5 ms·

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.

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.
  - Ydarbleoj 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - rpdillon 2mo ago
      This is a copy-pasted comment from elsewhere in the thread, which I've already responded to. A bit much calling others "incredibly lazy".
- jmmcd 2mo ago
  AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. At least data centres enable me to communicate with distant colleagues, watch enriching movies, and use very strong AI tools to accelerate my research.
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    > AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. It's actually significantly more environmentally friendly than heating to above 68F in the winter in most cases, since most AC is done with heat pumps but most heating is oil/gas (100% fossil fuel consumption) or resistive electric heaters (dramatically less efficient than heat pumps). On top of that AC use aligns strongly with solar generation output while heating load does the opposite, which means that even when heating is done with electricity it comes disproportionately from gas turbines at natural gas peaker plants.
  - atmavatar 2mo ago
    Data centers also enable the NSA to store the metadata and contents of every phone call you make and police to (without a warrant) to track anyone who's walked in front of your doorbell or many street corners in your city. They also store all the location data your phone collects for Google or Apple, nearly your entire internet history collected surreptitiously because many sites automatically use your GMail or Facebook logins, and your entire purchase history collected via Visa or MasterCard. And even better: all of that data is aggregated together and stored in its entirety several times over across multiple data centers because everyone shares your data with everyone else, such that if any single of more than a dozen data centers is ever compromised, it all gets leaked to whomever compromised it.
  - stasomatic 2mo ago
    My building is leaky. The association won't fix it. How about this compromise, you set yours to 74 to compensate for my 68. Fair enough, or will you say I should move?
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
- himata4113 2mo ago
  It directly and indirectly increases your quality of life and it is something you use every single day.
  - kennywinker 2mo ago
    What is? The opposition is to datacenters being built to meet imagined future demand for LLMs. Are LLMs directly and indirectly increasing my quality of life? Please explain how, because so far it seems to me like they’re decreasing my quality of life.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  > Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people." * yes, one to one hundred and twenty, there's that much uncertainty in the estimates for the AI.
  - DeluluDon 2mo ago
    >Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, In what country do you not have an electric bill?
    - ben_w 2mo ago
      It can be done even in rich countries, but the point is I think the opposite of your implication: I am claiming that it is hard to avoid causing costs to one's community (and that almost everything causes more impact than one might expect), I am not claiming to have achieved such avoidance.
  - magicalist 2mo ago
    When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result. Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...
    - ben_w 2mo ago
      Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it. I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.
- fourseventy 2mo ago
  You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.
  - Symbiote 2mo ago
    All of those are the old, smaller scale.
    - somehnguy 2mo ago
      Can you elaborate on the scale difference?
      - kennywinker 2mo ago
        I have a small home server setup. It’s stores all my data, and i can transcode video and stuff on it no problem. I put in a GPU to run some local LLM stuff. Now the whole thing generates enough heat and noise that I notice it if i sit near the cabinet it’s in. Scale matters.
      - Symbiote 2mo ago
        Racked servers pre-GPU used about 1kW each at high load. 5-10kW for a rack (20 to 40 servers) was common, much more than this would be a special thing. AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers. Extrapolate to the whole building and you have a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere. Instead of being similar to light industry, the hyperscale AI datacentre is using as much energy as a large steelworks.
  - Ydarbleoj 2mo ago
    You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy. One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.
- ryanisnan 2mo ago
  What a weird line to draw. Data centres do a lot more than what you report. E.g. they might host your electronic health records. They might host census data, or weather data, or your kid's school learning management system.
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  "i can't eat a cargo container so it's useless" -guy who can only see one level up the chain of abstractions that allow him to fill his belly.
  - kennywinker 2mo ago
    Please, elaborate on how hyperscale ai datacenters are going to help fill my belly.
    - whimsicalism 2mo ago
      maybe i'm working on software for supply chain routing. maybe i'm making a commodity trading bot that more accurately prices wheat futures. AI helps with both of those things.
      - kennywinker 2mo ago
        > maybe i'm working on software for supply chain routing. We have supply chain routing software already. Humans wrote it, humans can improve it. Getting ai in the loop won’t change the realities of the supply chain, except maybe they’ll hire less programmers. > maybe i'm making a commodity trading bot that more accurately prices wheat futures How does that benefit me? Further financializing food production seems like a bad thing. Not to mention all of what you’ve described could be run on a $1000 consumer GPU in a PC somewhere.
        whimsicalism 2mo ago
        This is what I mean about not understanding the second order transitive labor that goes into fulfilling people's wants. Making supply chain routing software cheaper, improving it for less money → all of these things directly make the products in grocery stores cheaper. "Further financializing food production seems like a bad thing." → Why assume rather than approaching with curiosity? Commodity futures are, again, critical to global supply chains and food markets. Farmers in eastern Europe actually look at futures markets to determine when and if to plant their harvest, cargo ships that transport your food buy futures in oil & gas so that they can have stable fuel costs to provide you with your food, etc. etc. Speculating on the future gives rise to the corrections necessary for providing things that people want in the future.
- vmchale 2mo ago
  > A data center costs my community No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers. Anything they like to consume, no matter how frivolous, is accepted as morally better on a metaphysical level. > further enriches a few already rich people. Meat eaters damaging the Earth is okay because it's "equal"? 300 million people deciding they're entitled to consume anything they want in ever-increasing quantities is a problem because... there's 300 million of them!
  - kennywinker 2mo ago
