear weapons like France decides to send a few jet fighters to force the private jet carrying someone like Musk or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, and convicted and forced to spend many years to decades inside a little box with little contact with the outside world this kind of stuff will keep happening. Honestly, the stuff that the oligarchs are doing now is going to seem minor compared to what they'll be doing a decade or two from now if there's no push back.
- JuniperMesos 2mo agoThe French government already did this to Pavel Durov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel... , which I'm sure people like Zuckerberg and Musk paid attention to and developed countermeasures for. After the arrest, Telegram started cooperating more with warrants from various countries' national police. Signal has better security and privacy guarantees than Telegram and is probably what ordinary people should be using instead of Telegram.
- rsoto2 2mo agoYes, the AI Datacenters are much worse for the environment. xAI is using methane-turbines to power theirs, and they are allowed to pollute your communities because they bribed the Trump admin. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/16/elon-musk-xai-datacenters-trump-administration https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/16/elon-musk... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/data-centers/elon-musk-xai-unpermitted-generators https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/data-centers/elon-musk-... https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1014655584252361 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1014655584252361
- mrngld 2mo agoI have some degree of sympathy for data centers, and anyone else that needs power, only because of how broken our regulatory state is on approving new transmission. To be clear, it's not just data centers that have this problem. Journalists have been spilling digital ink on this topic as it relates to solar and wind farms as well. It's also part of the thing that'd hold back rapid deployment of nuclear. If there's a strong enough economic incentive then yeah people are going to try to optimize around broken government.
- saturn8601 2mo agoThe country first and foremost should serve all its citizens. Not just wealthy people and not just people of the dominant ethnic background. The xAI data centers sits right next to a poor african american community and Musk used emergency turbines that were not designed for continuous daily use. He utilized a loophole to get past those restrictions. Those turbines are burning gasses inefficiently and producing a lot of pollution that is directly harming those residents who likely don't even materially benefit from all this effort. These people likely had nothing to do with the delay in solar installs, or decades of nuclear NIMBYism yet now because Musk cannot fall behind, they now have to suffer with no one in government caring about them. Its a real life hell, they cannot physically resist or cause any trouble or else the government will come and kill them where they stand, they cannot afford to move away because who would buy their houses (and why should they abandon their life's community for something they had no part in?) so they sit and suffer day after day with declining health for their family. Framed like this, Musk is like a locust who has come to devour whatever good there was and then move onto the next prey.
- e40 2mo ago> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now Point to _any_ analysis that says the current building boom is anything but speculation. xAI is renting out their DC space. I think I read that Google is, too. DC buildout is purely a gold rush. A play to be the one left standing after all the weaker players die.
- catlover76 2mo agoYou are trying to pick a fight with a post that isn't making the point you assume it is. All that guy is saying is that there is a rush to build them, which is objectively true. Whether or not the datacenters return on the investment is a different question.
- jacobgkau 2mo agoThere's a demand for data centers, but maybe not a demand for actual usages of the data centers. That's the distinction I think they were trying to make by pointing to existing data centers not even being used to full capacity in-house (and being rented out instead).
- jquery 2mo agoSpeculative demand is still demand.
- MasterScrat 2mo ago> xAI is renting out their DC space. I think I read that Google is, too. You’re probably thinking of Meta. Google renting GPUs is a less recent phenomenon, to say the least.
- euleriancon 2mo agoxAI is renting out compute https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-25-billion-per-month-for-compute/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-2...
- s1artibartfast 2mo ago
- itsrobreally 2mo agoIn Nashville they messed up by trying to build one next to the zoo, a beloved and popular attraction (higher attendance than our NFL franchise). The public outcry was swift and effective, new zoning rules were passed last night. https://nashvillebanner.com/2026/07/21/nashville-data-center-regulations-moratorium/ https://nashvillebanner.com/2026/07/21/nashville-data-center...
- dylan604 2mo agoThat's great for future sites, but how is that going to improve the zoo's situation?
- jacobgkau 2mo agoFrom reading the article, it sounds like one of the three items passed was an extension of a moratorium on data center building specifically for the area around the zoo. Another item involves eminent domain for the city to buy the land next to the zoo for use as city office space instead. So it pretty directly impacts the zoo's situation.
- dylan604 2mo agoah, I misread the comment as the data center was built by the zoo. skimmed past the "trying to" detail
- ecommerceguy 2mo agoIs there really demand for 4000 plus data centers? I have a feeling that's shooting a bit above the mark (10x).
