I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ...
*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.
I want to understand how his mind works. Not sure what value this is, now I think about it: I'm unlikely to time a bet against him well enough to win it.
So, for this point, I don't care that the words and actions he emits have no apparent rational long-term coherency, but I do care about the coherency of the system behind them which generates them.
Think of it like me wanting to learn how an LLM works so I don't get surprised by it doing more than a Markov chain.
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.
Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?
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'.
Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.
But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive.
So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
One tylenol is good at reducing my fever. 20 tylenol will likely damage my liver and might even kill me.
I'm not saying tylenol is bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just pointing out that your position is equivalent to opposing a person saying "lets no shove 20 tylenol down someone's throat" with the argument "but one has reduced the fever".
Unlikely. I'm not sure where HN is hosted, but I think it's a bare metal server in a colo, not a data center.
The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad", and then stretching the position to "data centers bad". I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud. Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there. We need the solar/wind equivalent for hosting. The problem is data centers have efficiencies at scale that we can't achieve with more distributed solutions, but I'm not a specialist in that particular analysis.
Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.... :)
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
>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
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
> Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction.
This is the opposite of how it works, ethanol is the active ingredient for all of the fun parts of drinking, the metabolite, acetaldehyde, is the cause of all of the unfun parts (nausea, headache, flushing).
A significant percentage of East Asians have one or both of a superactive alcohol dehydrogenase (which converts ethanol to acetaldehyde) and a defective aldehyde dehydrogenase (which converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid), and they have significantly lower rates of alcoholism.
My doctor indicated it was more of a risk for me because my liver worked quickly, but your mention of acetyldehyde I know to be correct. I need to better understand this, thanks for the correction.
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?
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?
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.
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. 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.
I’m not saying anything about opposition. I’m just saying I’m tired of “well people made unwanted porn before” or whatever as if the tools haven’t radially changed.
Your comment sure makes it sound like you think there's a problem with the new scale of things. And I'm not saying that's incorrect, just that it needs to be backed up with something more than "it's way bigger than it was."
Completely agreed that the "this existed before" argument is tiring. But so is the "it's a lot bigger now" argument. Neither one actually says anything interesting. They're both statements of opinion (this is fine, versus this is bad) hiding inside obvious statements of fact.
I just want something concrete to judge. The data center debate rages but almost never in terms that help me figure out what to think about it. RAM prices going through the roof is something I can easily contextualize and shows the impact on the broader world. Data center construction spending going up a few hundred percent isn't and doesn't, and when I look up the numbers to contextualize it then it doesn't really look all that significant.
“It’s a lot bigger now” just means we have to deal with realities of scale, that’s a true statement so I’m not sure why that’s different from my scale argument. The whole point is “yes these 2 things are the same, except scale, which can make it very different.” 1 bee sting is one thing, 1000 is another. 1 piece of candy is one thing, 1000 is another.
You are assigning additional value to my comments - I get it but I’m trying to say clearly that I’m not saying those things. All I am talking about is acting as if scale is not a part of the conversation. Anything beyond that I have yet to weigh in on. i’m happy to elaborate if you want me to on any particular point, I am not being deliberately opaque here. I’m just not entirely sure what you are looking for.
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I'm also in favor of making them pay, and in the end I'm expecting/hoping that's what will happen. But either way, when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa. Plus I'm sure some DCs would just pick another spot if forced to compromise; there's always some red county out there willing to do whatever just for a company to build there, that's why a lot of the DCs are being build in LA/AL/MS etc.
It might also be more complicated than you might think though due to the complexities of increasing power supply. Power companies also use prices raises to discourage residential use and conserve the existing supply for larger customers. They can't refuse to service residential but they also can't increase supply yet, so they just raise the prices until residential users "choose" to lower their power consumption.
My old power company told me it would be a temporary increase until supply was increased, but they said that the last time and it never happened. which, speaking of NOVA, was caused by the Loundon County allowing more data centers to be built. They get the money but since the power grid is regional everyone gets the bill :) .
> when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa.
That's assuming they have so few alternatives that opening with that wouldn't cause them to just cross you off their list.
Convincing your competitors to do that while you don't tends to be pretty profitable though, which is one of the reasons that strategy has so many champions.
> So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents.
This is actually what happens in most places. It's even what happens in many cases when the data centers are given a discount, because the "amortize fixed costs over more units of generation" thing still happens.
Higher rates are essentially a time lag. You want to add load to the grid today but it will take five years to add that much new generation and in the meantime the only way to make a higher demand curve match up with the existing supply curve is at a temporarily higher price.
You could raise the price of electricity on only the data center by so much that it removes the increase in demand, but what that actually means is not building it there, and then it also isn't there after generation catches up and the local power company would have been able to spread their fixed costs over more units.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
Data centers are asset dense. A large one would have a value of e.g. a billion dollars while the neighboring plot of land has an assessment value of a million dollars. That's why they offer tax incentives -- a tenth of the rate on 1000 times the assessment value is a huge revenue win over the 100% of nothing you get if they build it somewhere else.
Or to put it another way, it allows the towns with a higher mill rate to keep themselves in the running instead of being excluded from the outset.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Noise, pollution, energy costs (which you cover in your comment!) and water usage / contamination. I don't want more of those things. I don't want a bunch of strip malls of golf courses in my community, either.
Both of these are complaints about gas turbines rather than data centers.
Data centers can pretty easily do the opposite by offering to curtail load during energy supply shortfalls, both through region shifting and by temporarily operating backup generators, which allows the grid to add more renewable generation without having intermittency issues, and thereby operate fewer gas turbines.
Obviously you have to actually do it that way, but that's the point -- the focus of noise and pollution concerns should be directed towards how power is being generated.
> water usage / contamination
Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.
> energy costs
Energy costs are supply and demand. The econ 101 explanation is generally pretty accurate for supply -- if there isn't enough supply then prices go up. This is why NIMBYs screw everyone (including themselves). If you can't build more of something then you have to pay more for whatever already exists.
Demand is more complicated. Econ 101 usually applies in the immediate term, higher prices don't increase supply instantaneously so an immediate increase in demand tends to create an immediate increase in price. But then you can increase supply, and what does that do?
You now have higher volume, more economies of scale, more units to amortize fixed costs over. The ultimate effect of an increase in demand is usually a reduction in the unit price. The exceptions are the things where supply is highly inelastic, like land (as opposed to housing units), which is not the case with power generation.
Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators are preventing supply from increasing. In which case you should be focused on fixing that.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
This seems naive. You are missing the point. If you don't offer tax incentives, then you don't get data centers (or other important industrial facilities). The internal United States market competition to attract these projects is intense. If you look at when a major foreign auto manuf wants to build a new plant in the US, there is a line of communities hat-in-hand offering all kinds of tax rebates and cheap loans.
> Loudo[u]n County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I looked up the reason why Loudoun County has so many data centers: (1) favorable zoning laws passed in year 2000 and (2) sales tax break specific to data centers.
They don't pay as much. They get their electricity at industrial bulk rates while we pay the residential rate. Their demands require more power lines to be run, but those costs are spread out and blended with consumers. It's a legal form of stealing.
Because people don't like living next to them. They're loud, they're large and monotonous, they don't provide many jobs after construction, they use a lot electricity and decent amount of water, and the ones that rely on fossil fuels pollute.
That plus all the tech bros have gone out of their way to advertise loudly AI as a replacement for humans. So why would a community of humans want to support that?
> they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
Loudoun County is a very rich part of NOVA and was able to fight for those concessions, as well as being in a very desirable part of the country for those DC's to built in (close to major infrastructure but still undeveloped at the time) so they had a better position to argue from.
Plus, as I mentioned in another comment, while Loundoun County gets the tax benefits the whole area is affected by the DC's power consumption due to the regional power grid and shared infrastructure (i.e. the Potomoc) so part of my already high power bills was due to the data centers there and I got minimal benefits.
Yes. See my other comment about how Oregon was able to solve the power problem. The residents of Oregon will be paying LOWER prices than before the data centers.
The data center problem seems to be merely a government corruption problem. Which is a problem, of course, but not limited to data centers.
Alas, something like that wouldn't have helped me either as I was on the other side of the river :) . But yeah some sort of regional coordination between local governments or something like that would fix or at least help the problem.
Like I said in my original comment, I think really the problem is just the scale of the build out. Before the AI boom DCs were being built slowly enough that it wasn't a problem and/or costs could be amortized over time. But cost sharing agreements and subsidization needs to be done before the DCs are built the they're certainly not going to push for it, so the people need to. Lower state taxes in the future due to DCs subsidizing power is (sincerely) great and all, but it doesn't do shit for the families deciding between food and heating their house in the winter before those benefits kick in.
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
Oregon just passed a law saying data centers will pay more for electricity than normal people, and the math says that everyone's rates will be going down.
So, again, I think it depends on whether you live in a red or blue state.
> You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
they want to, hence all the natural gas turbines. However, and this is pretty funny, you don't just order those using doordash or turn up a knob like on AWS. It takes years, if not decades, for those things to get manufactured, delivered, installed, and on line. He who shall not be be named here mentioned in a interview how all these software guys are going to get painful lesson in hardware when they start trying to build behind the meter power generation.
