Since the article doesn't make this clear, let me explain.
The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad. But nobody really does this because you don't want to keep adding additives to water you're constantly discharging.
The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered.
Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.
I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped.
So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear.
I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.
As a former microbiologist, this news is important but not too concerning. It’s good that we found detected this and can respond accordingly. It doesn’t mean indicate an immediate, critical issue.
This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently.
--------
"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"
--------
Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
This closed loop system needs to be filled and flushed, which is the operation discussed in the article. The bacterium was described as a possible airborne hazard if used for irrigation, it's not a regulated substance though so dump and dilute might be perfectly safe.
Might be. Might not be. To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?
> To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?
Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
Otherwise it's an isolated demand for rigor.
You can tell that something has an ulterior motive when the rule or its enforcement special cases the doing of a generic thing only when it's being done by the people being targeted.
> Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
If by "regulated and studied" you mean there are some laws that people regularly pay no attention to and aren't even aware exist, and some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants, and not even that much in many jurisdictions.
Apparently, other people's quality of life and health are of little to no concern in comparison to company profits, after they've paid off the correct politicians.
After all, the executives of the company (the important people) know not to swim in that lake (their swimming pools are clean) nor drink the water (as they can drink Perrier bottled water).
Not sure why you got downloaded, but you’re right. Polluting public (and even private!) spaces is philosophically speaking a property rights violation, which is a core libertarian/free market value.
So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works.
So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak.
And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
> why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this
Because companies pay for lobbyist, give donations, and other perks to politicians. Simple as that ... And companies a a-political, they simply give money to both sides, so who is in power has less effect.
While you the normal voter, only matter a few times, and with increased irrelevant as how powerful your vote is.
The fact that companies can now vote in local elections (in some states, you can guess the states colors), tells you how deep the corruption has gone.
Testing for an extremely
rare bacterium is not the bare minimum. In fact even the water treatment plants rarely do it. They admit in the article we don’t even know whether or not the bacteria originated from the water supplied by the city that entered the pipes in the first place.
DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
Not do what? Not discharge the water with bacterium? But the data center claims that their independent testing shows that they didn’t even discharge the bacterium. It seems that neither the city nor Meta knew where the bacterium came from.
I kinda think the reaction and reporting on this is already being colored by the objection to the datacenters, as opposed to the other way around. And it's not obvious exactly where the problem came from in the first place: it doesn't look like this is some super-obvious, common and easy to prevent issue that they just decided to cheap out on, nor is it obviously a datacenter-specific issue.
Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.
By definition, externalizing a cost is less expensive than internalizing it; the only recourse for the rest of us is forcing them to properly internalize their costs.
it's incredibly hard to identify microbes like these, this is not a simple task, especially if you're not aware they exist or that they can occur in this way.. if they did, which i'm skeptical of
'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is a blatant public opinion campaign ran by people and entities who didn't give a damn about data centers up until 3 years ago.
Not just exploded, but went full on "move fast and break things". Nobody complained about the data centers that have no more impact on the local environment that a warehouse. But in all this rush, they're cutting corners everywhere and putting so much strain on the electric grid. Many also have massive onsite natural gas turbines, some big enough to power a small city, built by the contractor with the lowest bidder, half a mile from people's houses. You can hear and FEEL them from inside a house.
A bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle:
Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities.
This is gold for a comedy sketch :)
This is why datacenters in central texas are desperate to build anywhere in the edwards aquifer... so they can get "free" water from natural springs (already stressed by draught) and dump the effluent into city wastewater systems.
Data center water use is a fairly separate topic from what this article covers. Related of course but the conversation on USE centers around actual volume use, not contaminants.
It’s not a separate topic though, as this article shows. A closed loop system can still mess up the water supply, because (in this case) it wasn’t fully closed.
According to the article this is a closed loop cooling system, once it’s up and running it doesn’t use any water. They run water through it during installation and that’s the discharge that they found bacteria in.
You can have a “closed loop system” but you need to shed heat somewhere and that is either by air cooling drawing tons of electricity, or evaporation that draws tons of water.
Air cooled chillers are generally used in a closed loop system. A coefficient of performance (COP) of 4 is reasonable to expect, which means 1 watt of electricity to remove 4 watts of heat.
Not sure if you're being purposely intellectually dishonest or just unaware, but the common thread on the water usage argument is literally about quantity of usage and rising prices for local areas. So as I said, somewhat related, but still two completely separate discussion topics.
