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I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressu

I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?

turtlebits 1mo ago
Current administration has gutted the EPA, which means no one cares about going the cheap route and running data centers off fossil fuels and water.
jrflo 1mo ago
It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.
- bpodgursky 1mo ago
  The risk is that reacting to the panic, states lock in laws with destructive moratoriums they politically can't back out of later.
- seibelj 1mo ago
  Remember when people spent hours on the weekend protesting Tesla dealerships. I guess they protected us from whatever it was. Can’t remember anymore
  - dwoldrich 1mo ago
    Burning down Tesla dealerships and exploding a cybertruk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas was oRgAnIc and had nothing to do with the machine retaliating against Elon for boosting Trump's effort to (allegedly) go after corruption.
- goatlover 1mo ago
  Tell that to the people who have to live next to them and all the people going on about how AI is going to change everything. Some outrages are based on real things. Not everything is a moral panic. It's like saying the Epstein victims (for example) are just a moral panic because society refuses to hold the rich and powerful accountable and the news cycle moves on.
- raincole 1mo ago
  I hope so. The worst case scenario is that it develops into something like nuclear aversion in Germany.
donsupreme 1mo ago
TikTok and social media
- bigyabai 1mo ago
  Of course, that's why the US wanted to buy it.
- dgellow 1mo ago
  It's more like, not having Trump, and controlling the complete manufacturing pipeline from beginning to end
kipukun 1mo ago
Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.
xnx 1mo ago
The outrage is real to the individual, but manufactured. Media (e.g. 404media, Ed Zitron) promotes anything that engages for clicks, views, and subscriptions. Other parties do it to hinder competition, weaken the US, or distract from much worse polluters.
juancn 1mo ago
One HUGE issue is that datacenters don't have an afterlife in the communities where they're located. They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices. If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised. Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
- Imustaskforhelp 1mo ago
  > Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development. The issue is an incentive one, for the companies involved in the construction. Right now, they are getting paid so much to build it fast. Time is of the greatest importance. Nothing else is mattering to anyone involved except how fast datacenters are being built. At best, this is an after-thought. As such, I believe that we have to change the incentives to create more sustainability but it requires time, discussion. Perhaps laws can help in making them more sustainable but currently, the sad reality is that for all the parties actually involved, I don't think that many truly care about the after-math or repurcussions of it as much as its the only thing that they want right now
- dylan604 1mo ago
  If the ai bubble bursts, these buildings will be able to be repurposed unlike rust belt factories. With all of that cooling, you could turn them into a weird form of multi-family housing. Or use them for indoor skate parks, kart racing tracks, whatever you can imagine. I don't think rust belt is an appropriate comparison. Also, these places don't hire that many people like a factory did. If the factory shut down, entire towns could collapse with it. If a data center shut down, maybe 20 people would notice????
- quickthrowman 1mo ago
  It’s just a big tip-up warehouse with precast walls. If you stripped out all of the extra electrical distribution and cooling equipment, you’re left with a giant warehouse which can easily be repurposed.
dgellow 1mo ago
AI inference and training GPUs require way, way more power than anything manufactured before. Like, between 2020 and 2026 we went from ~400W for an A100 to ~1400W for an NVIDIA B300. And you cannot make that happen without changing the datacenter itself. More noise, way more complicated cooling setup, new power sources, etc. Not all datacenters are created equal. The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms
- nomel 1mo ago
  > The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms Could you expand on that?
  - epolanski 1mo ago
    I don't think it's necessarily shady, but let's say that we're assisting at bets and capex spending we've never seen in history. Companies like Meta, Alphabet, etc that were drowning in cash flow and buying back their stock are now back at issuing shares, creating a huge number of SPVs, issuing debt, etc. There's a gigantic spending spirale with no signs of ending. Nvidia is financing companies to buy its own hardware. Mind you, this is nothing new in some businesses. Airbus and Boeing have been lending money to companies to buy their own airplanes forever. But its just all too much, with very little money coming. To understand how massive is the spending: even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested.
    - benji-york 1mo ago
      > even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested. Your math does not make sense. That's something like $1.5 trillion every year. That's no where near what is being spent in AI hardware buildouts on an annual basis.
      - chrisfosterelli 1mo ago
compass_copium 1mo ago
I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever. It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."
- mfnfnnf 1mo ago
  [dead]
- babelfish 1mo ago
  Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.
  - K0balt 1mo ago
    Lobster Jesus FTW.
  - ipdashc 1mo ago
    > All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK. Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going. I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.
api 1mo ago
I've done a bit of research into it, and I think it's a mix. The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy. The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling. The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem. I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling. Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much. I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.
- nemomarx 1mo ago
  It's gotta be costs, right? Everyone wants this done fast and at large scale, so they're going for any sites with existing large electrical connections I assume.
- dgellow 1mo ago
  > Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling. A closed cycle cooling system doesn't solve the overall problem of water usage. Yes you have a cycle within the datacenter, but you need to then move that energy somewhere else, out of the system. Eventually that energy needs to find its way in the environment. A close loop system for a datacenter reduces the water use on site, but actually increase electro use. If that electricity comes from a power plant that is cooled by water you just moved the problem upstream
ajkjk 1mo ago
It is real but it's about the unaccountability, dishonesty, and misanthropy of corporate overlords, rather than about the externalities of data centers per se. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one. Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing. In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.
sjoedev 1mo ago
We’re building data centers in the U.S. at an unprecedented and increasing rate [1]. Is it so hard to imagine that something which was fine at one scale may begin to cause issues at some massively higher scale? If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-center-us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen...
- savanaly 1mo ago
  Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)
  - mediaman 1mo ago
