5 ms·

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 beg

by sjoedev 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
      Everything in moderation, especially moderation.
    - rpdillon 2mo ago
      It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this. All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation". I think the medical establishment is quite well aligned on this. One source is the CDC, which defines moderate drinking to be roughly an order of magnitude more alcohol consumption than "one drink every Friday night." https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcohol-use.html https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcoh...
      - throwaway2037 2mo ago
        > Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. I never heard this theory before, but on the surface, it sounds reasonable. Is there any published literature about it? One thing to keep in mind when discussing "drinking in moderation": I think people will surprised to learn that each country has their own (often, very different) idea of what it means. For example, healthy alcohol consumption levels are persistently higher from UK public health sources, compared to the United States (mostly CDC). My sense (that I cannot prove): If your median alcohol consumption is higher than global average, your national health agency will have higher values for "drinking in moderation". I would love to see a comparison of wealthy (primarily) Judeo-Christian countries and their recommended limits.
        rpdillon 2mo ago
        There's something to what I wrote, but I'm realizing I don't understand it as well as I thought. As for what moderate is: I can absolutely believe it'cultural. I was intending to post from a US/EU perspective, as that's what I'm most familiar with, but your explanation makes sense.
  - AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
    According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption (1). Every molecule of alcohol is measurably bad for you physically People want to conflate their personal desires and perceived social benefits with health benefits because mental health and physical health have overlaps However they need to be separate to actually make a claim about alcohol as there are millions of people in functional communities that reject alcohol and have non of the negative effects (1) https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-safe-for-our-health https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
    - pessimizer 2mo ago
      > According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption This would be a misquote, but you didn't use quotes. The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption. > The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body. I could see why you would say that from this: > “We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,” explains Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges, But that seems to be a mixture of some language difficulty and some intentional hyperbole.
      - AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
        >The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption. How do you not then clonclude that there IS a safe amount such that you would then consume it. What about this study would make anyone who is not an alcohol drinker become one? The only answer here that is actually logical is that you accept that there are risks to drinking alcohol, and that those risks are less important to you than whatever social personal benefit that you personally get out of it
  - victorbjorklund 2mo ago
    Most modern research I have seen says there is no safe levels of alcohol where you will get no negative effects on your body. 7 glasses of wine per week isn’t that low. Is it worse than sometimes eating crap food? Maybe not. But it isn’t without risks.
  - orwin 2mo ago
    Like I said on another topic: for the average man on earth, you're probably right, the carcinogenic effect of alcohol is smaller than eating red meat. But if you are overweight or a preclinical obese, any amount of alcohol put you closer to clinical obesity.
  - whimsicalism 2mo ago
    i don't agree, i think you are just describing a measurement problem, we have a clear mechanistic understanding of why 'anything above zero' would be bad, and are able to measure this in sufficiently large populations for larger drinkers. the effect size is smaller and thus unmeasurable above the noise floor for one glass a night, but the mechanistic story is clear.
    - mediaman 2mo ago
      Simple mechanistic explanations in biology are often wrong. For example, oxidative stress does not have a linear no-threshold harm. For alcohol, almost every big study has shown either no discernible effects going from zero to 1 drink per day, or actual slight benefits going from 0 to 1 that then reverse when increasing beyond that. There is not strong consensus which of these is true, but there's definitely no real evidence that 1 drink per day is harmful as measured by all-cause mortality. See GBD 2020 in the Lancet (which showed a slight J-curve), Wood in the Lancet 2018 (optimally low risk at 100g ethanol per week, or ~1 drink per day), Zhao in Jama (no discernible negative effects at 1 drink per day, no benefits either, no J-curve), and the latest National Acadamies review showing lowest all-cause mortality at about 1 drink per day (so, a J-curve). Alcoholism has tons of negative effects. But these seem to start at around 2 drinks per day and rise rapidly from there.
      - whimsicalism 2mo ago
        I think there is a big difference in mechanisms between non-linearity and non-monotonicity, but I don't have bandwidth to reply in more detail.
mr_00ff00 2mo ago
Valid point, but this looks like (roughly) 1 billion to 5 billion in a period of 10 years. 5x in a decade. The way it’s talked about you would think it’s orders of magnitude.
- larpingscholar 2mo ago
  Rack densities have also more than doubled just in last 5 years
- pessimizer 2mo ago
  It's an order of magnitude.
  - mr_00ff00 2mo ago
    No it’s not. Look up the definition of an order of magnitude.
nkrebs13 2mo ago
Your point would stand better without the insincere analogy.
- sndodnfinr 2mo ago
  [flagged]
WarmWash 2mo ago
Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.
- kennywinker 2mo ago
  Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?
  - mr_00ff00 2mo ago
    People say this and then use AI for literally everything they do.
    - dasil003 2mo ago
      Consider that there may be large populations doing both, but the overlap might be less than the internet jockey concludes via finger-in-the-wind hypocrisy check.
    - xboxnolifes 2mo ago
      I think this is just projection.
    - cryzinger 2mo ago