People would love to build their own servers (and run AI or other workloads on them) and kids would love to build their first PC, but big tech is buying all the hardware and stuffing it into data centers. You make it sound like they asked for it.
it's not a consolidation because all those computers are still in office parks and the like. This is new usage, and it consumes exponentially more resources than all of the previous usage.
Man, I wish I had more downvotes. This is not just about consolidation, it's about massive resource usage in areas where hardly any of the benefits accrue to the locals.
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks.
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
Also, people in your community probably own businesses that advertise or sell directly on a Meta platform. That's money affecting many things you interact with online and offline.
Also also, you describe yourself as an ordinary person but say you have no presence on any of the largest social media or messaging platforms. I think that's fairly far out of the ordinary.
I've never seen a cent go to any service in my local municipality from Meta's taxes & whatever does end up in the city coffers is not big enough to have any real effect b/c those services could just as easily be financed by direct payments instead of some circuitous route of federal, state, & sales taxes from transactions enabled by corporations like Meta.
If I was in SF & working for Google or Meta then maybe you might have a point but I'm not in SF or any major metropolitan area so from my perspective the whole thing is actually a net negative.
> Meta Platforms reported annual income taxes of $25.474 billion for 2025, driven by massive profit margins and a major one-time tax charge stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Despite massive recorded U.S. income, Meta's effective federal tax cash rate dropped to just over 3.5% due to extensive research and development (R&D) credits, stock option tax breaks, and bonus depreciation.
Corporate taxes are calculated on net income, i.e. revenue minus expenses. Amounts paid to employees (e.g. to do R&D) are expenses. The tax code defines which years you can deduct the expenses. Sometimes it requires you to deduct them in a later year than you incurred them, even though that's asinine and encourages companies to do buybacks instead of investing in R&D.
In years when the tax code changes, it thereby causes there to be years when companies are deducting both this year's expenses and previous year expenses they couldn't deduct earlier, and other years when they deducted less than they actually spent. The total deductions are still equal to expenses, but then disingenuous critics point to a low "cash" rate in the year deductions were shifted into, ignoring that it only happened because they weren't allowed to deduct those expenses in a previous year when they were actually incurred.
Taxed generally don't use cash-based accounting and if they did then the companies would have been able to deduct those expenses sooner.
Brief google search shows that most Meta DC's give around ~15M per year taxes on average per year. I'm not sure what circuitous route you are speaking about.
> How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centres?
And I gave the answer. How do you think you can eliminate the middleman?
> Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program
The amount I showed was after accounting for the Tax abatement program. And its almost as if there's a reason the state wants to have this program in the first place. Almost as if it helps broader society.
People in London buy Instagram ads to sell products to people in Birmingham and that money comes into the US. There are plenty of ways for you to catch some of it.
This is downvoted but factually correct way of looking at it. The benefits of Meta are convoluted and hard to state in ways that are quantified to simple numbers. (Well you can - Meta contributes ~0.25% of USA's GDP which is enormous)
For example, what is the benefit of google existing? Sure you can do google searches. You can use maps. But can you quantify it?
The benefits of living in a society that respects pluralist values is that even if you personally have never used Instagram ever, you still respect what it provides for broader society.
Its easy to give a popularist argument against anything you don't like - "how does it benefit me?!". Well it need not, but others use the products.
On a side note: I'm glad to live during times where we respect pluralist values. I hate football and find it mind numbing. But its great that those people can have their fun and joy without having to convince me. And I can have mine with League of Legends.
My patience with the pluralism argument evaporates instantly when the topic of discussion is services that are demonstrably harmful to both individuals and society at large. Trying to hide the tech industry at large and especially social media behind the NFL is wild.
I always imagined the HN server running on a single machine in some basement, running a magically efficient Lisp program that easily handles millions of requests per second.
HN supposedly currently runs via M5 Hosting according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750668 (comment from late 2025), though I think it ran on a single server over a decade ago.
Does dang run HN on a single server? Why does HN use Algolia for search and Firebase for its API?
"Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that."
The largest possible single digit annual electricity bill would be $9. That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
I don't think Dang is responsible of that part, but I may be wrong.
HN used to run on a single server (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041), and I don't see why that would have changed given that the hardware keeps getting better.
> Why does HN use Algolia for search
Algolia is a YC company, it's pretty much free marketing for their asset.
> That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year.
Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
You don't need to run it for 24 hours a day, nor do you need it to be the only process running on your machine.
Jitsi is a bit heavy for a phone, but easily fits on an old M1 macbook/mac mini, whose idle power consumption is well below 10W (idle power consumption is what matters, since your machine isn't going to be handling calls all the time). If you shut it down at night, you're almost good. And for any additional service you serve from the machine, you reduce the cost per service further.