It does take time to build capacity. But if I build a new office building I’m simply not allowed to open it up and park in the neighborhood driveways today because I have a plan to build a parking structure eventually.
> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.
*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"
"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.
What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.
A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.
You are right this seems to be misleading in a calculated way. And just because this is a junk paper doesn’t mean the groundwater issues aren’t real. I don’t really know who would be incentivized to publish this because as you say if it’s environmentalists they risk discrediting themselves.
I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."
Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.
> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want.
I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK.
Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going.
I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.
i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn....
This is how economies work and the alternative strategy of enumerating morally correct wants/needs and assigning the correct price from on-high has been a demonstrable failure. It is a cognitive failure of humanity that this strategy is so intuitively appealing to us.
> the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.
Sure, but that's the crux of it all, isn't it. Are they? And are they doing it that much better than before?
I'm far from an AI coding skeptic at this point, the stuff works, and I use it, but I think it's fair to ask whether it's worth burning a middle class home's amount of electricity to spit out CRUD apps and web frontends a bit faster. As many have pointed out, we've still yet to see some kind of huge productivity increase in society at large, or even some particularly revolutionary new app or whatever.
On some level it's people's money and they can spend it how they want, but people get criticized for unnecessary waste of resources all the time.
I think people should be allowed to do things, generally. If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business (and quickly, at these prices). I think it is likely more worth it than you realize.
We're not talking about criticizing, we're talking about bans.
> If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business
In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful.
We are also assuming that economic value means something is good for society. A lot of money is made off of social media, ads, gambling apps, clearly there's demand for it. I don't think that means we can say all those things are good, just off demand alone.
I'm not really talking about banning anything, I just think it should be asked whether this stuff is worth it. We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
I think that low externality things people are willing to pay for should be presumptively allowed unless there is strong reason otherwise. We are much too involved in the 'legislating individual activities' and not nearly enough in the 'tax wealth and redistribute' side of things.
> We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
Post-2020, the internet is real life. Internet native thought has proven to be a powerful force in the physical world. I remember laughing at the absurdity of 4chan posters in high school. I will not make the mistake of taking internet ideology lightly again.
>the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.
Some of them are doing this at their jobs, but there are also tons of people pushing slop to open-source projects, vibe coding useless or redundant apps, etc.
It's also a cognitive failure of humanity to assume the free market is only guided by the invisible hand of demand and supply, if only government and moralists would get out of the way.
> there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
ChatGPT has been the most downloaded app every month for a year and a half.
That doesn't mean people want LLMs to replace their jobs so they can (hopefully) go on welfare, and to have ever more data enters built with that goal in mind.
There's also different building pressures. Before, companies would want to build / power / maintain the smallest amount of data center hardware they could while still serving their needs. Overprovisioning just meant worse opex number.
Now, because supply is so constrained relative to demand, there's no limit. More is always better, which leads to a crazy amount of construction (as its negative effects).
How is there a big difference between those two things? People want Netflix, people also want the output of AI whether that is lobster Jesus or something else. This seems more like substituting what people want, which clearly includes AI, for what some people think others should want. I can guarantee you there are people who don’t want Netflix and think it’s a waste of resources that encourage people to binge TV, become a couch potato, and end up being drags on the healthcare system. Should their preferences override those who do want it?
Democracy, even at its most ideal, is often about overriding preferences. Netflix helps to float an entire industry of creators and a tangible pop culture. It's not entirely clear (or softened, maybe not clear to communities) what AI build out floats currently except AI companies and the tangible negatives of generative AI.
The specific examples are not the point. Obviously some people hate Netflix and some people love Lobster Jesus. There is a rising sentiment against AI:
>Should their preferences override those who do want it?
This is rather the point of government, balancing the competing amd incompatible desires of different groups of people for the benefit of everyone. Yes, if a community decides they don't want a GPU warehouse, using whatever means that community uses to make decisions (referenda, petitioning representatives, etc.), their desire should overrule the desire of people to have one. That's what society is!
I think that potentially the difference is that, while people do in some sense want AI, they don't want it in the same way that they want Netflix. I'd compare it to Amazon: it perfectly possible for people to like the ability to like 2 day shipping while also liking that the site is flooded in cheap crap.
So maybe it is that people like AI in certain domains but HATE the way that it is being used overall?
> How is there a big difference between those two things?
Netflix just serves existing data so their biggest need is data storage ala CDN for closer retrieval to the user. Very low requirements. Creating sweet baby lobster jesus requires incredible amounts of computer/power/cooling. The requirements are totally different. Yes, both ultimately deliver pixels to consumer's eyeballs, but how they get there are so different that it's laughable that people cannot see the difference.
The conflating of a data center and an AI/GPU farm is disingenuous at best, and the AI people know what they are doing. None of the "traditional" data centers are being powered on site with gas turbine generators. New GPU farms are also being designed with much larger footprints with much more needs from the public utilities.
As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end for planned facilities. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water.
This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.
That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.
AI inference and training GPUs require way, way more power than anything manufactured before. Like, between 2020 and 2026 we went from ~400W for an A100 to ~1400W for an NVIDIA B300. And you cannot make that happen without changing the datacenter itself. More noise, way more complicated cooling setup, new power sources, etc. Not all datacenters are created equal.
The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms
I don't think it's necessarily shady, but let's say that we're assisting at bets and capex spending we've never seen in history.
Companies like Meta, Alphabet, etc that were drowning in cash flow and buying back their stock are now back at issuing shares, creating a huge number of SPVs, issuing debt, etc.
There's a gigantic spending spirale with no signs of ending. Nvidia is financing companies to buy its own hardware.
Mind you, this is nothing new in some businesses. Airbus and Boeing have been lending money to companies to buy their own airplanes forever.
But its just all too much, with very little money coming. To understand how massive is the spending: even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested.
> even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested.
Your math does not make sense. That's something like $1.5 trillion every year. That's no where near what is being spent in AI hardware buildouts on an annual basis.
Last year estimated spend was $380 billion and this year it's $680 billion [0] just for the big five. Given global projections through 2030 being as high as 7 trillion [1], OPs comment seems at least the right order of magnitude.
1. The estimates, for data center build outs in 2026 alone, in US alone, and even limiting just to the hyperscalers + oracle is in the 600 to 800 billions range.
And I'm ignoring the likes of Nvidia building their owns and smaller (but still huge) outside the biggest players. Or the comparably smaller, yet still multi billions spent in the rest of the world.
2. That excludes salaries, research, taxes, cost of running the datacenters themselves, etc.
In fact several estimates are pointing out that global annual spending on AI better be in the range of 3T$ range (that's almost a 1'000 $ / year per every adult in the world) or this is all going bust.
The math that does not make sense is to expect such a gargantuan spending to have any meaningful monetary return.
This is very important, filling racks with GPU's instead of CPU's is vastly more power hungry (and hence will generate a lot more heat). Vera Rubin is 1800-2300W, mind boggling, these data centers even have new power architectures coming.
And I know what people will say, Vera Rubin is vastly more efficient, but that only matters if you have saturated your needs, it's meaningless if you need that capacity, and I'm sure it will run pretty much at a 100% 24/7.
Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors.
Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners.
Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.
Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.
All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.
If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.
I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.
I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else.
Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.
Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.
Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters.
Being within a few hundred meters of a building that's consuming tens to hundreds of megawatts will do that, yes. I have no idea how big a normal factory would be to consume that much while running.
It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.
Tell that to the people who have to live next to them and all the people going on about how AI is going to change everything.
Some outrages are based on real things. Not everything is a moral panic. It's like saying the Epstein victims (for example) are just a moral panic because society refuses to hold the rich and powerful accountable and the news cycle moves on.
One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.
I served two terms on my town's planning commission.
It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.
In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.
There is a lot of conflicting information out there, partly because the resources / environmental consequences of the current rollouts are incredibly multi-dimensional, and most articles only focus on a subset of them - and there seems to be rapid innovation happening in some of the infrastructure that can void an article from a year ago.
The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals.
I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.
Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it.
I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.
That's where the resources are. You wouldn't expect some uber wealthy billion dollar company to have to provide power/water needs way out in the middle of nowhere would you?
Why are we growing crops that depend on monsoon amounts of water in the desert? Because people with money and power have decided that's what they want to do.
The explanation has never made intuitive sense to me and the political power of almond and alfalfa farmers continues to elude me. Yes, almond farmers have money but Larry Ellison, Musk, and Sergey Brin have a shitload more. As do non-tech industries like Californian real estate developers. California has ~40 billionaires from real estate alone. That industry, and tech, and manufacturing, and everyone else is also competing for water supply.
What makes almond farmers so good at procuring and maintaining political influence?
You can use fuel cells; I'm sure external steam reforming based hydrogen (in protein exchange membrane fuel cells) works very well, but I'd not be surprised if some hydrocarbon or alcohol fuel cell beats it in TCO; also I'd expect liquid oxygen to be readily suited to be trucked-in with the fuel they feed these turbines and by the power of a simple dry heat exchanger exchanging between ambient air and combustion "air" they could use exhaust gas recirculation with pure (other than the exhaust gas diluting it so the flame doesn't melt the turbine blades) oxygen which would as a side-effect allow them to condense out water to obtain nearly pure CO2 exhaust.