    To continue to take us off topic, there is actually pretty limited evidence that this is true. It is true that wine doesn't do anyone any good (unless you count it making people more social or something). But the effects of one glass a night is indistinguishable from zero. There are definitely statistically significant morbidity effects at 3. I've been shocked reading public health proclamations that "anything above zero" is bad, and then reading the actual underlying paper they refer to, which clearly states exactly the opposite finding. I think it is an extension of the public policy belief that the public cannot be trusted with moderation, and so therefore must be communicated to in absolutes, and nobody will read the underlying paper anyway.
    - joaovnunes 1mo ago
      isn't one glass a night already lack of moderation? by drinking a glass a night, or even weekly such as every friday night you're creating habit and dependency.
      - Carrok 1mo ago
        Everything in moderation, especially moderation.
gdulli 1mo ago
One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.
zamadatix 1mo ago
These days there always seems to be panic regardless. I find it better to look at the merits of individual claims rather than try to group everything together into a binary answer like a possible conspiracy on one thing means nothing else needs to be considered. Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere. I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already. For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list. I say this as someone who has traditionally voted for environmentally conscious options/representatives - my previously existing circle doesn't spend that much time talking about AI compared to other causes.
ok_computer 1mo ago
Small scale natural gas turbine plants are bad for local human air due to NOx emissions.
- missedthecue 1mo ago
  100% true yet even when you solve this (for example with clean hydro in the northwest), you make zero progress with the anti-datacenter people.
  - masfuerte 1mo ago
    America is huge. Why do they need to be constructed next to people's homes?
    - dylan604 1mo ago
      That's where the resources are. You wouldn't expect some uber wealthy billion dollar company to have to provide power/water needs way out in the middle of nowhere would you?
      - lenerdenator 1mo ago
        Well, to a point. I honestly don't get why, for example, we're building anything that requires a lot of water in Arizona.
        dylan604 1mo ago
        Why are we growing crops that depend on monsoon amounts of water in the desert? Because people with money and power have decided that's what they want to do.
        missedthecue 1mo ago
        The explanation has never made intuitive sense to me and the political power of almond and alfalfa farmers continues to elude me. Yes, almond farmers have money but Larry Ellison, Musk, and Sergey Brin have a shitload more. As do non-tech industries like Californian real estate developers. California has ~40 billionaires from real estate alone. That industry, and tech, and manufacturing, and everyone else is also competing for water supply. What makes almond farmers so good at procuring and maintaining political influence?
stryan 1mo ago
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent. It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI. [0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
- drfloyd51 1mo ago
  Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up? Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70! Everyone would be singing their praises.
  - john_strinlai 1mo ago
    >Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up? demand goes up + supply remains steady = price goes up.
    - tonfa 1mo ago
      Also infrastructure costs might be billed differently between industrial vs retail. (And the marginal cost on infrastructure isn't necessarily paid be the people increasing the demand)
    - robotresearcher 1mo ago
paulcole 1mo ago
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up What recent mass-media panics have been legit? For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.
lbrito 1mo ago
That's just a non sequitur. Compare the scale of datacenter construction in the past decades vs the pace post 2022. Also the general computing datacenters of the past are vastly different in societal utility vs the GPU only AI datacenters, which do just one thing
epolanski 1mo ago
AI datacenters are a completely different beast than the "normal" cloud ones. They use order of magnitudes more resources.
- spogbiper 1mo ago
  the information I have says they use 3-5x, which isn't even one order of magnitude
harimau777 1mo ago
It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right? Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.
- dylan604 1mo ago
  > Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? At some point, their 401Ks are going to depend on it.
  - harimau777 1mo ago
    I think that's another example of the social contract breaking down. Lots of people either cannot afford to invest or no longer believe that investing will allow them to afford things like a house or retirement that were traditionally part of being middle class. I imagine that things would be dramatically different if most people believed that the success of data centers would directly lead to their economic success.
  - freeone3000 1mo ago
    45.7% of Americans don’t have a 401k. That’s not a convincing argument.
    - dylan604 1mo ago
      That's more people than elected the sitting president. Numbers don't really mean what you're trying to imply. Going the other way, 1% of the population hold the vast majority of the wealth while yielding all of the power.
Lerc 1mo ago
Well they say *As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m" "As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top. What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough. A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.
- onjectic 1mo ago
  You are right this seems to be misleading in a calculated way. And just because this is a junk paper doesn’t mean the groundwater issues aren’t real. I don’t really know who would be incentivized to publish this because as you say if it’s environmentalists they risk discrediting themselves.
arjie 1mo ago
Degrowth has always been a big part of Anglophone culture. This is just the latest part of that. If you see the various parties as those downwardly mobile vs those succeeding you can automatically place people predictably into where they’ll land on various issues. It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.
yieldcrv 1mo ago
It’s not so binary Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false. But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous
ebiederm 1mo ago
Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors. Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners. Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors. Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection. All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard. If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back. I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.
- dzhiurgis 1mo ago
  > They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection. Got source for that? Because in 90%+ of cases the power prices dropped because they are baseload.
LastTrain 1mo ago
> There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. This is the trumped up rhetoric you speak of.
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readthenotes1 1mo ago
My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.
DoneWithAllThat 1mo ago
It is 100% deranged nonsense. These people have absolutely lost their minds.
esseph 1mo ago
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.
nicoburns 1mo ago
Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so. (externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).