    Listen, I am no meat advocate. I just see a very clear link between the resources required to make meat and the benefit to the person eating the meat. Where data centers cause local and global harm, while not benefitting the locale or the globe. Which is why people don’t like them. And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc. We have a finite budget for water usage, and i’d allocate that to non-meat food > virtually anything else > meat > data centers > golf courses. > No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers I’m not entirely sure of the scale of pornhub’s operations, but i feel like one large ai data center uses more resources than all of pornhub’s data center usage around the globe. But maybe i’m wrong there, and the hub was just flying under the radar.
    - whimsicalism 2mo ago
      > And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc. Switching from meat to non-meat unequivocally lowers your GHG and water footprint and there's really no room for quibbling on this unless you are switching to a diet of exclusively almonds
- ares623 2mo ago
  The datacenter means I don't have read/write YAML anymore. Checkmate. I would burn the world than ever deal with YAML again.
  - kennywinker 2mo ago
    This is the only response disagreeing with me that i consider valid. The man hates YAML. Hopefully you’re ok with Markdown…
- ETH_start 2mo ago
  Data centers generate export revenue. For a country that has struggled to export as much as it imports, that seems very valuable to its national economic health, and sabotaging one of the few major export industries, and one that's growing rapidly at that, seems counterproductive. Data centers also generate local tax revenue. In fact, across industries, they have the best tax revenue to tax resource burden ratio, using very little government services while paying significant property tax. And the environmental damage, whatever that is, is negligible relative to other industries. Their only output is some noise pollution nearby and whatever emissions are produced in the power plants that give them electricity. All industries require electricity in proportion to how much economic value they produce. So unless you want degrowth and no industry, you're going to have energy consumption. In fact, rising energy consumption is a sign of a growing economy. That's why China has seen its energy consumption grow far faster than any other major economy while its economy has also grown far faster. They do use water but their water usage is mininscule compared to agribusiness, or even fast food restaurants and golf courses. And the potable water usage can be brought down. They just use the water for cooling. So they could use treated wastewater or recycle the water they use. Newer data centers use these more water efficient cooling systems. So water usage is not a major long-term concern. Not one that justifies crippling this key emerging industry.
- soerxpso 2mo ago
  A data center allows the website you're whining on to function. If they're really as inconsequential to your life as you're implying, maybe you should boycott them by not using any websites or apps that rely on a data center to function.
- Panzer04 2mo ago
  How does it cost your community money? How does it damage the environment? By using energy? Like literally any other human enterprise? What's wrong with it creating wealth? You don't have to spend money on it, it's none of your concern what other people do.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
throw-the-towel 2mo ago
To be completely honest, normal people being able to set their AC to a sane temp does sound very valuable, and probably totally worth slowing down the slop machines a little bit.
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  what if rather than enumerating the list of allowed/disallowed economic activities based on some moral criterion, we just tax the rich and redistribute it. i kinda thought this is what we spent the entirety of the 20th c. litigating but maybe i'm mistaken
sophacles 2mo ago
It's incredibly disingenuous to wonder why people would be concerned about projects that: * Take a bunch of their tax money with no benefit to them * lower their property value * Make electricity and water more expensive (both of which make other things they use more expensive also) * can cause other environmental impacts that raise inconvenience and expenses both directly and indirectly so some AI douchebags can have a shiny datacenter to enable their bosses' stated desire to replace them with the very same AI might be opposed to the current AI drive datacenter boom. Whatever actual benefits AI has, or tech in general, the way it is being approached right now is a disgusting and blatant attempt to steal as much as possible from everyone. People don't like that, and the like even less how the people doing it pretend they don't understand the dislike while building bunkers to protect themselves from the anger.
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  i don't think either of the first two things are generally true (usually tax positive, new usecases generally raise property value). it sounds like you just want to ban American industry altogether, we've quietly let extreme conservatism sneak up on us in the US it seems.
  - sophacles 2mo ago
    WTF are you on about? They aren't tax positive. The deal might "theoretically" be tax positive in 30 years if things go exactly according to some plan. In the short term they are usually associated with large tax breaks for some number of years, accompanied a guarantee to occupy the data-center for less than the payback period (so the tax breaks can be extended later with threats to move on so those tax paybacks never happen). They also come with the locality footing the bill for a lot of infrastructure build-out. That's just a bad use of my tax dollars. Let the datacenter people pay for themselves at the very least - my taxes don't need to go subsidize some pile of shit AI fanatic. If you like AI, pay for your AI, don't take it from me. It has nothing to do with me being pro- or anti-industry, however if an already profitable industry can't exist without my tax subsidizing it just so some rich guy can be a little bit richer... well maybe it doesn't need to exist. I have no idea how any of this is conservatism... I'm opposed to a specific set of changes, not all changes. Perhaps you are just trying to throw shade because I think you should pay for your own toys?
hofo 2mo ago
and if we’re gonna start worrying about how much a building raises the nearby temperatures, let’s also start looking at whether or not buildings are using dark or light colored roofing
techbrah9000 2mo ago
When you account for post build runtime use it never looks like a big deal Account for the runtime of the extra mining, production of materials... the scale blows up exponentially when externalities of all those extra screws and zip ties are appropriately accounted. An issue with Americans in particular as capitalism propaganda completely ignores externalities like kids in textile sweatshops not given a choice of college or the mines 3c global increase by 2050 is locked in. Meaning another 10-15 degrees local warming. If Exxon could predict the min-max of the exact trend in the 1970s. Physical reality doesn't give a shit about our rhetorical ability to blame a corporation or rich person; everyone consuming this shit is part of the math of the problem.
quantified 2mo ago
People have their priorities, and putting the data centers into their mix isn't what they asked for. To say "resource abusers think this is a resource abuse" isn't really a counter argument.