Liquid oxygen is around 100$/ton and you need 3.21 tons of it to burn one ton of methane. If you use kerosene instead you're at about 2.58 tons of oxygen per ton of fuel.
Note that the absence of nitrogen otherwise plentiful in combustion air eliminates NOX formation.
What they do for the oxygen production is they condense air and then distill it; IIRC it's mainly done for steel production where they use it to burn off carbon dissolved in molten iron. It's side product liquid nitrogen and argon are primarily produced from this but are mostly considered side-products of the "oxygen refining".
Thanks for the information. I never knew about those kinds of fuel cells and they look like an excellent alternative.
From what I've just read, the only real downsides other than initial cost are slow startup time (hours) and they are physically larger than gas turbines. In exchange for a higher upfront price, you get a more efficient and reliable power generator. Very cool.
It's new, noticeable, memorable, and the companies involved (tech) are uniquely unlikable. Incumbents that use more resources in ways that create unwanted externalities are better about doing things more stealthily, and look rather boring. Also they've been there the entire time, so easier to accept.
Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so.
(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).
It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.
Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok
-inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns…
It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.
People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.
Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth.
Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.
What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?
China is certainly thrilled with how this manufactured moral panic is playing out in the US. AI is going to be the most important technology in the world before long.
The water use panic is so ridiculous. The sheep pushing it do so while sipping almond milk lattes. One almond milk latte uses the same water as tens of thousands of chat gpt requests.
~80–90 liters for one typical almond milk latte vs. ~0.3–15 mL for one ChatGPT request.
Using a mid-range AI figure of ~5 mL: one latte ≈ 16,000–18,000 ChatGPT requests.
Using OpenAI’s ~0.32 mL figure: one latte ≈ 250,000+ requests.
Even with a higher AI estimate of 50 mL: still roughly 1,600–1,800 requests per latte.
Step 1: Convince the public (voters) that Data Centers are the evil boogeyman
Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies).
General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations!
Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around.
Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage.
Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure.
Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason?
“Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!”
Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players.
Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”.
i2p = dead
Hyphanet = dead
TOR = dead
[insert self hosted service] = dead
I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.
4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.
> My skeptic meter
Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD
> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.
Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center.
It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers.
If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.
>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.
It's both.
As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.
You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.
The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.
It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)
Reminds me of how Shake Shack got rid of all of their peanut butter milkshakes years ago because one single person complained that their child with a peanut allergy couldn't have them.
It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right?
Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.
I think that's another example of the social contract breaking down. Lots of people either cannot afford to invest or no longer believe that investing will allow them to afford things like a house or retirement that were traditionally part of being middle class.
I imagine that things would be dramatically different if most people believed that the success of data centers would directly lead to their economic success.
That's more people than elected the sitting president. Numbers don't really mean what you're trying to imply. Going the other way, 1% of the population hold the vast majority of the wealth while yielding all of the power.
The outrage is real to the individual, but manufactured. Media (e.g. 404media, Ed Zitron) promotes anything that engages for clicks, views, and subscriptions. Other parties do it to hinder competition, weaken the US, or distract from much worse polluters.
You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.
One HUGE issue is that datacenters don't have an afterlife in the communities where they're located.
They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices.
If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised.
Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
It’s just a big tip-up warehouse with precast walls. If you stripped out all of the extra electrical distribution and cooling equipment, you’re left with a giant warehouse which can easily be repurposed.
If the ai bubble bursts, these buildings will be able to be repurposed unlike rust belt factories. With all of that cooling, you could turn them into a weird form of multi-family housing. Or use them for indoor skate parks, kart racing tracks, whatever you can imagine. I don't think rust belt is an appropriate comparison. Also, these places don't hire that many people like a factory did. If the factory shut down, entire towns could collapse with it. If a data center shut down, maybe 20 people would notice????
> Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
The issue is an incentive one, for the companies involved in the construction.
Right now, they are getting paid so much to build it fast. Time is of the greatest importance. Nothing else is mattering to anyone involved except how fast datacenters are being built. At best, this is an after-thought.
As such, I believe that we have to change the incentives to create more sustainability but it requires time, discussion. Perhaps laws can help in making them more sustainable but currently, the sad reality is that for all the parties actually involved, I don't think that many truly care about the after-math or repurcussions of it as much as its the only thing that they want right now
It is real but it's about the unaccountability, dishonesty, and misanthropy of corporate overlords, rather than about the externalities of data centers per se. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901
It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one.
Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing.
In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.
From my research, data centers and - more importantly - the electricity required to run data centers, are consuming a lot of water.
Sure you can argue that it's less than other industries, but that ignores the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure in the US. Any statistic you use right now is obsolete in 18-36 months when X times more data centers are running.
Also on a local level the water use can even be significant. I don't think you can rightfully tell residents who are seeing an outsized amount of their water going to data centers that they're "panicking" over nothing.
The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down.
But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.
If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth
We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.
My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.
Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact
Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done
They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.
But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous
I've done a bit of research into it, and I think it's a mix.
The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.
The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.
The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem.
I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.
Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much.
I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.
> Two AI Data Centers Require More Energy Than All Wisconsin Homes Combined: Just two AI data center projects — the Microsoft data center in Mt. Pleasant and Vantage data center in Port Washington — will require a combined 3.9 gigawatts (GW) of electric power, which is enough energy to power 4.3 million Wisconsin homes. There are only 2.8 million housing units in the entire state.
> In fiscal year 2023-24, we supplied more than 20,749 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of power for more than 1.6 million electric service customers, including nearly 6,000 in the Owens Valley.
That's an average of 2.3 GW over the year.
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> The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water.
> When Google purchased a defunct aluminum smelter in The Dalles, it also acquired the right to pump massive amounts of water from underground — up to 3.88 million gallons a day. That’s almost as much water as the entire city averaged per day in 2024.
> The corporation transferred those water rights to the city in 2021, Bentz noted, allowing The Dalles to pump more water from underground. The city only obtained part, not all, of the former smelter’s water rights, Mays said after OPB’s story published.
It's the rights to pump the water. Google can pump up to 3.88 million gallons per day and the city can't bill them a penny for that. Also, because it's an old claim, it's likely more senior to other water rights.
> The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.
It doesn't work like that because skipping your DoorDash burrito doesn't make the energy not used for that available for data center use.
The AI data center energy problem is that they use an order of magnitude more than regular data centers and they are being built at a massively higher rate than regular data centers and they are being built in places where many are being built and their owners are in a hurry.
The electric grid is designed to handle growth in demand, but this is growth way beyond anything that was anticipated.
> I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.
Not Phoenix, but I learned an interesting fact about some of the huge data centers in Las Vegas, which pre-date AI: since it's 72 degrees or cooler for more than 70% of the year, during those months they can just pipe in outside air without needing to cool it first.
On top of that, I think both Phoenix and Vegas have fewer natural disasters than other major metro areas.
> Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.
A closed cycle cooling system doesn't solve the overall problem of water usage. Yes you have a cycle within the datacenter, but you need to then move that energy somewhere else, out of the system. Eventually that energy needs to find its way in the environment. A close loop system for a datacenter reduces the water use on site, but actually increase electro use. If that electricity comes from a power plant that is cooled by water you just moved the problem upstream
That's true. Making them pay enough for water might mean the data center doesn't even get built there. It gets built somewhere more logical with abundant cheap water.
It's gotta be costs, right? Everyone wants this done fast and at large scale, so they're going for any sites with existing large electrical connections I assume.
Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.
The Texas grid is largely independent of the national grid. Abbott wants an audit to ensure data center plans comply with the rules. "Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first."
It's not a pro or anti business stance it's just a deal-is-a-deal stance.
There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.
Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.
Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.
You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.
At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.
It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.
Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up
What recent mass-media panics have been legit?
For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.
These days there always seems to be panic regardless. I find it better to look at the merits of individual claims rather than try to group everything together into a binary answer like a possible conspiracy on one thing means nothing else needs to be considered.
Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere.
I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already.
For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list. I say this as someone who has traditionally voted for environmentally conscious options/representatives - my previously existing circle doesn't spend that much time talking about AI compared to other causes.
Degrowth has always been a big part of Anglophone culture. This is just the latest part of that. If you see the various parties as those downwardly mobile vs those succeeding you can automatically place people predictably into where they’ll land on various issues.
It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.
If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts.
I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.
We need some gatekeeping. We need automated fact checking. We need moderation based on someone's domain expertise and not how well their argument appeals to readers. User moderation is fundamentally broken and maybe only worked for a while due to the participants tending towards a particular background. Also, in the age of AI it's questionable if community forums can even continue to exist.
I do not believe for one instance that people are coming from a legitimate concern around planet-burning and reaching their conclusions about AI vs. reasoning backwards from wanting reasons to be anti-AI. Very few people I've met seems willing to make one iota of earnest personal sacrifice for avoiding actual in-real-life planet-burning industries.