      In my experience, there's not a ton of overlap between people who say this and people who use AI for everything they do... but most people who say this do use social media, cloud storage, on-demand video streaming, and plenty of other things that rely on data centers :) Not for nothing that YouTube alone is responsible for a double-digit amount of all internet traffic.
    - windexh8er 2mo ago
      The interesting thing is: they don't. Most people not on HN could give two shits about an AI generated overview on Google search, in fact if you asked most people of age they'd rather have a Google Search that worked vs what we have now. Just because the bubble here uses AI doesn't mean it's even remotely valuable for the 80%. But they've done a great job convincing a specific group of people this.
jstummbillig 2mo ago
Oh, it's absolutely easy to imagine. That is what should give us pause. We are fantastic at imagining things. We are less fantastic at being reasonable.
wat10000 2mo ago
It's not so hard to imagine that something which was fine at the old scale may cause issues at the new. At the same time, it's also not so hard to imagine that the new scale still isn't particularly large and that there are about a million more important things to worry about. The question isn't whether it's possible for something to become problematic past a certain scale. The question is whether data centers are at that point, or will be anytime soon. The actual facts and figures that are presented in opposition tend to be stripped of the larger context, which makes me skeptical. The graph you linked looks wild, but in a country that spends two trillion dollars per year on all construction, is the jump from $1 billion/month to $4 billion/month very important?
- Forgeties79 2mo ago
  I feel like this has to be reiterated every single AI discussion. Anytime someone points out something it enables, someone has to go “well that existed before” as if the scale is somehow 1) irrelevant and 2) not orders of magnitude larger. If you gave me one night, a pot of coffee, and few scruples, I could probably dump hundreds if not thousands of fake posts on the internet. Hundreds would easily break through and who knows, a handful might even go viral on Twitter. Yeah I could do that 5 years ago, but not nearly at the same scale. Maybe a few dozen? Back to DCs: it’s like saying “well we had coal fire plants years ago.” Ok…well there are more now generating way more power and spewing way more pollution. It’s not the same situation anymore. This DC build out is massive.
  - wat10000 2mo ago
    I think both sides of the debate are guilty of being too vague about it, probably because being more precise is pretty difficult. "Data centers already existed." "The scale is vastly larger than before." OK, this exchange contains zero new information. "Already existed" doesn't mean it's fine now, and "vastly larger" doesn't mean it's bad now. This DC buildout is massive? Yep. So massive that it merits substantial public opposition? Citation needed on that part. And any citation that compares current or projected DC activity with past DC activity is missing the point. Two concrete examples: the above graph showing a multi-fold increase in construction expenditures is useless, because it gives no indication of the absolute significance of the current level. It tells me very little. For a better example, here's a graph of RAM prices over the past year and a half: https://whereismyram.com/us/price-chart https://whereismyram.com/us/price-chart. Here, we can see that data center buildout is big enough to massively affect the global market for an important commodity, and we can translate that into some sort of understanding of how this affects ordinary people.
throwaway2037 2mo ago
One thing I never see pushback about: Northern Virginia has the highest density of data centers in the United States. Google tells me there are over 600 data centers in Virginia (that is nuts!). This build-out has been happening for more than 25 years. Until very recently, I have not heard any pushback from people in that area. What am I missing?
- chasd00 2mo ago
  > What am I missing? nation states trying to slow progress. I was pretty perplexed as well, now we're concerned about data centers? They're everywhere already. Oh wait, it's a FUD campaign sewn by competing nations using social media so they can, hopefully, catch up. That makes a lot more sense. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
  - techbrah9000 2mo ago
    Of course that's exactly what a US propaganda mill would say Just as complicit in obfuscation of reality through quantity of time spent in a topic: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
  - jst1fthsdys 2mo ago
    Yeah man, I'm sure the largest industrial mfg country in the world is desperate to buy time to outbuild the decaying husk of a mfg country that can't even build the transformers needed to power these data centers.
- jst1fthsdys 2mo ago
  Better question, why don't they just build them in N. Virginia then?
  - throwaway2037 2mo ago
    I assume that data center builders can get cheaper land and/or lower taxes and/or easier regulations elsewhere. Also, the US is gigantic, so you want to have data centers geographically dispersed to reduce ping time for customers.
sieabahlpark 2mo ago
[dead]
maxerickson 2mo ago
A nuclear power station puts out many times the waste heat of the sites mentioned in the article. We've apparently mostly made peace with the local impacts of those. Thermal efficiency is in the 30s, so roughly 2x the electrical output as waste heat. Looks like waste heat from nuclear is still quite a bit more than from data centers. Data centers are growing quickly and that's not including the waste heat from generating the energy the consume, just taking a quick look at the relative direct emission.
- renata 2mo ago
  > A nuclear power station puts out many times the waste heat of the sites mentioned in the article. We've apparently mostly made peace with the local impacts of those. Although to be fair, when was the last time we actually managed to build a new nuclear plant?
  - philipkglass 2mo ago
    The newest American nuclear reactors to enter service were Vogtle units 3 and 4, in 2023 and 2024: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Commissioning_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
    - renata 2mo ago
      Hmm, I hadn't considered additions to existing plants versus greenfield plants, fair point. Presumably those have less local resistance and permitting issues considering it only took fifteen years from application to generating power. Guess there's probably a market in selling existing datacenters to the hyperscalers to expand them!
m4rtink 2mo ago
So we got a lot or bike paths and roads instead of the old railway tracks, many of them built during railway mania boom cycles. I wonder what will we use these shoddy windowless boxes for ?