- oceanplexian 2mo agoIf all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters, absolutely, it will be the most desired commodity in the world surpassing all others.
- bigbadfeline 2mo ago> If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters. How can an "approximation of human intelligence" be "scaled by building more datacenters"? That doesn't even make sense. You don't need more datacenters to demonstrate that you have an "approximation of human intelligence", all you need is a lab and at most 1 (one) datacenter. Only after you've demonstrated you know how to deliver the goods, you can think about scaling, retail and marketing. The demand for the current "approximation" is out there for all to see, it's nothing like the "most desired commodity in the world", in fact, it needs huge inflationary subsidies in order to sustain some sort of demand-for-show.
- holbrad 2mo agoPrecisely, if we expect AI/LLM progress to continue as it currently is, then data centers seem like a sure fire bet. They will just print money if AI reached that level.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo agoThe whole thing is a motte and bailey game. The largest of cloud companies might build a data center which is 1GW. There won't be 4000 of those and it won't be next to your house. A huge number of commercial office buildings already have a 100kW data center in them, and have for decades, without anyone having any reason to know or care. For those 4000 is certainly an underestimate.
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoI wonder how long till they start scooping up old abandoned towns?
- SoftTalker 2mo agoThat's what they should do. Datacenters don't need to be in anyone's backyard. The US has vast amounts of unused land as well as urban brownfields that are sitting empty. Put them there.
- neutronicus 2mo agoYou're not getting it into an urban brownfield unless it comes with price controls on energy. I live amongst the urban brownfields of Baltimore and our politicians are under tons of pressure to stop data center projects (and to tar and feather utility executives).
- cucumber3732842 2mo ago>(and to tar and feather utility executives) Has anyone thought about perhaps tar and feathering the politicans and bureaucrats that wrote all the rules that make greenfield development with a transmission line tap a non-starter? The developers would looooove to not deal with brownfields, not have pissed off neighbors, not deal in complex urban sites, etc, but greenfield above a tiny size is effectively outlawed piecemeal in many states.
- neutronicus 2mo agoProfits are high and bills are high it’s not that deep.
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoHeck, abandoned means those power generators are ripe for it, and that power plant you want to build? You've got the room!
- 2mo ago
- fnordsensei 2mo agoThey could build them somewhere where people don't care. But you can't co-opt 70 years of public infrastructure investments out in the middle of nowhere.
- rconti 2mo agoI don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them. They're a proxy for peoples' sense of powerlessness about what's going on around them. Skyrocketing electricity prices, the sense that elected officials aren't looking out for their interests, job losses, etc. They're a convenient proxy for many disparate concerns because they represent all of those things in one way or another.
- srmatto 2mo agoI think there's truth to what you're saying but I also think there's truth to what people are experiencing and perceiving. A highly power and/or water consumptive data center being installed in a town or city is pretty much a perfect embodiment of people's frustrations. It consumes tons of power and/or water and therefore drives up utility costs for the locals or pollutes the air with diesel exhaust. And it doesn't create jobs so it's just frankly some rich cabal of capitalists getting richer while people's lives continue to feel materially worse. I can't think of a better embodiment of the sort of confluence of crumminess that seems to be underway.
- econ 2mo agohttps://www.tumblr.com/geneseelibby/35053843499/a-horrible-monster-july-19-1880-the-standard https://www.tumblr.com/geneseelibby/35053843499/a-horrible-m...
- bjustin 2mo agoAmazingly, they managed to _undersell_ the ill effects that the oil industry would have on even just the US, such as the oil-driven military actions we've taken over the years.
- illliillll 2mo ago[flagged]
- bjustin 2mo ago
- moduspol 2mo agoIt's that, but it's also that AI is not visibly providing any tangible benefit for most people. It'd be one thing if you had to tolerate a datacenter at the edge of town, but at least now you have a robot to fold your clean clothes. Instead, you get the threat of losing your job, the privilege of dealing with AI customer service chatbots, and higher energy costs. I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them. This would make sense if the ones being targeted are the ones that do this, but that isn't the case. Moreover, those would be simple to address, e.g. pass an ordinance that prohibits long-term operation of fossil fuel generators, defined as operating them for more than 40 days out of each 700. Or impose a reasonable decibel limit as measured at the property line. Meanwhile people are proposing "data center moratoriums" and so on, even if the data center would be built in a non-residential area with a closed-loop cooling system and generate its power from a completely silent and non-polluting solar+battery system. Which makes it pretty obvious that the motivation is something else.