Actively pisses me off hearing climate rationale for opposing something so relatively inconsequential while the house is on fire from pre-existing industry that is grandfathered in.
I live in a place with sufficient books that I know how to understand the written word, but I understand not everyone replying to my comments is so fortunate.
A lot of those aren't really online problems. People will always be discussing from feelings, bickering, so on. Go to any town hall meeting or debate club and you can see the same. Take a look at politicians and their discussions too, yeah?
If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.
if you've ever read Plato's dialogues or are familiar with the court politics of the eunuchs during, well, any Chinese dynasty, you might be convinced that even those that sit squarely in the seat of power and have the best access to food, education, and disposable time in their era are all still just a bunch of ideologues prone to bickering, constantly arguing from feelings and having little echo chambers, and so on
has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations
When you label people who disagree with you ideological extremists, you're part of the problem. They're properly labeled "people who believe things that I don't believe" and they deserve a counterargument rather than a curt dismissal or demand for silencing. If you have the courage of your own beliefs, it should be trivial to offer one.
It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answer, it's good AI slop.
Agreed, also with the people claiming foreign influence or fake accounts. I like AI, I use it a lot for work. I do not think people opposed to data centers are under foreign influence. It's pretty obvious why someone wouldn't want a huge building in their neighborhood. It's also pretty obvious to me that we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates in places like Phoenix Arizona! There can be discussion for sure, but to accuse people (who are quite frankly taking a pretty obvious and easy to understand position) of being "foreign agents" or "extremists", is just wrong. If anyone is the extremists, it's us, the heavy AI users.
I do think the quality has gone down over my seven-ish years on HN, but that could be me just remembering "the good ol' days". Still so much better than Reddit though. It's not close. Reddit has a much lower quality set of posts and comments on average across technical subreddits.
I remember the Ivermectin/Hydroxychloroquine fights where people were gaslighting others for some unknown reason. People sharing dubious studies, with questionable results.
Meanwhile many of those people had a secondary agenda to keep the FDA from releasing the covid vaccine. America's Frontline Doctors (the group) promoted drugs over vaccines, etc.
Granted there was a lot of fear in the air back then. But this site is not immune from toxicity.
Yeah COVID really showed the darker side of HN. It was madness and still sticks out in my mind. Any question that didn't toe the line was shouted down from all sides. Don't forget Youtube was even censoring content then. It was a mess.
Yeah, maybe I'm just getting older. Not sure how you would measure it, but maybe it would be % of posts with "nuanced" discussions. It feels like HN was gone way downhill in this regard, but who knows.
This is technically explicitly a rule violation. Yes, yes we've been hearing it for years but it is much more true in the past 2-3 years than anytime in the past imo.
Frankly, it's a shame that the only high quality discussion I can find is on gross platforms like 'the everything app' or more obscure forums.
> The mean air temperature on the upwind side of the facility was approximately 42.7 °C, increasing to 43.5 °C in the neighborhood near the eastern boundary of the data center campus on the downwind side. The observed ΔT of approximately 0.8 °C extended roughly 500 m downwind
Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated over, seems like 500-1000m was their search window from their text. The next paragraph discusses how one of the sites they compare to is a relatively lower average temperate than the rest of Phoenix. Not really convinced by this methodology. Seems like doing something in a flat field with an array of temperature sensors would be a much more robust way to look at heating effects over some reasonable distance. Plenty of data centers fit the bill of flat and semi-isolated, curious why they chose these sites to look at
The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:
>Why is that?
The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.
So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?
Right, but even then, why would we not discuss noise pollution?
The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States.
There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
There are many reasons to not like these things nearby (anywhere it affects power or water too). And on top of that they've been "somehow" getting massive incentives and tax cuts, despite bringing in very little money or employment, which costs the area even more in future years.
It's everything combined, and pushback has been somewhat successful. Success in a protest tends to help bring more success to the same protest elsewhere.
> The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking generically why no one talks about it
But, had I been, it is not all of these things because one of those things is abject misinformation - water usage is not a real problem and touting it as the issue hurts the protests. 30B gallons of water globally for data center cooling is 100x less than the leaky pipes in just the United States
If data centers are such a big issue that we must stop them, communicating that without lying is the protestor's responsibility. You'll never have a successful protest if it is motivated by falsifiable information and water usage is still the number one thing I see written about and spoken about my protestors. It is impossible to get on board so long as that misinformation is front and center of most arguments
It can be an issue for the community in the same watershed, as well as being affected by what they do with any waste water. There have been quite a lot of extremely-drawn-out lawsuits about them drawing more than claimed, dumping hot water into streams and damaging the ecosystem, and polluting other water sources by dumping dirty water into drinking water affecting areas.
I agree the total usage isn't particularly large, and any "they'll use up all the fresh water everywhere" FUD is flat out wrong. But it can be a large jump for an area, and they've broadly shown themselves to be incredibly amoral and willing to fight legal battles with infinite money just because they can. They are not good neighbors.
Agreed, it can. And by reserving that argument for when it is an actual problem, it strengths the overall position
> There have been quite a lot of extremely-drawn-out lawsuits about them drawing more than claimed, dumping hot water into streams and damaging the ecosystem, and polluting other water sources by dumping dirty water into drinking water affecting areas.
And I support strict EPA guidelines and heavy fees for violators! I just think that we should keep the conversation clear and not introduce facts that can be easily overturned as it moves the conversation away from impact and to the argument being made
Let's say a DC is being built in my area and I read how in some locations tap water is being polluted by these DCs. Wouldn't it be better to address that before it's built rather than after?
Supporting strict Zoning/EPA guidelines is me supporting the ability to address it before it is built. If you local tap water is being polluted by a data center, then we did not have strict Zoning/EPA guidelines. The fines exist because big corporations routinely lie and screw us. They are large penalties, not the way we prevent it from happening.
I am in full support to address it ahead of time and nothing I have said goes against this.
By then it is too late, plus they never pay enough in damages. And the EPA does not have teeth currently, and damage will be done while fixing that too.
So people fight by pattern recognition: abnormally incentivized and extremely large? Kill it with fire immediately. It's mostly reasonable and more effective than anything else at the moment.
Right, but misinformation is ineffective as it forces the conversation to revolve around the misinformation and not the topic we were attempting to discuss. If we need an example, we need look no further than this thread
Beyond this, it is my opinion that people are cowards. The few who care about this issue enough to perform terroristic actions won't spur any sort of meaningful change in the general population because the general population is not made up of extremists. The general population will not do anything that endangers their lives no matter how much they praise another for doing so
Luigi kills a healthcare CEO. Endless chatter about how this is the end for big pharma, the people are rising up, they better count their days because the people are paying attention. Nothing has happened since but more dead people due to denied insurance claims. But there sure are a lot of people talking about how another Luigi will show up sometime soon
An arsonist burned down a large warehouse. Endless chatter about how this is the end for big corporations screwing us at the register, how workers will rise up and burn even MORE if they don't get treated better. Nothing has happened since to these big businesses. There is no tiktok trend for large scale arson, no worker unionization. Nothing changed but boy do people talk about i
I would rather solve it politically by strengthening the EPA. We may just disagree here and that is fine.
Honestly, anything that gets people paying attention to stuff that has been building for decades is good in my book.
I agree that'll be a much better end-state to be in, but is it the best right now? ... idk. We're in an increasingly blatant "smash and grab" phase for major corporations right now, and they need to be stopped quickly.
Sure, but what is this comment if not a plea for someone else to do something? No one can live your ideals for you, if you think something should be done, you should do it, and quickly at that. If it is that urgent, why are you not doing anything?
You've been complaining that people blocking datacenters (which is partly succeeding) is worse than fixing the EPA.
Something is being done, urgently (vastly faster than the larger legal system), and public outrage is loud and annoying and widely visible, which is indeed what I want. Beyond that it isn't especially fair to say "if you like to eat, why haven't you solved world hunger", particularly when those EPA/zoning laws aren't in place yet, so I'll just ignore that part.
No one has ever complained about people blocking data centers. Just over the top bad-faith to even type that out, this will be our final back and forth.
My points have consistently been (1) lying is the quickest way to make an issue divisive as they focus on the lies and not the cause and that (2) that you cannot trust members of the general public to undertake radical actions nor can you sit by and egg them on to achieve your goals for you.
Data centers are coming up left and right and no violent uprising has stopped them from being built. What has slowed them down in certain communities are those communities coming together, organizing, and making themselves heard via political action. Which is the avenue I am advocating for here in this conversation with you.
You are here discussing how someone must do something and how it needs to be done urgently because it is so pressing. No one challenged you to solve it. Equating any call to action, especially for an issue that you yourself declare urgent, to solving world hunger is an immediate end to this conversation. If you cannot take your own views seriously, neither can I. No one is going to take care of the bothersome priest for you as living out your ideals is your problem, not theirs.
>No one can live your ideals for you, if you think something should be done, you should do it, and quickly at that. If it is that urgent, why are you not doing anything?
This is the world-hunger-equivalent bit fwiw. It's rather explicitly "if you care about this, why haven't you solved it", an over-the-top bad-faith argument.
> I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem.
You are lying here.