anticorporate 1mo ago
I served two terms on my town's planning commission. It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments. In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.
TheTaytay 1mo ago
Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok -inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns… It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity. People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care. Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…
nancyminusone 1mo ago
You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.
tracerbulletx 1mo ago
Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it. I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.
- dwoldrich 1mo ago
  My thinking is most aligned with yours relative to all the other replies. Short term tulip bulb mania pricing on vidya game hardware is annoying and making me delay purchases. And my concerns for long term are about what all that heavy compute will be used for. All the grug-brained politics and popular panic hysteria about power and water and heat for AI seems to me to be a transient thing, at least with regards to inference. The power requirements for inference will drop to practically zilch once models get etched onto dedicated hardware and the dynamic state requirments become optimized. I want to know what the real plans are for all the general purpose compute and memory they are building everywhere. If inference is going to wind up being cheap or free, then that general purpose compute will in the best case be left unused and available for lease like dark fiber was after the over-buildout of the 2000's. In the worst case, all that compute will be used for probably something awful like surveillance.
colechristensen 1mo ago
>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. It's both. As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about. You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists. The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme. It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)
- remich 1mo ago
  Reminds me of how Shake Shack got rid of all of their peanut butter milkshakes years ago because one single person complained that their child with a peanut allergy couldn't have them.
Larrikin 1mo ago
The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down. But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them. If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.
smallerize 1mo ago
The article isn't about warming the planet. So you're the one trumping up something that isn't there.
Frieren 1mo ago
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. That is using FUD to avoid accountability. In this case is the last one "doubt". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt 4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent. > My skeptic meter Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD
quickthrowman 1mo ago
> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it? Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise. Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine. Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center. It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers. If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.
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Forgeties79 1mo ago
Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.
- chasd00 1mo ago
  The Texas grid is largely independent of the national grid. Abbott wants an audit to ensure data center plans comply with the rules. "Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first." It's not a pro or anti business stance it's just a deal-is-a-deal stance. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comp...
  - Forgeties79 1mo ago
    Texas rarely lets the letter of the law stand in the way of how they operate.
a-priori 1mo ago
As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end for planned facilities. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water. This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city. That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.
palmotea 1mo ago
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with. What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?
- dwoldrich 1mo ago
  Have you seen pictures of Los Angeles from space? It's a grey speck. I grew up in the smog layer, let me tell you it was disgusting and I'm sure it gave me respiratory disease. But from space, the smog blowing off every day looks like a tiny little fart because the world is huge. I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one.
  - palmotea 1mo ago
    > Have you seen pictures of Los Angeles from space? It's a grey speck. I grew up in the smog layer, let me tell you it was disgusting and I'm sure it gave me respiratory disease. But from space, the smog blowing off every day looks like a tiny little fart because the world is huge. Alright then. So I suppose you think that was "a backyard issue... [and] it [was] politics to hate on [smog]," and so the expensive efforts to mitigate it, like requiring catalytic converters and NOx mitigation should be repealed? Or not enacted in the first place? > I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one. I honestly just don't think you understand what's going on, what the issue is, so are just saying all kinds of foolish things. You should probably work on your empathy skills, and put aside your planet-sized skills of dismissal. You also mentioned "propaganda campaigns," but think about it: investors are pouring literally trillions of dollars into AI. Who do you think is going to be running the "propaganda campaigns," the people with the trillions or their much poorer opponents? And the opposition is totally organic, which is pretty easy to see. Why would common people want any of this? I mean, FFS: AI data centers are ugly, power hungry, often loud and polluting, don't employ many people, and provide a service literally marketed as a job destroyer. And then to add insult to injury, their builders attempt subvert the local democratic process with NDAs, etc.
whatsThisBtn4 1mo ago
I did some digging and lots of anti data center accounts were from India. I imagine China bought the accounts or pay $20 for a post.
ben_w 1mo ago
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it? Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important. Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters. Being within a few hundred meters of a building that's consuming tens to hundreds of megawatts will do that, yes. I have no idea how big a normal factory would be to consume that much while running.
lenerdenator 1mo ago
It's like literally any other change to society: You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town. At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive. It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain. Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.
nodesocket 1mo ago
There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it. Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market. Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.
iwontberude 1mo ago
"We've been clearing redwood trees for decades and the plots are minuscule compared to the size of all the redwoods. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?" 50 years later...
forshaper 1mo ago
It's new, noticeable, memorable, and the companies involved (tech) are uniquely unlikable. Incumbents that use more resources in ways that create unwanted externalities are better about doing things more stealthily, and look rather boring. Also they've been there the entire time, so easier to accept.
jplusequalt 1mo ago