by sjoedev 2mo ago

savanaly 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
    Everything in moderation, especially moderation.
  - rpdillon 2mo ago
    It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this. All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation". I think the medical establishment is quite well aligned on this. One source is the CDC, which defines moderate drinking to be roughly an order of magnitude more alcohol consumption than "one drink every Friday night." https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcohol-use.html https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcoh...
    - throwaway2037 2mo ago
      > Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. I never heard this theory before, but on the surface, it sounds reasonable. Is there any published literature about it? One thing to keep in mind when discussing "drinking in moderation": I think people will surprised to learn that each country has their own (often, very different) idea of what it means. For example, healthy alcohol consumption levels are persistently higher from UK public health sources, compared to the United States (mostly CDC). My sense (that I cannot prove): If your median alcohol consumption is higher than global average, your national health agency will have higher values for "drinking in moderation". I would love to see a comparison of wealthy (primarily) Judeo-Christian countries and their recommended limits.
      - rpdillon 2mo ago
        There's something to what I wrote, but I'm realizing I don't understand it as well as I thought. As for what moderate is: I can absolutely believe it'cultural. I was intending to post from a US/EU perspective, as that's what I'm most familiar with, but your explanation makes sense.
- AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
  According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption (1). Every molecule of alcohol is measurably bad for you physically People want to conflate their personal desires and perceived social benefits with health benefits because mental health and physical health have overlaps However they need to be separate to actually make a claim about alcohol as there are millions of people in functional communities that reject alcohol and have non of the negative effects (1) https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-safe-for-our-health https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
  - pessimizer 2mo ago
    > According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption This would be a misquote, but you didn't use quotes. The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption. > The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body. I could see why you would say that from this: > “We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,” explains Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges, But that seems to be a mixture of some language difficulty and some intentional hyperbole.
    - AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
      >The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption. How do you not then clonclude that there IS a safe amount such that you would then consume it. What about this study would make anyone who is not an alcohol drinker become one? The only answer here that is actually logical is that you accept that there are risks to drinking alcohol, and that those risks are less important to you than whatever social personal benefit that you personally get out of it
- victorbjorklund 2mo ago
  Most modern research I have seen says there is no safe levels of alcohol where you will get no negative effects on your body. 7 glasses of wine per week isn’t that low. Is it worse than sometimes eating crap food? Maybe not. But it isn’t without risks.
- orwin 2mo ago
  Like I said on another topic: for the average man on earth, you're probably right, the carcinogenic effect of alcohol is smaller than eating red meat. But if you are overweight or a preclinical obese, any amount of alcohol put you closer to clinical obesity.
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  i don't agree, i think you are just describing a measurement problem, we have a clear mechanistic understanding of why 'anything above zero' would be bad, and are able to measure this in sufficiently large populations for larger drinkers. the effect size is smaller and thus unmeasurable above the noise floor for one glass a night, but the mechanistic story is clear.
  - mediaman 2mo ago
    Simple mechanistic explanations in biology are often wrong. For example, oxidative stress does not have a linear no-threshold harm. For alcohol, almost every big study has shown either no discernible effects going from zero to 1 drink per day, or actual slight benefits going from 0 to 1 that then reverse when increasing beyond that. There is not strong consensus which of these is true, but there's definitely no real evidence that 1 drink per day is harmful as measured by all-cause mortality. See GBD 2020 in the Lancet (which showed a slight J-curve), Wood in the Lancet 2018 (optimally low risk at 100g ethanol per week, or ~1 drink per day), Zhao in Jama (no discernible negative effects at 1 drink per day, no benefits either, no J-curve), and the latest National Acadamies review showing lowest all-cause mortality at about 1 drink per day (so, a J-curve). Alcoholism has tons of negative effects. But these seem to start at around 2 drinks per day and rise rapidly from there.
    - whimsicalism 2mo ago
      I think there is a big difference in mechanisms between non-linearity and non-monotonicity, but I don't have bandwidth to reply in more detail.