> it's all people seem to care about.
You were specifically asking why what "all people seem to care about" is "the whole data center heat/water thing," and when somebody told you that's this is not the only thing people care about, you immediately lied about what you just said.
Even by the end of the comment:
> water usage is still the number one thing I see written about and spoken about my protestors.
So you're still not talking specifically to this person, but making easily falsifiable generalizations. And you still haven't claimed why water and power usage are not problems, you've just decided that people must only talk about "the main problem" but somehow not being the "main problem" becomes "falsifiable information" by the end.
It's just garbled when it's not dishonest.
I have "mixed" feelings about data centers, although they're pretty clear. I do not think that we will get the utilization out of data centers that we are expecting, I do not think there is as much revenue as needed in it, so I think this is a massive waste of resources. But if I am wrong and we do, I think noise pollution, heat pollution, power usage and water usage are worth it. I also think that poor and powerless people are being victimized by the placement of these things, just like they are in most large polluting capital expenditures. This should be compensated for. I also think that the longer data centers are delayed, the better idea we will have of their potential utilization.
The idea that current data center water use is as much as 1% of all of the leaky pipes in the US is not a statement of its insignificance, it's a statement of its massive significance. You might as well say that all of the shootings in the world are only 1% of all of the deaths from heart disease.
Yes, comments can make points and then support those points with their own anecdotal evidence. Maybe take a break, you are acting unhinged.
> The idea that current data center water use is as much as 1% of all of the leaky pipes in the US is not a statement of its insignificance, it's a statement of its massive significance. You might as well say that all of the shootings in the world are only 1% of all of the deaths from heart disease.
Google what fallacies are. You should start with False Equivalence
I've seen lots of talk about noise pollution with them? There's infrasound concerns and etc. No idea how real that impact is, but it's apparently measurable for a few miles away.
It mostly needs zoning as you say and maybe require each project put down a bond to supply a power plant expansion / new plant that covers their projected energy uses, imo. That sorts out a lot of issues. Maybe put some kinda tax on them and use it to pay for local infrastructure or schools for PR too
I'm not saying the noise pollution concerns aren't real, but these are often the same people who had "concerns" with 5G.
Most datacenters I've been to around the world are barely noticeable. Most of them are in warehouse districts and the AC chillers are barely noticeable over the chillers on other nearby buildings. Often, they WANT to be nondescript.
That being said, I've not been to any of these new ones which are both significantly larger and also can have onsite turbines that run all the time and not just during power outages.
> The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking generically why no one talks about it
"residential zoning" looks like an intentional misunderstanding of the problem. Putting one outside of "residential zoning" surely isn't a problem even if it robs an entire residential zone of power, right? Or then governments can't just re-allocate residential zones to industrial zones to get those juicy deals, right?
The way you're using language here is putting the problem so close to the edge that abuse, ignoring the quality of lives of residents, would seem just so logical.
> Or then governments can't just re-allocate residential zones to industrial zones to get those juicy deals, right?
Which is why we need laws around where data centers can and cannot be built. Something I clearly alluded to in my first comment. Do you want to make up things I never said such that you can make some snarky comment and feel good about yourself or have a real conversation? If it is the former, fuck off.
It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.
Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest, which includes LA, and LA's water system includes NorCal consequences, and California water issues include all-country impacts due to the farming there.
If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
> Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest
no, it's a thing because you can put water in terms that even a hair dresser can be convinced to get scared and angry about. No technical knowledge required.
For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.
You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.
Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers.
All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.
It's much more tangible for your average person than circular financing deals or chip supply constraints. And unfortunately social media is an amplifier for tangible misinformation.
Industry build-out in the USA? It's raising our energy and water costs.
Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese.
Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!
People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons.
That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.
There's a certain group of people (the kind of people who used to spend a lot of time on twitter and now spend a lot of time on bluesky) that's convinced that their environmental activism is what defeated NFT and are trying to repeat that to defeat AI because it's the same "tech bros we hate".
Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem.
Luckily, modern cooling techniques like heat pumps are much more efficient than resistive heating, 300% to 500% efficiency is easily attainable. You can keep the inside of a data center nice and chilly at room temperature even in the middle of a heat wave.
Then there is also the heat island effect. Concrete boxes will heat up an area more than dirt or wood, even if those boxes are completely empty inside. If you build them near where people live, people are gonna notice. Houses have gardens, industrial complexes such as data centers and factories don't.
Also, the effect is more concentrated downwind, so the heat effect is not some kind of uniform distribution in all directions.
That's surprising to me. You think a gigawatt of heat cannot be felt 500 meters downwind? How near before you experience the temperature rise in the article, if not that?
HN guidelines are that I should choose the most generous interpretation of your comment, not the most likely one. It would be uncharitable and insulting to you to take your comment at face value.
Interesting, as we increase our total global power consumption, losses in the form of heat will increase proportionally.
This is more of a zoning problem
"...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"
With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks?
Coding agents are increasingly popular right now, and they can use millions of reasoning tokens per hour. Basic ChatGPT queries hardly use any tokens by comparison.
Even at today's demand Anthropic and OpenAI often return 'model overloaded' errors.
Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this:
>I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years
Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy.
Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world.
If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice.
The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.
Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.
The zoning for Mesa AZ is some of the craziest I've ever seen. The obviously unsustainable car-choked sprawl near NTT PH1 is listed in the growth plan as "sustain" while the industrial area is listed as "evolve". The industrial/commercial strip is between two sprawl neighborhoods. In the general plan the car-oriented cul-de-sac hellscape is noted to be "traditional residential" while the data center area is "regional employment". It appears online that the city of Mesa actively encourages data centers in their "technology corridor"
industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits
honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
If they're zoned like heavy industry, that seems fine for any noise/ heat etc. If they're zoned for light industry or similar to office buildings like the other comment says I feel like that could have different impacts - an office building will have some of this but probably has much less equipment and energy needs, less venting heat out maybe?
But if we're going to keep factories and chemical plants away from housing we can keep data centers over with them I think. Out of sight, out of mind, less chance of local protestors, maybe even closer to good power plants for transmission. Everyone wins?
* a bunch of places didn't have the foresight to actually put buffers between industrial and residential zoned areas (either due to space limitations and/or poor planning)... sometimes people only notice when the empty lot they lived next to for a decade actually gets something built
* currently some protests are whipping up enough fervor where location doesn't really factor, people are fighting against any data centers within city limits at all
It's the issue du jour because of foreign influence. The situation in Phoenix is due more to poor zoning since the DC is right across the street from a residential area.
If you want people to be more supportive of it, there are pretty direct ways to do that. Donate heavily to the local community to make up for impact, build new power plants for the project to pay for itself, don't put in gas powered generators, stay away from housing...
3) actual fucking nutjobs in charge of these companies who can't seem to simply not say actual nutjob shit all the fucking time
4) entry level jobs disappearing
5) the obvious fact that "I am building the most powerful technology ever" means "the already-powerful people who own these technologies and companies are working to become vastly more powerful"
And I say this as someone who uses and loves using AI heavily across both my personal and professional life. It's better to grapple directly with the fact that people have very legitimate fears and concerns around this technology and the people who own it.
Reading only the abstract: "We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach... We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
I've only heard about datacenter protests in the past 2 years. So perhaps what the authors warned about is happening now?
Is your implication that something responsible for 5% of the demand is responsible for 5% of the price?
Because... that's not how prices work. And certainly not energy prices, which have both significant capex requirements, spot-market pricing dynamics, and capacity headroom requirements.
Data centers directly led to my rates increasing over the last ~6 months where several came online locally without supply increasing. Natural gas prices also impacted it, but the data center buildout over the last year has not helped.
That article is two years out of date, and looking at nationwide electricity usage doesn't account for the local impacts of these data centers.
(* nb4 "it's summer": talking about price per kWhr)
> I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too
If anything about this paper is accurate, which it clearly is not, then the >8000MW rejected to the atmosphere from the nearby Palo Verde power station should be raising the air temperature at least 250C, 1km downwind. Which it obviously does not.
Using energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas.
But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
Not necessarily; a building satisfied by its own rooftop solar should be roughly heat neutral since that energy was already there. The problem is with the power density these buildings imply, requiring energy movement. Everyone could run Qwen 3.8 27B at home with a solar panel and it'd make no difference. Companies could run their traditional servers on-site at their offices, etc.
Not quite. If the roof were highly reflective and it's a clear sky, it would reflect sunlight (including infrared) back into space. Of course, we're talking about such minimal levels of power here compared to, say, heating a house in the winter that it's irrelevant.
It needs around 300 W to run Qwen 3.8-27b here, which is roughly eqivalent to me as a human walking around and doing basically anything other than sitting still.
> But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment
The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.
The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.
Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.
1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.
My first thought: Phoenix is a large city. Google maps tells me that it is north-to-south is about 38km, and west-to-east about 28km. Plus, it seamlessly blends into other cities to the west and east, similar to Los Angeles County (it is endless!). The headline is wildly overstated. Literally, they are measuring residential neighborhoods built next to large data centers. Yeah, no shit Sherlock. If I built housing next to some industrial plant that emits lots of heat, the same effect would probably occur. The reality of people living in a place that experiences summertime temperatures of forty-five degrees Celcius, your enormous air conditioning unit will just work a little bit harder. You spent hardly anytime outside during weather like that. If anything, this just sounds like bad land zoning laws in Phoenix. The intent of this peer-reviewed study seems suspicious to me.