From my research, data centers and - more importantly - the electricity required to run data centers, are consuming a lot of water. Sure you can argue that it's less than other industries, but that ignores the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure in the US. Any statistic you use right now is obsolete in 18-36 months when X times more data centers are running. Also on a local level the water use can even be significant. I don't think you can rightfully tell residents who are seeing an outsized amount of their water going to data centers that they're "panicking" over nothing.
soundworlds 1mo ago
There is a lot of conflicting information out there, partly because the resources / environmental consequences of the current rollouts are incredibly multi-dimensional, and most articles only focus on a subset of them - and there seems to be rapid innovation happening in some of the infrastructure that can void an article from a year ago. The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals. I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.
whimsicalism 1mo ago
It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.
brikym 1mo ago
I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else. Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.
qzx_pierri 1mo ago
Step 1: Convince the public (voters) that Data Centers are the evil boogeyman Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies). General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations! Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around. Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage. Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure. Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason? “Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!” Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players. Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”. i2p = dead Hyphanet = dead TOR = dead [insert self hosted service] = dead I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.
fridder 1mo ago
Amongst other issues, it is a proxy for the angst over AI.
mawadev 1mo ago
This post is quite hilarious to read, it has to be satire
- dwoldrich 1mo ago
  I try to be a fun person. But, no it wasn't satire. I find this latest satanic panic to be so cringe. If you crave religion, I suggest you find a bible and get to know Jesus because the post-modernist stuff blows.
  - mawadev 1mo ago
    I think I know what you mean, but that is a side effect of how eyeballs are collected with all the doomsday stuff, but lets be real here, what's the point of more data centers only for LLMs? I work with cloud stuff and you cannot, and I mean it, cannot believe how much compute is wasted on the tiniest of things just because.
    - dwoldrich 1mo ago
      I value your experience! I agree with you the insane buildout does not make sense. The rapidly approaching optimizations in the inference space will eliminate 99% of the current compute requirements. So what do they really need all the general compute for?? I work with cloud everyday and am disgusted by the waste - not cracking 5% utilization on huge clusters. It feels like globocorpo money laundering to me. Every once in awhile you get to see good utilization in cloud with distribution and amazing scaling and failover with big data and it all seems worthwhile. :)
Rover222 1mo ago
China is certainly thrilled with how this manufactured moral panic is playing out in the US. AI is going to be the most important technology in the world before long. The water use panic is so ridiculous. The sheep pushing it do so while sipping almond milk lattes. One almond milk latte uses the same water as tens of thousands of chat gpt requests. ~80–90 liters for one typical almond milk latte vs. ~0.3–15 mL for one ChatGPT request. Using a mid-range AI figure of ~5 mL: one latte ≈ 16,000–18,000 ChatGPT requests. Using OpenAI’s ~0.32 mL figure: one latte ≈ 250,000+ requests. Even with a higher AI estimate of 50 mL: still roughly 1,600–1,800 requests per latte.
duxup 1mo ago
It feels like there's some legit bad practices that some folks have been hit with and legit complaints. But yes online there's a populist panic about it that seems disconnected and completely driving itself without basis in reality... Locally there's folks terribly angry about fairly small data centers and they don't realize how many are around them and they never notice. But they don't want to hear it, if anyone is anything but fervently anti data center then you're Elon's friend or something. The panic reminds me of how the Great Fear in the French revolution was described folks believed everything was an indicator they were right, and denying it meant you were the bad guy ... and thus more evidence that their fear is true... Some data centers in my area I would love to live near because on the property they have big green space and wetlands surrounding them.
Tanoc 1mo ago
We built maybe two of the older less dense ones every year in most states, and that was driven by SaaS and cloud storage. The expected rate these AI datacenters would be built at if we just let these people go unopposed would be one every single week for the next four years. Something the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter that uses the equivalent electricity of fifty to sixty four person households and depending on if it's open or closed loop cooled could use the equivalent of thirty households' worth of water. That doesn't sound like a panic, that sounds like people wanting some consideration and moderation of infrastructure that's extremely disruptive and tied to a technology that's causing more damage than it's helping currently.
MrSkelter 1mo ago
Why do you assume that building data centers is critical to begin with? You seem to start with an assumption you haven’t even questioned? Just 5 years ago very few Americans thought massive data center buildout was key to the economy. Your comment about the size of the earth is confounding. How is that relevant? Raising temps 4 degrees locally is a serious issue. Yes it will be worse if it scales but it doesn’t have to in order for us to care. The tech companies could be building green data centers. Using renewable energy they are paying to add to the grid ( ie building the solar plant along with the data centers) and then flowing half the power they make back to the grid to lower prices. They could similarly work with water, purifying non drinking sources and adding to supply overall. Costs would balloon but the negative impacts would go and getting a data center would mean jobs, lower prices for energy, less carbon and clean water. Doing it the way we are - based on subsidies and pollution - is a choice.
- fragmede 1mo ago
  5 years ago was 2021. Covid was causing a lot of thoughts about the economy that I think, people who were thinking about it did actually include data centers in, given that shelter in place meant that Internet usage was up. As far as whether I think data centers are justified, the climate accords have failed to stop industrialization, so the only way forwards is through - meaning if data centers are how we get to fusion and advanced geothermal and solar and wind power because of the sheer power demands, so be it. I wish we could just get off coal and oil in the first place, but me wishing things has no effect on reality. As far as what tech companies could be doing to be green, Google's investment into Fervo Energy gives them energy that runs 24/7 with no reliance on the weather or the sun. They've got an initial plant going, all that's left is to replicate it and find cheaper ways to do it.
m4rtink 1mo ago
Regardless of the datacenter issues being true or not, I think any friction that can be applied on "AI" is good. Not to mention people pushing "AI" not really bothering with facts either. This is necessary to bring "AI" possessed people back to reality from their feverish dream world, so we can get rid of all the negative externalities of the "AI" push & finally find out what this new tech is actually genuinely useful for.