Modern computers are fast, and fascinatingly energy efficient.
You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
> "I'm all right, Jack" is a British expression used to describe people who act only in their own best interests, even if providing assistance to others would take minimal to no effort on their part.
> The phrase is believed to have originated among Royal Navy sailors: when a ladder was slung over the side of a ship, the last sailor to climb on board would say, "I'm all right Jack; pull up the ladder."
> The latter half of the phrase has been used to call out unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others.
Since the article doesn't make this clear, let me explain.
The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad. But nobody really does this because you don't want to keep adding additives to water you're constantly discharging.
The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered.
Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.
I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped.
So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear.
I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.
> But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.
Maybe but there are citywide chlorine flushes of their water supply. some worse than others
Erin Brockovich tracks this
As a former microbiologist, this news is important but not too concerning. It’s good that we found detected this and can respond accordingly. It doesn’t mean indicate an immediate, critical issue.
Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this?
I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently.
--------
"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"
--------
Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
This closed loop system needs to be filled and flushed, which is the operation discussed in the article. The bacterium was described as a possible airborne hazard if used for irrigation, it's not a regulated substance though so dump and dilute might be perfectly safe.
Might be. Might not be. To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?
> To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?
Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
Otherwise it's an isolated demand for rigor.
You can tell that something has an ulterior motive when the rule or its enforcement special cases the doing of a generic thing only when it's being done by the people being targeted.
> Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
All of those are regulated and studied.
If by "regulated and studied" you mean there are some laws that people regularly pay no attention to and aren't even aware exist, and some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants, and not even that much in many jurisdictions.
Apparently, other people's quality of life and health are of little to no concern in comparison to company profits, after they've paid off the correct politicians.
After all, the executives of the company (the important people) know not to swim in that lake (their swimming pools are clean) nor drink the water (as they can drink Perrier bottled water).
Not sure why you got downloaded, but you’re right. Polluting public (and even private!) spaces is philosophically speaking a property rights violation, which is a core libertarian/free market value.
So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works.
So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak.
And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
> why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this
Because companies pay for lobbyist, give donations, and other perks to politicians. Simple as that ... And companies a a-political, they simply give money to both sides, so who is in power has less effect.
While you the normal voter, only matter a few times, and with increased irrelevant as how powerful your vote is.
The fact that companies can now vote in local elections (in some states, you can guess the states colors), tells you how deep the corruption has gone.
> began hauling wastewater offsite
They towed it outside the environment.
Testing for an extremely rare bacterium is not the bare minimum. In fact even the water treatment plants rarely do it. They admit in the article we don’t even know whether or not the bacteria originated from the water supplied by the city that entered the pipes in the first place.
DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
Not do what? Not discharge the water with bacterium? But the data center claims that their independent testing shows that they didn’t even discharge the bacterium. It seems that neither the city nor Meta knew where the bacterium came from.
I kinda think the reaction and reporting on this is already being colored by the objection to the datacenters, as opposed to the other way around. And it's not obvious exactly where the problem came from in the first place: it doesn't look like this is some super-obvious, common and easy to prevent issue that they just decided to cheap out on, nor is it obviously a datacenter-specific issue.
Is this a common problem? I would assume not, since it lead to a suspense, and that is probably very expensive and something you aim to avoid.
Yeah, unfortunately.
Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.
By definition, externalizing a cost is less expensive than internalizing it; the only recourse for the rest of us is forcing them to properly internalize their costs.
it's incredibly hard to identify microbes like these, this is not a simple task, especially if you're not aware they exist or that they can occur in this way.. if they did, which i'm skeptical of
Wait until they get nuclear power plants for their data centers.
Profit over safety all day long
'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is a blatant public opinion campaign ran by people and entities who didn't give a damn about data centers up until 3 years ago.
Well, it turns out people started noticing local community impacts when new data center construction absolutely exploded 2-3 years ago.
Not just exploded, but went full on "move fast and break things". Nobody complained about the data centers that have no more impact on the local environment that a warehouse. But in all this rush, they're cutting corners everywhere and putting so much strain on the electric grid. Many also have massive onsite natural gas turbines, some big enough to power a small city, built by the contractor with the lowest bidder, half a mile from people's houses. You can hear and FEEL them from inside a house.
you have numbers? I asked a chatbot and the numbers I got were underwhelming.
I feel sorry for you. How about you do your own research?
Move fast and break things isn't a mantra that arose from first principles, it's literally all they know how to do
Omen AI just got $31m to solve this problem...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/omen-ais-plan-to-optimize-...
Interesting I’ve been waiting for something like this on our rivers. Hopefully.