"The attribution of this warming to data center waste heat is supported by the consistent alignment of the temperature signal with the prevailing wind direction across multiple sites, dates, and meteorological conditions. "
Well, no? That could also mean that the heat island effect of the (statutorily mandated) employee parking lot is causal.
You can look up the NTT PH1 Datacenter from the study on Google Maps. It doesn't have much of a parking lot but due to poor industrial zoning, it's right next to a residential suburb. It's basically a failure of urban planning.
It's in the middle of a large, disturbed area with big commercial buildings, roads, and parking lots, only some of which are data centers. This type of disturbance tends to get hot in the sun. But the larger question is how they are attributing the temperature at the end of the cul de sac to the data center when the somewhat more obvious reason for a hot spot there is that nothing shades it. That is, the measured cooler streets are shaded by the houses, but the edges of the neighborhood are shaded by nothing.
Anyway the main problem with this paper is it does not have an explanation for why the response isn't linear. If areal density of heat rejection was able to raise air temperatures this amount, then nobody would be able to go anywhere near a thermal power station without being vaporized.
All I can think of when reading this was Hank Hill yelling at his neighbor: "Dale you giblet-head, we live in Texas, where it's already 110 in the summer. And if it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!" [1]
During peak sunlight conditions, a standard black asphalt surface will readily absorb solar radiation, sending its surface temperature to 150°F–190°F .
A clean white roof reflects up to 80% of sunlight, and topping out at around 95°F–115°F. (https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roo...)
The referenced 169 MW location is literally across the street from a residential neighborhood, where the article indicates they measured temperature differences[0].
> This gap is significant because many facilities are sited adjacent to residential neighborhoods (Fig. 1), and their air-cooled condenser arrays discharge air at temperatures 8–14 °C above ambient—often exceeding 50 °C during Phoenix summers—with air velocities of 2–4 m/s [15,16], creating thermal plumes that are advected downwind over inhabited areas. For example, the Iron Mountain Data Center (Fig. 1(c)) has cooling equipment located less than 50 m from the nearest three-story apartment building.
Well historically it meant that's where poor black families lived, but since these days the lower end of the 1% have more in common with the poorest of the poor than the richest of the rich it's probably where mere millionaires live.
But ... but ... but ... ai companies have safety teams that ... well ... make sure some kind of singularity mumbo jumbo threat wont happen. The thing they dont care about are ... well ... actual people and actual environment.
I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ...
*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
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-cen...
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.
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?
> 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.
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-cente...
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.
Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.
I fear you may be correct.
On the other hand, how does that combine with his apparent narcissistic need to be seen? Is his need so simple it can be met with "line go up"?
Why would it have to be consistent? I've seen so many things be said and be done that do not mesh at al that this is really a very minor thing.
Think about it, the list is just about endless by now it's hard to tell the lies from the intentions and the character deficits.
I want to understand how his mind works. Not sure what value this is, now I think about it: I'm unlikely to time a bet against him well enough to win it.
So, for this point, I don't care that the words and actions he emits have no apparent rational long-term coherency, but I do care about the coherency of the system behind them which generates them.
Think of it like me wanting to learn how an LLM works so I don't get surprised by it doing more than a Markov chain.
You'd have to become a billionaire first and that takes a particular mindset. The two might be mutually exclusive.
>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?
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.
Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?
Training is part of why there's two orders of magnitude range in the estimates. However, I believe yes, they do include energy production impact.
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'.
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.
Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.
But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive.
So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
They also didn't say whether or not they like electric lightbulbs. Or hot showers. Or clothes. Or the wheel.
One tylenol is good at reducing my fever. 20 tylenol will likely damage my liver and might even kill me.
I'm not saying tylenol is bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just pointing out that your position is equivalent to opposing a person saying "lets no shove 20 tylenol down someone's throat" with the argument "but one has reduced the fever".
Turning off the datacenters would be horrible. We would literally be forced to go outside and touch grass. I wouldn't want to live in such a world.
What else might happen?
We stop being subjected to patronizing thought experiments by geriatric HN user accounts.
If you have a point be a grown up and make it. We aren't your grandkids or doggy here for a Milk Bone.
Unlikely. I'm not sure where HN is hosted, but I think it's a bare metal server in a colo, not a data center.
The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad", and then stretching the position to "data centers bad". I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud. Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there. We need the solar/wind equivalent for hosting. The problem is data centers have efficiencies at scale that we can't achieve with more distributed solutions, but I'm not a specialist in that particular analysis.
Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.
We had all of that before the current wave of hyperscale data center buildout. So what NEW benefit do i get from all this?
How many racks do you think a niche, text only forum is going to take up?
We could do all of that before the most recent datacenter build outs.
Existing datacenters at the scale we were used to were just fine for what was expected of them.
All of those are the old, smaller scale.
Can you elaborate on the scale difference?
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
People say this and then use AI for literally everything they do.
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.
I think this is just projection.
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.
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.
"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.
Please, elaborate on how hyperscale ai datacenters are going to help fill my belly.
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.
> 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.
It directly and indirectly increases your quality of life and it is something you use every single day.
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.
The datacenter means I don't have read/write YAML anymore. Checkmate. I would burn the world than ever deal with YAML again.
This is the only response disagreeing with me that i consider valid. The man hates YAML. Hopefully you’re ok with Markdown…
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Rack densities have also more than doubled just in last 5 years
It's an order of magnitude.
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.
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.... :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
> 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.
>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
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.
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-alcoh...
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.
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.
> Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction.
This is the opposite of how it works, ethanol is the active ingredient for all of the fun parts of drinking, the metabolite, acetaldehyde, is the cause of all of the unfun parts (nausea, headache, flushing).
A significant percentage of East Asians have one or both of a superactive alcohol dehydrogenase (which converts ethanol to acetaldehyde) and a defective aldehyde dehydrogenase (which converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid), and they have significantly lower rates of alcoholism.
My doctor indicated it was more of a risk for me because my liver worked quickly, but your mention of acetyldehyde I know to be correct. I need to better understand this, thanks for the correction.
Everything in moderation, especially moderation.
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?
> 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-...
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...
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?
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.
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. 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.
I’m not saying anything about opposition. I’m just saying I’m tired of “well people made unwanted porn before” or whatever as if the tools haven’t radially changed.
Your comment sure makes it sound like you think there's a problem with the new scale of things. And I'm not saying that's incorrect, just that it needs to be backed up with something more than "it's way bigger than it was."
Completely agreed that the "this existed before" argument is tiring. But so is the "it's a lot bigger now" argument. Neither one actually says anything interesting. They're both statements of opinion (this is fine, versus this is bad) hiding inside obvious statements of fact.
I just want something concrete to judge. The data center debate rages but almost never in terms that help me figure out what to think about it. RAM prices going through the roof is something I can easily contextualize and shows the impact on the broader world. Data center construction spending going up a few hundred percent isn't and doesn't, and when I look up the numbers to contextualize it then it doesn't really look all that significant.
“It’s a lot bigger now” just means we have to deal with realities of scale, that’s a true statement so I’m not sure why that’s different from my scale argument. The whole point is “yes these 2 things are the same, except scale, which can make it very different.” 1 bee sting is one thing, 1000 is another. 1 piece of candy is one thing, 1000 is another.
You are assigning additional value to my comments - I get it but I’m trying to say clearly that I’m not saying those things. All I am talking about is acting as if scale is not a part of the conversation. Anything beyond that I have yet to weigh in on. i’m happy to elaborate if you want me to on any particular point, I am not being deliberately opaque here. I’m just not entirely sure what you are looking for.
Your point would stand better without the insincere analogy.
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I'm also in favor of making them pay, and in the end I'm expecting/hoping that's what will happen. But either way, when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa. Plus I'm sure some DCs would just pick another spot if forced to compromise; there's always some red county out there willing to do whatever just for a company to build there, that's why a lot of the DCs are being build in LA/AL/MS etc.
It might also be more complicated than you might think though due to the complexities of increasing power supply. Power companies also use prices raises to discourage residential use and conserve the existing supply for larger customers. They can't refuse to service residential but they also can't increase supply yet, so they just raise the prices until residential users "choose" to lower their power consumption.
My old power company told me it would be a temporary increase until supply was increased, but they said that the last time and it never happened. which, speaking of NOVA, was caused by the Loundon County allowing more data centers to be built. They get the money but since the power grid is regional everyone gets the bill :) .
> when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa.
That's assuming they have so few alternatives that opening with that wouldn't cause them to just cross you off their list.
Convincing your competitors to do that while you don't tends to be pretty profitable though, which is one of the reasons that strategy has so many champions.
My community tried that. They were coerced into a tax break instead.
https://www.wemu.org/wemu-news/2026-07-18/saline-township-re...
> So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents.