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.
- Ydarbleoj 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - rpdillon 2mo ago
    This is a copy-pasted comment from elsewhere in the thread, which I've already responded to. A bit much calling others "incredibly lazy".
jmmcd 2mo ago
AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. At least data centres enable me to communicate with distant colleagues, watch enriching movies, and use very strong AI tools to accelerate my research.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
  > AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. It's actually significantly more environmentally friendly than heating to above 68F in the winter in most cases, since most AC is done with heat pumps but most heating is oil/gas (100% fossil fuel consumption) or resistive electric heaters (dramatically less efficient than heat pumps). On top of that AC use aligns strongly with solar generation output while heating load does the opposite, which means that even when heating is done with electricity it comes disproportionately from gas turbines at natural gas peaker plants.
- atmavatar 2mo ago
  Data centers also enable the NSA to store the metadata and contents of every phone call you make and police to (without a warrant) to track anyone who's walked in front of your doorbell or many street corners in your city. They also store all the location data your phone collects for Google or Apple, nearly your entire internet history collected surreptitiously because many sites automatically use your GMail or Facebook logins, and your entire purchase history collected via Visa or MasterCard. And even better: all of that data is aggregated together and stored in its entirety several times over across multiple data centers because everyone shares your data with everyone else, such that if any single of more than a dozen data centers is ever compromised, it all gets leaked to whomever compromised it.
- stasomatic 2mo ago
  My building is leaky. The association won't fix it. How about this compromise, you set yours to 74 to compensate for my 68. Fair enough, or will you say I should move?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
himata4113 2mo ago
It directly and indirectly increases your quality of life and it is something you use every single day.
- kennywinker 2mo ago
  What is? The opposition is to datacenters being built to meet imagined future demand for LLMs. Are LLMs directly and indirectly increasing my quality of life? Please explain how, because so far it seems to me like they’re decreasing my quality of life.
ben_w 2mo ago
> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people." * yes, one to one hundred and twenty, there's that much uncertainty in the estimates for the AI.
- DeluluDon 2mo ago
  >Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, In what country do you not have an electric bill?
  - ben_w 2mo ago
    It can be done even in rich countries, but the point is I think the opposite of your implication: I am claiming that it is hard to avoid causing costs to one's community (and that almost everything causes more impact than one might expect), I am not claiming to have achieved such avoidance.
- magicalist 2mo ago
  When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result. Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...
  - ben_w 2mo ago
    Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it. I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.
fourseventy 2mo ago
You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.
- Symbiote 2mo ago
  All of those are the old, smaller scale.
  - somehnguy 2mo ago
    Can you elaborate on the scale difference?
    - kennywinker 2mo ago
      I have a small home server setup. It’s stores all my data, and i can transcode video and stuff on it no problem. I put in a GPU to run some local LLM stuff. Now the whole thing generates enough heat and noise that I notice it if i sit near the cabinet it’s in. Scale matters.
    - Symbiote 2mo ago
      Racked servers pre-GPU used about 1kW each at high load. 5-10kW for a rack (20 to 40 servers) was common, much more than this would be a special thing. AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers. Extrapolate to the whole building and you have a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere. Instead of being similar to light industry, the hyperscale AI datacentre is using as much energy as a large steelworks.
- Ydarbleoj 2mo ago
  You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy. One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.
ryanisnan 2mo ago
What a weird line to draw. Data centres do a lot more than what you report. E.g. they might host your electronic health records. They might host census data, or weather data, or your kid's school learning management system.
whimsicalism 2mo ago
"i can't eat a cargo container so it's useless" -guy who can only see one level up the chain of abstractions that allow him to fill his belly.
- kennywinker 2mo ago
  Please, elaborate on how hyperscale ai datacenters are going to help fill my belly.
  - whimsicalism 2mo ago
    maybe i'm working on software for supply chain routing. maybe i'm making a commodity trading bot that more accurately prices wheat futures. AI helps with both of those things.
    - kennywinker 2mo ago