Oh, great. A group of men in black shirts and jeans are here to fix the issue
Move fast and break things is back.
reminds me the meme that every 'thinking...' you see in ChatGPT is just another gallon of poisoned groundwater
A bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle: Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities. This is gold for a comedy sketch :)
Often life doesn't just imitate a movie, but imitates a goofy movie.
This is why datacenters in central texas are desperate to build anywhere in the edwards aquifer... so they can get "free" water from natural springs (already stressed by draught) and dump the effluent into city wastewater systems.
> after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus
Hey where’s that person from yesterday who argued with me over the 1m vs 1cm hole in the boat?
Everyone saying stop talking about data center water use is missing the entire point as this article shows.
Data center water use is a fairly separate topic from what this article covers. Related of course but the conversation on USE centers around actual volume use, not contaminants.
It’s not a separate topic though, as this article shows. A closed loop system can still mess up the water supply, because (in this case) it wasn’t fully closed.
Discharge, is part of "water usage". Arguing otherwise is embarrassing.
According to the article this is a closed loop cooling system, once it’s up and running it doesn’t use any water. They run water through it during installation and that’s the discharge that they found bacteria in.
You can have a “closed loop system” but you need to shed heat somewhere and that is either by air cooling drawing tons of electricity, or evaporation that draws tons of water.
I’m pretty sure that “closed loop” in this context would mean that the water is recirculated and not evaporated.
From the links in the article, it looks like this DC runs giant heat exchangers to dump the heat to air.
> air cooling drawing tons of electricity
Reference? What's the efficiency of the systems like used here?
Air cooled chillers are generally used in a closed loop system. A coefficient of performance (COP) of 4 is reasonable to expect, which means 1 watt of electricity to remove 4 watts of heat.
I could vibe code 1:6
Not sure if you're being purposely intellectually dishonest or just unaware, but the common thread on the water usage argument is literally about quantity of usage and rising prices for local areas. So as I said, somewhat related, but still two completely separate discussion topics.
[fnord]
People would love to build their own servers (and run AI or other workloads on them) and kids would love to build their first PC, but big tech is buying all the hardware and stuffing it into data centers. You make it sound like they asked for it.
it's not a consolidation because all those computers are still in office parks and the like. This is new usage, and it consumes exponentially more resources than all of the previous usage.
I don’t know why you’re phrasing it like it’s not a big deal that these juggernauts are attempting to make themselves indispensable.
Man, I wish I had more downvotes. This is not just about consolidation, it's about massive resource usage in areas where hardly any of the benefits accrue to the locals.
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks.
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
¹https://solidproject.org/
https://github.com/facebookresearch
There's a lot of excellent projects here.
Also, people in your community probably own businesses that advertise or sell directly on a Meta platform. That's money affecting many things you interact with online and offline.
Also also, you describe yourself as an ordinary person but say you have no presence on any of the largest social media or messaging platforms. I think that's fairly far out of the ordinary.
> How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers?
From the taxes they provide
I've never seen a cent go to any service in my local municipality from Meta's taxes & whatever does end up in the city coffers is not big enough to have any real effect b/c those services could just as easily be financed by direct payments instead of some circuitous route of federal, state, & sales taxes from transactions enabled by corporations like Meta.
If I was in SF & working for Google or Meta then maybe you might have a point but I'm not in SF or any major metropolitan area so from my perspective the whole thing is actually a net negative.
Those workers pay quite a lot of federal taxes
Meta takes more in than whatever it pays back¹
> Meta Platforms reported annual income taxes of $25.474 billion for 2025, driven by massive profit margins and a major one-time tax charge stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Despite massive recorded U.S. income, Meta's effective federal tax cash rate dropped to just over 3.5% due to extensive research and development (R&D) credits, stock option tax breaks, and bonus depreciation.
https://share.google/aimode/INoZEto9gPbRPilrV
3.5% is criminal.
3.5% is fake.
Corporate taxes are calculated on net income, i.e. revenue minus expenses. Amounts paid to employees (e.g. to do R&D) are expenses. The tax code defines which years you can deduct the expenses. Sometimes it requires you to deduct them in a later year than you incurred them, even though that's asinine and encourages companies to do buybacks instead of investing in R&D.
In years when the tax code changes, it thereby causes there to be years when companies are deducting both this year's expenses and previous year expenses they couldn't deduct earlier, and other years when they deducted less than they actually spent. The total deductions are still equal to expenses, but then disingenuous critics point to a low "cash" rate in the year deductions were shifted into, ignoring that it only happened because they weren't allowed to deduct those expenses in a previous year when they were actually incurred.