This is actually what happens in most places. It's even what happens in many cases when the data centers are given a discount, because the "amortize fixed costs over more units of generation" thing still happens.
Higher rates are essentially a time lag. You want to add load to the grid today but it will take five years to add that much new generation and in the meantime the only way to make a higher demand curve match up with the existing supply curve is at a temporarily higher price.
You could raise the price of electricity on only the data center by so much that it removes the increase in demand, but what that actually means is not building it there, and then it also isn't there after generation catches up and the local power company would have been able to spread their fixed costs over more units.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
Data centers are asset dense. A large one would have a value of e.g. a billion dollars while the neighboring plot of land has an assessment value of a million dollars. That's why they offer tax incentives -- a tenth of the rate on 1000 times the assessment value is a huge revenue win over the 100% of nothing you get if they build it somewhere else.
Or to put it another way, it allows the towns with a higher mill rate to keep themselves in the running instead of being excluded from the outset.
They do pay, that's why these towns are doing all these shady things to minimize public input.
The problem is that the towns generally want to spend the money on new stuff rather than give the money back in tax cuts.
You can't make them pay. And even if you could, real people wouldn't see the revenue.
It's far cheaper to buy local politicians.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Noise, pollution, energy costs (which you cover in your comment!) and water usage / contamination. I don't want more of those things. I don't want a bunch of strip malls of golf courses in my community, either.
> Noise, pollution
Both of these are complaints about gas turbines rather than data centers.
Data centers can pretty easily do the opposite by offering to curtail load during energy supply shortfalls, both through region shifting and by temporarily operating backup generators, which allows the grid to add more renewable generation without having intermittency issues, and thereby operate fewer gas turbines.
Obviously you have to actually do it that way, but that's the point -- the focus of noise and pollution concerns should be directed towards how power is being generated.
> water usage / contamination
Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.
> energy costs
Energy costs are supply and demand. The econ 101 explanation is generally pretty accurate for supply -- if there isn't enough supply then prices go up. This is why NIMBYs screw everyone (including themselves). If you can't build more of something then you have to pay more for whatever already exists.
Demand is more complicated. Econ 101 usually applies in the immediate term, higher prices don't increase supply instantaneously so an immediate increase in demand tends to create an immediate increase in price. But then you can increase supply, and what does that do?
You now have higher volume, more economies of scale, more units to amortize fixed costs over. The ultimate effect of an increase in demand is usually a reduction in the unit price. The exceptions are the things where supply is highly inelastic, like land (as opposed to housing units), which is not the case with power generation.
Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators are preventing supply from increasing. In which case you should be focused on fixing that.
> What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers. Just make them pay!
What kind of question is that? Communities that don't want them?
You think money can fix and buy everything?
Besides, they pay already.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Well maybe if you were in community with the people protesting them you'd understand their perspective.
They don't pay as much. They get their electricity at industrial bulk rates while we pay the residential rate. Their demands require more power lines to be run, but those costs are spread out and blended with consumers. It's a legal form of stealing.
Because people don't like living next to them. They're loud, they're large and monotonous, they don't provide many jobs after construction, they use a lot electricity and decent amount of water, and the ones that rely on fossil fuels pollute.
That plus all the tech bros have gone out of their way to advertise loudly AI as a replacement for humans. So why would a community of humans want to support that?
> they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
https://www.loudoun.gov/faq.aspx?TID=241
Loudoun County is a very rich part of NOVA and was able to fight for those concessions, as well as being in a very desirable part of the country for those DC's to built in (close to major infrastructure but still undeveloped at the time) so they had a better position to argue from.
Plus, as I mentioned in another comment, while Loundoun County gets the tax benefits the whole area is affected by the DC's power consumption due to the regional power grid and shared infrastructure (i.e. the Potomoc) so part of my already high power bills was due to the data centers there and I got minimal benefits.
Yes. See my other comment about how Oregon was able to solve the power problem. The residents of Oregon will be paying LOWER prices than before the data centers.
The data center problem seems to be merely a government corruption problem. Which is a problem, of course, but not limited to data centers.
Alas, something like that wouldn't have helped me either as I was on the other side of the river :) . But yeah some sort of regional coordination between local governments or something like that would fix or at least help the problem.
Like I said in my original comment, I think really the problem is just the scale of the build out. Before the AI boom DCs were being built slowly enough that it wasn't a problem and/or costs could be amortized over time. But cost sharing agreements and subsidization needs to be done before the DCs are built the they're certainly not going to push for it, so the people need to. Lower state taxes in the future due to DCs subsidizing power is (sincerely) great and all, but it doesn't do shit for the families deciding between food and heating their house in the winter before those benefits kick in.
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
Everyone would be singing their praises.
Oregon just passed a law saying data centers will pay more for electricity than normal people, and the math says that everyone's rates will be going down.
So, again, I think it depends on whether you live in a red or blue state.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/04/data-centers-utility-...
that seems odd, do other industries pay a higher rate for electricity or is this specifically targeting data centers?
>Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
demand goes up + supply remains steady = price goes up.
Why should supply stay steady?
You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
Putting up everyone’s prices is a hard impact on a community.
> You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
they want to, hence all the natural gas turbines. However, and this is pretty funny, you don't just order those using doordash or turn up a knob like on AWS. It takes years, if not decades, for those things to get manufactured, delivered, installed, and on line. He who shall not be be named here mentioned in a interview how all these software guys are going to get painful lesson in hardware when they start trying to build behind the meter power generation.
>Why should supply stay steady?
i'm not saying it should. but it takes time to bring new power generation online.
>You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
agreed
It does take time to build capacity. But if I build a new office building I’m simply not allowed to open it up and park in the neighborhood driveways today because I have a plan to build a parking structure eventually.
Also infrastructure costs might be billed differently between industrial vs retail.
(And the marginal cost on infrastructure isn't necessarily paid be the people increasing the demand)
In the short term (assuming no point fixes help soften the shock).
> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.
Well they say
*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"
"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.
What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.
A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.
You are right this seems to be misleading in a calculated way. And just because this is a junk paper doesn’t mean the groundwater issues aren’t real. I don’t really know who would be incentivized to publish this because as you say if it’s environmentalists they risk discrediting themselves.
I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."
Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.
> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want.
I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK.
Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going.
I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.
i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn....
This is how economies work and the alternative strategy of enumerating morally correct wants/needs and assigning the correct price from on-high has been a demonstrable failure. It is a cognitive failure of humanity that this strategy is so intuitively appealing to us.
> the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.
Sure, but that's the crux of it all, isn't it. Are they? And are they doing it that much better than before?
I'm far from an AI coding skeptic at this point, the stuff works, and I use it, but I think it's fair to ask whether it's worth burning a middle class home's amount of electricity to spit out CRUD apps and web frontends a bit faster. As many have pointed out, we've still yet to see some kind of huge productivity increase in society at large, or even some particularly revolutionary new app or whatever.
On some level it's people's money and they can spend it how they want, but people get criticized for unnecessary waste of resources all the time.
I think people should be allowed to do things, generally. If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business (and quickly, at these prices). I think it is likely more worth it than you realize.
We're not talking about criticizing, we're talking about bans.
> If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business
In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful.
We are also assuming that economic value means something is good for society. A lot of money is made off of social media, ads, gambling apps, clearly there's demand for it. I don't think that means we can say all those things are good, just off demand alone.
I'm not really talking about banning anything, I just think it should be asked whether this stuff is worth it. We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
I think that low externality things people are willing to pay for should be presumptively allowed unless there is strong reason otherwise. We are much too involved in the 'legislating individual activities' and not nearly enough in the 'tax wealth and redistribute' side of things.
> We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
Post-2020, the internet is real life. Internet native thought has proven to be a powerful force in the physical world. I remember laughing at the absurdity of 4chan posters in high school. I will not make the mistake of taking internet ideology lightly again.
>the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.
Some of them are doing this at their jobs, but there are also tons of people pushing slop to open-source projects, vibe coding useless or redundant apps, etc.
It's also a cognitive failure of humanity to assume the free market is only guided by the invisible hand of demand and supply, if only government and moralists would get out of the way.
Lobster Jesus FTW.
> there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
ChatGPT has been the most downloaded app every month for a year and a half.
It's gotta be something. The actual apps I use to do work on my phone either were included in the OS or downloaded long ago.
And yet, AI is broadly unpopular:
https://techstrong.ai/features/public-sentiment-sours-as-ai-...
The fact that people try out ChatGPT does not change that. People are complicated!
That doesn't mean people want LLMs to replace their jobs so they can (hopefully) go on welfare, and to have ever more data enters built with that goal in mind.
They don't want them to replace their job, they want them to replace other peoples jobs.
There's also different building pressures. Before, companies would want to build / power / maintain the smallest amount of data center hardware they could while still serving their needs. Overprovisioning just meant worse opex number.
Now, because supply is so constrained relative to demand, there's no limit. More is always better, which leads to a crazy amount of construction (as its negative effects).
How is there a big difference between those two things? People want Netflix, people also want the output of AI whether that is lobster Jesus or something else. This seems more like substituting what people want, which clearly includes AI, for what some people think others should want. I can guarantee you there are people who don’t want Netflix and think it’s a waste of resources that encourage people to binge TV, become a couch potato, and end up being drags on the healthcare system. Should their preferences override those who do want it?