      > maybe i'm working on software for supply chain routing. We have supply chain routing software already. Humans wrote it, humans can improve it. Getting ai in the loop won’t change the realities of the supply chain, except maybe they’ll hire less programmers. > maybe i'm making a commodity trading bot that more accurately prices wheat futures How does that benefit me? Further financializing food production seems like a bad thing. Not to mention all of what you’ve described could be run on a $1000 consumer GPU in a PC somewhere.
      - whimsicalism 2mo ago
        This is what I mean about not understanding the second order transitive labor that goes into fulfilling people's wants. Making supply chain routing software cheaper, improving it for less money → all of these things directly make the products in grocery stores cheaper. "Further financializing food production seems like a bad thing." → Why assume rather than approaching with curiosity? Commodity futures are, again, critical to global supply chains and food markets. Farmers in eastern Europe actually look at futures markets to determine when and if to plant their harvest, cargo ships that transport your food buy futures in oil & gas so that they can have stable fuel costs to provide you with your food, etc. etc. Speculating on the future gives rise to the corrections necessary for providing things that people want in the future.
vmchale 2mo ago
> A data center costs my community No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers. Anything they like to consume, no matter how frivolous, is accepted as morally better on a metaphysical level. > further enriches a few already rich people. Meat eaters damaging the Earth is okay because it's "equal"? 300 million people deciding they're entitled to consume anything they want in ever-increasing quantities is a problem because... there's 300 million of them!
- kennywinker 2mo ago
  Listen, I am no meat advocate. I just see a very clear link between the resources required to make meat and the benefit to the person eating the meat. Where data centers cause local and global harm, while not benefitting the locale or the globe. Which is why people don’t like them. And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc. We have a finite budget for water usage, and i’d allocate that to non-meat food > virtually anything else > meat > data centers > golf courses. > No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers I’m not entirely sure of the scale of pornhub’s operations, but i feel like one large ai data center uses more resources than all of pornhub’s data center usage around the globe. But maybe i’m wrong there, and the hub was just flying under the radar.
  - whimsicalism 2mo ago
    > And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc. Switching from meat to non-meat unequivocally lowers your GHG and water footprint and there's really no room for quibbling on this unless you are switching to a diet of exclusively almonds
ares623 2mo ago
The datacenter means I don't have read/write YAML anymore. Checkmate. I would burn the world than ever deal with YAML again.
- kennywinker 2mo ago
  This is the only response disagreeing with me that i consider valid. The man hates YAML. Hopefully you’re ok with Markdown…
ETH_start 2mo ago
Data centers generate export revenue. For a country that has struggled to export as much as it imports, that seems very valuable to its national economic health, and sabotaging one of the few major export industries, and one that's growing rapidly at that, seems counterproductive. Data centers also generate local tax revenue. In fact, across industries, they have the best tax revenue to tax resource burden ratio, using very little government services while paying significant property tax. And the environmental damage, whatever that is, is negligible relative to other industries. Their only output is some noise pollution nearby and whatever emissions are produced in the power plants that give them electricity. All industries require electricity in proportion to how much economic value they produce. So unless you want degrowth and no industry, you're going to have energy consumption. In fact, rising energy consumption is a sign of a growing economy. That's why China has seen its energy consumption grow far faster than any other major economy while its economy has also grown far faster. They do use water but their water usage is mininscule compared to agribusiness, or even fast food restaurants and golf courses. And the potable water usage can be brought down. They just use the water for cooling. So they could use treated wastewater or recycle the water they use. Newer data centers use these more water efficient cooling systems. So water usage is not a major long-term concern. Not one that justifies crippling this key emerging industry.
soerxpso 2mo ago
A data center allows the website you're whining on to function. If they're really as inconsequential to your life as you're implying, maybe you should boycott them by not using any websites or apps that rely on a data center to function.
Panzer04 2mo ago
How does it cost your community money? How does it damage the environment? By using energy? Like literally any other human enterprise? What's wrong with it creating wealth? You don't have to spend money on it, it's none of your concern what other people do.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