turtlebits 1mo ago

Current administration has gutted the EPA, which means no one cares about going the cheap route and running data centers off fossil fuels and water.

jrflo 1mo ago

It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.

bpodgursky 1mo ago
The risk is that reacting to the panic, states lock in laws with destructive moratoriums they politically can't back out of later.
seibelj 1mo ago
Remember when people spent hours on the weekend protesting Tesla dealerships. I guess they protected us from whatever it was. Can’t remember anymore
- dwoldrich 1mo ago
  Burning down Tesla dealerships and exploding a cybertruk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas was oRgAnIc and had nothing to do with the machine retaliating against Elon for boosting Trump's effort to (allegedly) go after corruption.
goatlover 1mo ago
Tell that to the people who have to live next to them and all the people going on about how AI is going to change everything. Some outrages are based on real things. Not everything is a moral panic. It's like saying the Epstein victims (for example) are just a moral panic because society refuses to hold the rich and powerful accountable and the news cycle moves on.
raincole 1mo ago
I hope so. The worst case scenario is that it develops into something like nuclear aversion in Germany.

donsupreme 1mo ago

TikTok and social media

bigyabai 1mo ago
Of course, that's why the US wanted to buy it.
dgellow 1mo ago
It's more like, not having Trump, and controlling the complete manufacturing pipeline from beginning to end

kipukun 1mo ago

Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.

xnx 1mo ago

The outrage is real to the individual, but manufactured. Media (e.g. 404media, Ed Zitron) promotes anything that engages for clicks, views, and subscriptions. Other parties do it to hinder competition, weaken the US, or distract from much worse polluters.

juancn 1mo ago

One HUGE issue is that datacenters don't have an afterlife in the communities where they're located. They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices. If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised. Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.

Imustaskforhelp 1mo ago
> Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development. The issue is an incentive one, for the companies involved in the construction. Right now, they are getting paid so much to build it fast. Time is of the greatest importance. Nothing else is mattering to anyone involved except how fast datacenters are being built. At best, this is an after-thought. As such, I believe that we have to change the incentives to create more sustainability but it requires time, discussion. Perhaps laws can help in making them more sustainable but currently, the sad reality is that for all the parties actually involved, I don't think that many truly care about the after-math or repurcussions of it as much as its the only thing that they want right now
dylan604 1mo ago
If the ai bubble bursts, these buildings will be able to be repurposed unlike rust belt factories. With all of that cooling, you could turn them into a weird form of multi-family housing. Or use them for indoor skate parks, kart racing tracks, whatever you can imagine. I don't think rust belt is an appropriate comparison. Also, these places don't hire that many people like a factory did. If the factory shut down, entire towns could collapse with it. If a data center shut down, maybe 20 people would notice????
quickthrowman 1mo ago
It’s just a big tip-up warehouse with precast walls. If you stripped out all of the extra electrical distribution and cooling equipment, you’re left with a giant warehouse which can easily be repurposed.

dgellow 1mo ago

AI inference and training GPUs require way, way more power than anything manufactured before. Like, between 2020 and 2026 we went from ~400W for an A100 to ~1400W for an NVIDIA B300. And you cannot make that happen without changing the datacenter itself. More noise, way more complicated cooling setup, new power sources, etc. Not all datacenters are created equal. The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms

nomel 1mo ago
> The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms Could you expand on that?
- epolanski 1mo ago
  I don't think it's necessarily shady, but let's say that we're assisting at bets and capex spending we've never seen in history. Companies like Meta, Alphabet, etc that were drowning in cash flow and buying back their stock are now back at issuing shares, creating a huge number of SPVs, issuing debt, etc. There's a gigantic spending spirale with no signs of ending. Nvidia is financing companies to buy its own hardware. Mind you, this is nothing new in some businesses. Airbus and Boeing have been lending money to companies to buy their own airplanes forever. But its just all too much, with very little money coming. To understand how massive is the spending: even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested.
  - benji-york 1mo ago
    > even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested. Your math does not make sense. That's something like $1.5 trillion every year. That's no where near what is being spent in AI hardware buildouts on an annual basis.
    - chrisfosterelli 1mo ago

compass_copium 1mo ago

I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever. It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."

mfnfnnf 1mo ago
[dead]
babelfish 1mo ago
Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.
- K0balt 1mo ago
  Lobster Jesus FTW.
- ipdashc 1mo ago
  > All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK. Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going. I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.

api 1mo ago

I've done a bit of research into it, and I think it's a mix. The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy. The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling. The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem. I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling. Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much. I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.

nemomarx 1mo ago
It's gotta be costs, right? Everyone wants this done fast and at large scale, so they're going for any sites with existing large electrical connections I assume.
dgellow 1mo ago
> Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling. A closed cycle cooling system doesn't solve the overall problem of water usage. Yes you have a cycle within the datacenter, but you need to then move that energy somewhere else, out of the system. Eventually that energy needs to find its way in the environment. A close loop system for a datacenter reduces the water use on site, but actually increase electro use. If that electricity comes from a power plant that is cooled by water you just moved the problem upstream

ajkjk 1mo ago

It is real but it's about the unaccountability, dishonesty, and misanthropy of corporate overlords, rather than about the externalities of data centers per se. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one. Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing. In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.