Taxed generally don't use cash-based accounting and if they did then the companies would have been able to deduct those expenses sooner.
Brief google search shows that most Meta DC's give around ~15M per year taxes on average per year. I'm not sure what circuitous route you are speaking about.
https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-news/2024-12-02/dek...
https://ipmnewsroom.org/how-do-data-centers-benefit-the-plac...
Meta is an unnecessary middleman, all those payments could be handled w/o them & their advertising network. Also, from your own link
> META received a 55 percent tax break as part of the Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program, which is a state initiative
This doesn't make any sense.
You asked this
> How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centres?
And I gave the answer. How do you think you can eliminate the middleman?
> Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program
The amount I showed was after accounting for the Tax abatement program. And its almost as if there's a reason the state wants to have this program in the first place. Almost as if it helps broader society.
My city has bonds for all sorts of projects & it is financed by the people & federal grants. No corporations are involved in the process. It's not complicated: https://www.epa.gov/waterfinancecenter/effective-funding-fra...
You asked how data centres help you personally, I answered that it was taxes.
Your response is that - no you don't need the money, you can get it elsewhere.
This is a kind of senseless argument, I'll let you decide whether that's the case.
People in London buy Instagram ads to sell products to people in Birmingham and that money comes into the US. There are plenty of ways for you to catch some of it.
This is downvoted but factually correct way of looking at it. The benefits of Meta are convoluted and hard to state in ways that are quantified to simple numbers. (Well you can - Meta contributes ~0.25% of USA's GDP which is enormous)
For example, what is the benefit of google existing? Sure you can do google searches. You can use maps. But can you quantify it?
The benefits of living in a society that respects pluralist values is that even if you personally have never used Instagram ever, you still respect what it provides for broader society.
Its easy to give a popularist argument against anything you don't like - "how does it benefit me?!". Well it need not, but others use the products.
On a side note: I'm glad to live during times where we respect pluralist values. I hate football and find it mind numbing. But its great that those people can have their fun and joy without having to convince me. And I can have mine with League of Legends.
My patience with the pluralism argument evaporates instantly when the topic of discussion is services that are demonstrably harmful to both individuals and society at large. Trying to hide the tech industry at large and especially social media behind the NFL is wild.
I believe you are thinking of “collectivism”.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/collectivism
“Pluralism” refers to a society supporting diverse systems of law, religion, or culture. Like the United States.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pluralism
I don’t know what “popularist” is but perhaps “populism”; however, the complement of collectivism is individualism.
'regular people' use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc.
Even you use HN.
Not everything can be local.
My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
I always imagined the HN server running on a single machine in some basement, running a magically efficient Lisp program that easily handles millions of requests per second.
HN supposedly currently runs via M5 Hosting according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750668 (comment from late 2025), though I think it ran on a single server over a decade ago.
Back in 2018 it was already running on M5 Hosting, but still on a single server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041
(And honestly I don't see why it would have changed given that the hardware has been getting faster in the meantime).
> Even you use HN.
A website that runs on an infra that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs serving hundreds of thousands of users with very small loading time.
> My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house
> (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that.
Does dang run HN on a single server? Why does HN use Algolia for search and Firebase for its API?
"Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that."
The largest possible single digit annual electricity bill would be $9. That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
> Does dang run HN on a single server?
I don't think Dang is responsible of that part, but I may be wrong.
HN used to run on a single server (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041), and I don't see why that would have changed given that the hardware keeps getting better.
> Why does HN use Algolia for search
Algolia is a YC company, it's pretty much free marketing for their asset.
> That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
You don't need to run it for 24 hours a day, nor do you need it to be the only process running on your machine.
Jitsi is a bit heavy for a phone, but easily fits on an old M1 macbook/mac mini, whose idle power consumption is well below 10W (idle power consumption is what matters, since your machine isn't going to be handling calls all the time). If you shut it down at night, you're almost good. And for any additional service you serve from the machine, you reduce the cost per service further.
Modern computers are fast, and fascinatingly energy efficient.
You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
Found a good phrase to describe the situation:
> "I'm all right, Jack" is a British expression used to describe people who act only in their own best interests, even if providing assistance to others would take minimal to no effort on their part.
> The phrase is believed to have originated among Royal Navy sailors: when a ladder was slung over the side of a ship, the last sailor to climb on board would say, "I'm all right Jack; pull up the ladder."
> The latter half of the phrase has been used to call out unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others.
Nobody is "missing" anything. There are migrations to the cloud, but AI growth is on top of that.
AI computing capacity is doubling every seven months. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-chip-production.