throw-the-towel 2mo ago

To be completely honest, normal people being able to set their AC to a sane temp does sound very valuable, and probably totally worth slowing down the slop machines a little bit.

whimsicalism 2mo ago
what if rather than enumerating the list of allowed/disallowed economic activities based on some moral criterion, we just tax the rich and redistribute it. i kinda thought this is what we spent the entirety of the 20th c. litigating but maybe i'm mistaken

sophacles 2mo ago

It's incredibly disingenuous to wonder why people would be concerned about projects that: * Take a bunch of their tax money with no benefit to them * lower their property value * Make electricity and water more expensive (both of which make other things they use more expensive also) * can cause other environmental impacts that raise inconvenience and expenses both directly and indirectly so some AI douchebags can have a shiny datacenter to enable their bosses' stated desire to replace them with the very same AI might be opposed to the current AI drive datacenter boom. Whatever actual benefits AI has, or tech in general, the way it is being approached right now is a disgusting and blatant attempt to steal as much as possible from everyone. People don't like that, and the like even less how the people doing it pretend they don't understand the dislike while building bunkers to protect themselves from the anger.

whimsicalism 2mo ago
i don't think either of the first two things are generally true (usually tax positive, new usecases generally raise property value). it sounds like you just want to ban American industry altogether, we've quietly let extreme conservatism sneak up on us in the US it seems.
- sophacles 2mo ago
  WTF are you on about? They aren't tax positive. The deal might "theoretically" be tax positive in 30 years if things go exactly according to some plan. In the short term they are usually associated with large tax breaks for some number of years, accompanied a guarantee to occupy the data-center for less than the payback period (so the tax breaks can be extended later with threats to move on so those tax paybacks never happen). They also come with the locality footing the bill for a lot of infrastructure build-out. That's just a bad use of my tax dollars. Let the datacenter people pay for themselves at the very least - my taxes don't need to go subsidize some pile of shit AI fanatic. If you like AI, pay for your AI, don't take it from me. It has nothing to do with me being pro- or anti-industry, however if an already profitable industry can't exist without my tax subsidizing it just so some rich guy can be a little bit richer... well maybe it doesn't need to exist. I have no idea how any of this is conservatism... I'm opposed to a specific set of changes, not all changes. Perhaps you are just trying to throw shade because I think you should pay for your own toys?

hofo 2mo ago

and if we’re gonna start worrying about how much a building raises the nearby temperatures, let’s also start looking at whether or not buildings are using dark or light colored roofing

techbrah9000 2mo ago

When you account for post build runtime use it never looks like a big deal Account for the runtime of the extra mining, production of materials... the scale blows up exponentially when externalities of all those extra screws and zip ties are appropriately accounted. An issue with Americans in particular as capitalism propaganda completely ignores externalities like kids in textile sweatshops not given a choice of college or the mines 3c global increase by 2050 is locked in. Meaning another 10-15 degrees local warming. If Exxon could predict the min-max of the exact trend in the 1970s. Physical reality doesn't give a shit about our rhetorical ability to blame a corporation or rich person; everyone consuming this shit is part of the math of the problem.

quantified 2mo ago

People have their priorities, and putting the data centers into their mix isn't what they asked for. To say "resource abusers think this is a resource abuse" isn't really a counter argument.