sjoedev 1mo ago

We’re building data centers in the U.S. at an unprecedented and increasing rate [1]. Is it so hard to imagine that something which was fine at one scale may begin to cause issues at some massively higher scale? If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-center-us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen...

savanaly 1mo ago
Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)
- mediaman 1mo ago
  To continue to take us off topic, there is actually pretty limited evidence that this is true. It is true that wine doesn't do anyone any good (unless you count it making people more social or something). But the effects of one glass a night is indistinguishable from zero. There are definitely statistically significant morbidity effects at 3. I've been shocked reading public health proclamations that "anything above zero" is bad, and then reading the actual underlying paper they refer to, which clearly states exactly the opposite finding. I think it is an extension of the public policy belief that the public cannot be trusted with moderation, and so therefore must be communicated to in absolutes, and nobody will read the underlying paper anyway.
  - joaovnunes 1mo ago
    isn't one glass a night already lack of moderation? by drinking a glass a night, or even weekly such as every friday night you're creating habit and dependency.
    - Carrok 1mo ago
      Everything in moderation, especially moderation.

gdulli 1mo ago

One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.

zamadatix 1mo ago

These days there always seems to be panic regardless. I find it better to look at the merits of individual claims rather than try to group everything together into a binary answer like a possible conspiracy on one thing means nothing else needs to be considered. Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere. I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already. For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list. I say this as someone who has traditionally voted for environmentally conscious options/representatives - my previously existing circle doesn't spend that much time talking about AI compared to other causes.

ok_computer 1mo ago

Small scale natural gas turbine plants are bad for local human air due to NOx emissions.

missedthecue 1mo ago
100% true yet even when you solve this (for example with clean hydro in the northwest), you make zero progress with the anti-datacenter people.
- masfuerte 1mo ago
  America is huge. Why do they need to be constructed next to people's homes?
  - dylan604 1mo ago
    That's where the resources are. You wouldn't expect some uber wealthy billion dollar company to have to provide power/water needs way out in the middle of nowhere would you?
    - lenerdenator 1mo ago
      Well, to a point. I honestly don't get why, for example, we're building anything that requires a lot of water in Arizona.
      - dylan604 1mo ago
        Why are we growing crops that depend on monsoon amounts of water in the desert? Because people with money and power have decided that's what they want to do.
        missedthecue 1mo ago
        The explanation has never made intuitive sense to me and the political power of almond and alfalfa farmers continues to elude me. Yes, almond farmers have money but Larry Ellison, Musk, and Sergey Brin have a shitload more. As do non-tech industries like Californian real estate developers. California has ~40 billionaires from real estate alone. That industry, and tech, and manufacturing, and everyone else is also competing for water supply. What makes almond farmers so good at procuring and maintaining political influence?

stryan 1mo ago

Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent. It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI. [0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.

drfloyd51 1mo ago
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up? Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70! Everyone would be singing their praises.
- john_strinlai 1mo ago
  >Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up? demand goes up + supply remains steady = price goes up.
  - tonfa 1mo ago
    Also infrastructure costs might be billed differently between industrial vs retail. (And the marginal cost on infrastructure isn't necessarily paid be the people increasing the demand)
  - robotresearcher 1mo ago

paulcole 1mo ago

> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up What recent mass-media panics have been legit? For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.

lbrito 1mo ago

That's just a non sequitur. Compare the scale of datacenter construction in the past decades vs the pace post 2022. Also the general computing datacenters of the past are vastly different in societal utility vs the GPU only AI datacenters, which do just one thing

epolanski 1mo ago

AI datacenters are a completely different beast than the "normal" cloud ones. They use order of magnitudes more resources.

spogbiper 1mo ago
the information I have says they use 3-5x, which isn't even one order of magnitude

harimau777 1mo ago

It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right? Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.

dylan604 1mo ago
> Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? At some point, their 401Ks are going to depend on it.
- harimau777 1mo ago
  I think that's another example of the social contract breaking down. Lots of people either cannot afford to invest or no longer believe that investing will allow them to afford things like a house or retirement that were traditionally part of being middle class. I imagine that things would be dramatically different if most people believed that the success of data centers would directly lead to their economic success.
- freeone3000 1mo ago
  45.7% of Americans don’t have a 401k. That’s not a convincing argument.
  - dylan604 1mo ago
    That's more people than elected the sitting president. Numbers don't really mean what you're trying to imply. Going the other way, 1% of the population hold the vast majority of the wealth while yielding all of the power.

Lerc 1mo ago

Well they say *As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m" "As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top. What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough. A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.

onjectic 1mo ago
You are right this seems to be misleading in a calculated way. And just because this is a junk paper doesn’t mean the groundwater issues aren’t real. I don’t really know who would be incentivized to publish this because as you say if it’s environmentalists they risk discrediting themselves.

arjie 1mo ago

Degrowth has always been a big part of Anglophone culture. This is just the latest part of that. If you see the various parties as those downwardly mobile vs those succeeding you can automatically place people predictably into where they’ll land on various issues. It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.

yieldcrv 1mo ago

It’s not so binary Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false. But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous

ebiederm 1mo ago

Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors. Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners. Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors. Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection. All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard. If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back. I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.

dzhiurgis 1mo ago
> They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection. Got source for that? Because in 90%+ of cases the power prices dropped because they are baseload.

LastTrain 1mo ago

> There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. This is the trumped up rhetoric you speak of.