mr_00ff00 2mo ago

Valid point, but this looks like (roughly) 1 billion to 5 billion in a period of 10 years. 5x in a decade. The way it’s talked about you would think it’s orders of magnitude.

larpingscholar 2mo ago
Rack densities have also more than doubled just in last 5 years
pessimizer 2mo ago
It's an order of magnitude.
- mr_00ff00 2mo ago
  No it’s not. Look up the definition of an order of magnitude.

nkrebs13 2mo ago

Your point would stand better without the insincere analogy.

sndodnfinr 2mo ago
[flagged]

WarmWash 2mo ago

Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.

kennywinker 2mo ago
Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?
- mr_00ff00 2mo ago
  People say this and then use AI for literally everything they do.
  - dasil003 2mo ago
    Consider that there may be large populations doing both, but the overlap might be less than the internet jockey concludes via finger-in-the-wind hypocrisy check.
  - xboxnolifes 2mo ago
    I think this is just projection.
  - cryzinger 2mo ago
    In my experience, there's not a ton of overlap between people who say this and people who use AI for everything they do... but most people who say this do use social media, cloud storage, on-demand video streaming, and plenty of other things that rely on data centers :) Not for nothing that YouTube alone is responsible for a double-digit amount of all internet traffic.
  - windexh8er 2mo ago
    The interesting thing is: they don't. Most people not on HN could give two shits about an AI generated overview on Google search, in fact if you asked most people of age they'd rather have a Google Search that worked vs what we have now. Just because the bubble here uses AI doesn't mean it's even remotely valuable for the 80%. But they've done a great job convincing a specific group of people this.

jstummbillig 2mo ago

Oh, it's absolutely easy to imagine. That is what should give us pause. We are fantastic at imagining things. We are less fantastic at being reasonable.

wat10000 2mo ago

It's not so hard to imagine that something which was fine at the old scale may cause issues at the new. At the same time, it's also not so hard to imagine that the new scale still isn't particularly large and that there are about a million more important things to worry about. The question isn't whether it's possible for something to become problematic past a certain scale. The question is whether data centers are at that point, or will be anytime soon. The actual facts and figures that are presented in opposition tend to be stripped of the larger context, which makes me skeptical. The graph you linked looks wild, but in a country that spends two trillion dollars per year on all construction, is the jump from $1 billion/month to $4 billion/month very important?

Forgeties79 2mo ago
I feel like this has to be reiterated every single AI discussion. Anytime someone points out something it enables, someone has to go “well that existed before” as if the scale is somehow 1) irrelevant and 2) not orders of magnitude larger. If you gave me one night, a pot of coffee, and few scruples, I could probably dump hundreds if not thousands of fake posts on the internet. Hundreds would easily break through and who knows, a handful might even go viral on Twitter. Yeah I could do that 5 years ago, but not nearly at the same scale. Maybe a few dozen? Back to DCs: it’s like saying “well we had coal fire plants years ago.” Ok…well there are more now generating way more power and spewing way more pollution. It’s not the same situation anymore. This DC build out is massive.
- wat10000 2mo ago
  I think both sides of the debate are guilty of being too vague about it, probably because being more precise is pretty difficult. "Data centers already existed." "The scale is vastly larger than before." OK, this exchange contains zero new information. "Already existed" doesn't mean it's fine now, and "vastly larger" doesn't mean it's bad now. This DC buildout is massive? Yep. So massive that it merits substantial public opposition? Citation needed on that part. And any citation that compares current or projected DC activity with past DC activity is missing the point. Two concrete examples: the above graph showing a multi-fold increase in construction expenditures is useless, because it gives no indication of the absolute significance of the current level. It tells me very little. For a better example, here's a graph of RAM prices over the past year and a half: https://whereismyram.com/us/price-chart https://whereismyram.com/us/price-chart. Here, we can see that data center buildout is big enough to massively affect the global market for an important commodity, and we can translate that into some sort of understanding of how this affects ordinary people.

throwaway2037 2mo ago

One thing I never see pushback about: Northern Virginia has the highest density of data centers in the United States. Google tells me there are over 600 data centers in Virginia (that is nuts!). This build-out has been happening for more than 25 years. Until very recently, I have not heard any pushback from people in that area. What am I missing?

chasd00 2mo ago
> What am I missing? nation states trying to slow progress. I was pretty perplexed as well, now we're concerned about data centers? They're everywhere already. Oh wait, it's a FUD campaign sewn by competing nations using social media so they can, hopefully, catch up. That makes a lot more sense. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
- techbrah9000 2mo ago
  Of course that's exactly what a US propaganda mill would say Just as complicit in obfuscation of reality through quantity of time spent in a topic: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
- jst1fthsdys 2mo ago
  Yeah man, I'm sure the largest industrial mfg country in the world is desperate to buy time to outbuild the decaying husk of a mfg country that can't even build the transformers needed to power these data centers.
jst1fthsdys 2mo ago
Better question, why don't they just build them in N. Virginia then?
- throwaway2037 2mo ago
  I assume that data center builders can get cheaper land and/or lower taxes and/or easier regulations elsewhere. Also, the US is gigantic, so you want to have data centers geographically dispersed to reduce ping time for customers.

sieabahlpark 2mo ago

[dead]

maxerickson 2mo ago

A nuclear power station puts out many times the waste heat of the sites mentioned in the article. We've apparently mostly made peace with the local impacts of those. Thermal efficiency is in the 30s, so roughly 2x the electrical output as waste heat. Looks like waste heat from nuclear is still quite a bit more than from data centers. Data centers are growing quickly and that's not including the waste heat from generating the energy the consume, just taking a quick look at the relative direct emission.

renata 2mo ago
> A nuclear power station puts out many times the waste heat of the sites mentioned in the article. We've apparently mostly made peace with the local impacts of those. Although to be fair, when was the last time we actually managed to build a new nuclear plant?
- philipkglass 2mo ago
  The newest American nuclear reactors to enter service were Vogtle units 3 and 4, in 2023 and 2024: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Commissioning_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
  - renata 2mo ago
    Hmm, I hadn't considered additions to existing plants versus greenfield plants, fair point. Presumably those have less local resistance and permitting issues considering it only took fifteen years from application to generating power. Guess there's probably a market in selling existing datacenters to the hyperscalers to expand them!

m4rtink 2mo ago

So we got a lot or bike paths and roads instead of the old railway tracks, many of them built during railway mania boom cycles. I wonder what will we use these shoddy windowless boxes for ?