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readthenotes1 1mo ago

My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.

DoneWithAllThat 1mo ago

It is 100% deranged nonsense. These people have absolutely lost their minds.

esseph 1mo ago

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.

nicoburns 1mo ago

Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so. (externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).

anticorporate 1mo ago

I served two terms on my town's planning commission. It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments. In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.

TheTaytay 1mo ago

Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok -inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns… It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity. People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care. Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…

nancyminusone 1mo ago

You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.

tracerbulletx 1mo ago

Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it. I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.

dwoldrich 1mo ago
My thinking is most aligned with yours relative to all the other replies. Short term tulip bulb mania pricing on vidya game hardware is annoying and making me delay purchases. And my concerns for long term are about what all that heavy compute will be used for. All the grug-brained politics and popular panic hysteria about power and water and heat for AI seems to me to be a transient thing, at least with regards to inference. The power requirements for inference will drop to practically zilch once models get etched onto dedicated hardware and the dynamic state requirments become optimized. I want to know what the real plans are for all the general purpose compute and memory they are building everywhere. If inference is going to wind up being cheap or free, then that general purpose compute will in the best case be left unused and available for lease like dark fiber was after the over-buildout of the 2000's. In the worst case, all that compute will be used for probably something awful like surveillance.

colechristensen 1mo ago

>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. It's both. As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about. You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists. The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme. It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)

remich 1mo ago
Reminds me of how Shake Shack got rid of all of their peanut butter milkshakes years ago because one single person complained that their child with a peanut allergy couldn't have them.

Larrikin 1mo ago

The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down. But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them. If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.

smallerize 1mo ago

The article isn't about warming the planet. So you're the one trumping up something that isn't there.

Frieren 1mo ago

> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. That is using FUD to avoid accountability. In this case is the last one "doubt". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt 4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent. > My skeptic meter Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD

quickthrowman 1mo ago

> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it? Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise. Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine. Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center. It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers. If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.

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Forgeties79 1mo ago

Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.

chasd00 1mo ago
The Texas grid is largely independent of the national grid. Abbott wants an audit to ensure data center plans comply with the rules. "Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first." It's not a pro or anti business stance it's just a deal-is-a-deal stance. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comp...
- Forgeties79 1mo ago
  Texas rarely lets the letter of the law stand in the way of how they operate.

a-priori 1mo ago

As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end for planned facilities. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water. This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city. That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.

palmotea 1mo ago

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with. What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?

dwoldrich 1mo ago
Have you seen pictures of Los Angeles from space? It's a grey speck. I grew up in the smog layer, let me tell you it was disgusting and I'm sure it gave me respiratory disease. But from space, the smog blowing off every day looks like a tiny little fart because the world is huge. I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one.
- palmotea 1mo ago
  > Have you seen pictures of Los Angeles from space? It's a grey speck. I grew up in the smog layer, let me tell you it was disgusting and I'm sure it gave me respiratory disease. But from space, the smog blowing off every day looks like a tiny little fart because the world is huge. Alright then. So I suppose you think that was "a backyard issue... [and] it [was] politics to hate on [smog]," and so the expensive efforts to mitigate it, like requiring catalytic converters and NOx mitigation should be repealed? Or not enacted in the first place? > I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one. I honestly just don't think you understand what's going on, what the issue is, so are just saying all kinds of foolish things. You should probably work on your empathy skills, and put aside your planet-sized skills of dismissal. You also mentioned "propaganda campaigns," but think about it: investors are pouring literally trillions of dollars into AI. Who do you think is going to be running the "propaganda campaigns," the people with the trillions or their much poorer opponents? And the opposition is totally organic, which is pretty easy to see. Why would common people want any of this? I mean, FFS: AI data centers are ugly, power hungry, often loud and polluting, don't employ many people, and provide a service literally marketed as a job destroyer. And then to add insult to injury, their builders attempt subvert the local democratic process with NDAs, etc.

whatsThisBtn4 1mo ago

I did some digging and lots of anti data center accounts were from India. I imagine China bought the accounts or pay $20 for a post.

ben_w 1mo ago

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it? Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important. Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters. Being within a few hundred meters of a building that's consuming tens to hundreds of megawatts will do that, yes. I have no idea how big a normal factory would be to consume that much while running.

lenerdenator 1mo ago

It's like literally any other change to society: You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town. At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive. It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain. Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.

nodesocket 1mo ago

There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it. Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market. Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.

iwontberude 1mo ago

"We've been clearing redwood trees for decades and the plots are minuscule compared to the size of all the redwoods. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?" 50 years later...

forshaper 1mo ago

It's new, noticeable, memorable, and the companies involved (tech) are uniquely unlikable. Incumbents that use more resources in ways that create unwanted externalities are better about doing things more stealthily, and look rather boring. Also they've been there the entire time, so easier to accept.

jplusequalt 1mo ago

From my research, data centers and - more importantly - the electricity required to run data centers, are consuming a lot of water. Sure you can argue that it's less than other industries, but that ignores the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure in the US. Any statistic you use right now is obsolete in 18-36 months when X times more data centers are running. Also on a local level the water use can even be significant. I don't think you can rightfully tell residents who are seeing an outsized amount of their water going to data centers that they're "panicking" over nothing.

soundworlds 1mo ago

There is a lot of conflicting information out there, partly because the resources / environmental consequences of the current rollouts are incredibly multi-dimensional, and most articles only focus on a subset of them - and there seems to be rapid innovation happening in some of the infrastructure that can void an article from a year ago. The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals. I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.

whimsicalism 1mo ago

It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.

brikym 1mo ago

I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else. Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.

qzx_pierri 1mo ago

Step 1: Convince the public (voters) that Data Centers are the evil boogeyman Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies). General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations! Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around. Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage. Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure. Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason? “Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!” Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players. Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”. i2p = dead Hyphanet = dead TOR = dead [insert self hosted service] = dead I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.

fridder 1mo ago

Amongst other issues, it is a proxy for the angst over AI.

mawadev 1mo ago

This post is quite hilarious to read, it has to be satire

dwoldrich 1mo ago
I try to be a fun person. But, no it wasn't satire. I find this latest satanic panic to be so cringe. If you crave religion, I suggest you find a bible and get to know Jesus because the post-modernist stuff blows.
- mawadev 1mo ago
  I think I know what you mean, but that is a side effect of how eyeballs are collected with all the doomsday stuff, but lets be real here, what's the point of more data centers only for LLMs? I work with cloud stuff and you cannot, and I mean it, cannot believe how much compute is wasted on the tiniest of things just because.
  - dwoldrich 1mo ago
    I value your experience! I agree with you the insane buildout does not make sense. The rapidly approaching optimizations in the inference space will eliminate 99% of the current compute requirements. So what do they really need all the general compute for?? I work with cloud everyday and am disgusted by the waste - not cracking 5% utilization on huge clusters. It feels like globocorpo money laundering to me. Every once in awhile you get to see good utilization in cloud with distribution and amazing scaling and failover with big data and it all seems worthwhile. :)

Rover222 1mo ago

China is certainly thrilled with how this manufactured moral panic is playing out in the US. AI is going to be the most important technology in the world before long. The water use panic is so ridiculous. The sheep pushing it do so while sipping almond milk lattes. One almond milk latte uses the same water as tens of thousands of chat gpt requests. ~80–90 liters for one typical almond milk latte vs. ~0.3–15 mL for one ChatGPT request. Using a mid-range AI figure of ~5 mL: one latte ≈ 16,000–18,000 ChatGPT requests. Using OpenAI’s ~0.32 mL figure: one latte ≈ 250,000+ requests. Even with a higher AI estimate of 50 mL: still roughly 1,600–1,800 requests per latte.

duxup 1mo ago

It feels like there's some legit bad practices that some folks have been hit with and legit complaints. But yes online there's a populist panic about it that seems disconnected and completely driving itself without basis in reality... Locally there's folks terribly angry about fairly small data centers and they don't realize how many are around them and they never notice. But they don't want to hear it, if anyone is anything but fervently anti data center then you're Elon's friend or something. The panic reminds me of how the Great Fear in the French revolution was described folks believed everything was an indicator they were right, and denying it meant you were the bad guy ... and thus more evidence that their fear is true... Some data centers in my area I would love to live near because on the property they have big green space and wetlands surrounding them.

Tanoc 1mo ago

We built maybe two of the older less dense ones every year in most states, and that was driven by SaaS and cloud storage. The expected rate these AI datacenters would be built at if we just let these people go unopposed would be one every single week for the next four years. Something the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter that uses the equivalent electricity of fifty to sixty four person households and depending on if it's open or closed loop cooled could use the equivalent of thirty households' worth of water. That doesn't sound like a panic, that sounds like people wanting some consideration and moderation of infrastructure that's extremely disruptive and tied to a technology that's causing more damage than it's helping currently.

MrSkelter 1mo ago

Why do you assume that building data centers is critical to begin with? You seem to start with an assumption you haven’t even questioned? Just 5 years ago very few Americans thought massive data center buildout was key to the economy. Your comment about the size of the earth is confounding. How is that relevant? Raising temps 4 degrees locally is a serious issue. Yes it will be worse if it scales but it doesn’t have to in order for us to care. The tech companies could be building green data centers. Using renewable energy they are paying to add to the grid ( ie building the solar plant along with the data centers) and then flowing half the power they make back to the grid to lower prices. They could similarly work with water, purifying non drinking sources and adding to supply overall. Costs would balloon but the negative impacts would go and getting a data center would mean jobs, lower prices for energy, less carbon and clean water. Doing it the way we are - based on subsidies and pollution - is a choice.

fragmede 1mo ago
5 years ago was 2021. Covid was causing a lot of thoughts about the economy that I think, people who were thinking about it did actually include data centers in, given that shelter in place meant that Internet usage was up. As far as whether I think data centers are justified, the climate accords have failed to stop industrialization, so the only way forwards is through - meaning if data centers are how we get to fusion and advanced geothermal and solar and wind power because of the sheer power demands, so be it. I wish we could just get off coal and oil in the first place, but me wishing things has no effect on reality. As far as what tech companies could be doing to be green, Google's investment into Fervo Energy gives them energy that runs 24/7 with no reliance on the weather or the sun. They've got an initial plant going, all that's left is to replicate it and find cheaper ways to do it.

m4rtink 1mo ago

Regardless of the datacenter issues being true or not, I think any friction that can be applied on "AI" is good. Not to mention people pushing "AI" not really bothering with facts either. This is necessary to bring "AI" possessed people back to reality from their feverish dream world, so we can get rid of all the negative externalities of the "AI" push & finally find out what this new tech is actually genuinely useful for.