Democracy, even at its most ideal, is often about overriding preferences. Netflix helps to float an entire industry of creators and a tangible pop culture. It's not entirely clear (or softened, maybe not clear to communities) what AI build out floats currently except AI companies and the tangible negatives of generative AI.
The specific examples are not the point. Obviously some people hate Netflix and some people love Lobster Jesus. There is a rising sentiment against AI:
https://techstrong.ai/features/public-sentiment-sours-as-ai-...
>Should their preferences override those who do want it?
This is rather the point of government, balancing the competing amd incompatible desires of different groups of people for the benefit of everyone. Yes, if a community decides they don't want a GPU warehouse, using whatever means that community uses to make decisions (referenda, petitioning representatives, etc.), their desire should overrule the desire of people to have one. That's what society is!
I think that potentially the difference is that, while people do in some sense want AI, they don't want it in the same way that they want Netflix. I'd compare it to Amazon: it perfectly possible for people to like the ability to like 2 day shipping while also liking that the site is flooded in cheap crap.
So maybe it is that people like AI in certain domains but HATE the way that it is being used overall?
> How is there a big difference between those two things?
Netflix just serves existing data so their biggest need is data storage ala CDN for closer retrieval to the user. Very low requirements. Creating sweet baby lobster jesus requires incredible amounts of computer/power/cooling. The requirements are totally different. Yes, both ultimately deliver pixels to consumer's eyeballs, but how they get there are so different that it's laughable that people cannot see the difference.
The point is they don't use nearly the same amount of energy.
It's weird how this point is being ignored, or that you even have to say it.
The conflating of a data center and an AI/GPU farm is disingenuous at best, and the AI people know what they are doing. None of the "traditional" data centers are being powered on site with gas turbine generators. New GPU farms are also being designed with much larger footprints with much more needs from the public utilities.
You really think Lobster Jesus is what most of this is doing?
It's doing code, analytics, training, research, operating services. The silly slop stuff is a small rounding error of usage.
Ah, the job-killing stuff, right. Don't forget selecting Iranian girls' schools as targets for missile strikes, AI is doing that, too.
As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end for planned facilities. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water.
This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.
That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.
AI inference and training GPUs require way, way more power than anything manufactured before. Like, between 2020 and 2026 we went from ~400W for an A100 to ~1400W for an NVIDIA B300. And you cannot make that happen without changing the datacenter itself. More noise, way more complicated cooling setup, new power sources, etc. Not all datacenters are created equal.
The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms
> The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms
Could you expand on that?
I don't necessarily know what the parent was referring to, but I can see two this:
Megacorps often get significant tax breaks to build AI in a community.
Megacorps advertise that datacenters will create jobs but don't mention that most of those jobs will disappear once construction is finished.
I don't think it's necessarily shady, but let's say that we're assisting at bets and capex spending we've never seen in history.
Companies like Meta, Alphabet, etc that were drowning in cash flow and buying back their stock are now back at issuing shares, creating a huge number of SPVs, issuing debt, etc.
There's a gigantic spending spirale with no signs of ending. Nvidia is financing companies to buy its own hardware.
Mind you, this is nothing new in some businesses. Airbus and Boeing have been lending money to companies to buy their own airplanes forever.
But its just all too much, with very little money coming. To understand how massive is the spending: even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested.
> even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested.
Your math does not make sense. That's something like $1.5 trillion every year. That's no where near what is being spent in AI hardware buildouts on an annual basis.
Last year estimated spend was $380 billion and this year it's $680 billion [0] just for the big five. Given global projections through 2030 being as high as 7 trillion [1], OPs comment seems at least the right order of magnitude.
[0]: https://futurumgroup.com/insights/ai-capex-2026-the-690b-inf...
[1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
1. The estimates, for data center build outs in 2026 alone, in US alone, and even limiting just to the hyperscalers + oracle is in the 600 to 800 billions range.
And I'm ignoring the likes of Nvidia building their owns and smaller (but still huge) outside the biggest players. Or the comparably smaller, yet still multi billions spent in the rest of the world.
2. That excludes salaries, research, taxes, cost of running the datacenters themselves, etc.
In fact several estimates are pointing out that global annual spending on AI better be in the range of 3T$ range (that's almost a 1'000 $ / year per every adult in the world) or this is all going bust.
The math that does not make sense is to expect such a gargantuan spending to have any meaningful monetary return.
Gartner estimates that 2026 will have about $2.5 trillion in AI investments, with 2027 reaching over $3 trillion.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-1...
Those are totals, not annual spending.
Thank you for the correction.
This is very important, filling racks with GPU's instead of CPU's is vastly more power hungry (and hence will generate a lot more heat). Vera Rubin is 1800-2300W, mind boggling, these data centers even have new power architectures coming.
And I know what people will say, Vera Rubin is vastly more efficient, but that only matters if you have saturated your needs, it's meaningless if you need that capacity, and I'm sure it will run pretty much at a 100% 24/7.
Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors. Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners.
Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.
Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.
All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.
If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.
I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.
I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else.
Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.
Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.
Being within a few hundred meters of a building that's consuming tens to hundreds of megawatts will do that, yes. I have no idea how big a normal factory would be to consume that much while running.It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.
I hope so. The worst case scenario is that it develops into something like nuclear aversion in Germany.
Tell that to the people who have to live next to them and all the people going on about how AI is going to change everything.
Some outrages are based on real things. Not everything is a moral panic. It's like saying the Epstein victims (for example) are just a moral panic because society refuses to hold the rich and powerful accountable and the news cycle moves on.
Remember when people spent hours on the weekend protesting Tesla dealerships. I guess they protected us from whatever it was. Can’t remember anymore
The risk is that reacting to the panic, states lock in laws with destructive moratoriums they politically can't back out of later.
That's just a non sequitur.
Compare the scale of datacenter construction in the past decades vs the pace post 2022.
Also the general computing datacenters of the past are vastly different in societal utility vs the GPU only AI datacenters, which do just one thing
One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.
I served two terms on my town's planning commission.
It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.
In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.
There is a lot of conflicting information out there, partly because the resources / environmental consequences of the current rollouts are incredibly multi-dimensional, and most articles only focus on a subset of them - and there seems to be rapid innovation happening in some of the infrastructure that can void an article from a year ago.
The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals.
I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.
Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it.
I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.
Amongst other issues, it is a proxy for the angst over AI.
Small scale natural gas turbine plants are bad for local human air due to NOx emissions.
100% true yet even when you solve this (for example with clean hydro in the northwest), you make zero progress with the anti-datacenter people.
America is huge. Why do they need to be constructed next to people's homes?
That's where the resources are. You wouldn't expect some uber wealthy billion dollar company to have to provide power/water needs way out in the middle of nowhere would you?
Well, to a point. I honestly don't get why, for example, we're building anything that requires a lot of water in Arizona.
Why are we growing crops that depend on monsoon amounts of water in the desert? Because people with money and power have decided that's what they want to do.
The explanation has never made intuitive sense to me and the political power of almond and alfalfa farmers continues to elude me. Yes, almond farmers have money but Larry Ellison, Musk, and Sergey Brin have a shitload more. As do non-tech industries like Californian real estate developers. California has ~40 billionaires from real estate alone. That industry, and tech, and manufacturing, and everyone else is also competing for water supply.
What makes almond farmers so good at procuring and maintaining political influence?
Right, as with almost everything with people, it's an emotional reaction (fear) with a thin layer of rationalization on top.
This applies to the billionaire class as well. Such as having to beat China in AI race the tech CEOs started.
Is there a better alternative for on-demand, on-location power generation?
You can use fuel cells; I'm sure external steam reforming based hydrogen (in protein exchange membrane fuel cells) works very well, but I'd not be surprised if some hydrocarbon or alcohol fuel cell beats it in TCO; also I'd expect liquid oxygen to be readily suited to be trucked-in with the fuel they feed these turbines and by the power of a simple dry heat exchanger exchanging between ambient air and combustion "air" they could use exhaust gas recirculation with pure (other than the exhaust gas diluting it so the flame doesn't melt the turbine blades) oxygen which would as a side-effect allow them to condense out water to obtain nearly pure CO2 exhaust. Liquid oxygen is around 100$/ton and you need 3.21 tons of it to burn one ton of methane. If you use kerosene instead you're at about 2.58 tons of oxygen per ton of fuel.
Note that the absence of nitrogen otherwise plentiful in combustion air eliminates NOX formation.
What they do for the oxygen production is they condense air and then distill it; IIRC it's mainly done for steel production where they use it to burn off carbon dissolved in molten iron. It's side product liquid nitrogen and argon are primarily produced from this but are mostly considered side-products of the "oxygen refining".
Thanks for the information. I never knew about those kinds of fuel cells and they look like an excellent alternative.
From what I've just read, the only real downsides other than initial cost are slow startup time (hours) and they are physically larger than gas turbines. In exchange for a higher upfront price, you get a more efficient and reliable power generator. Very cool.
It's new, noticeable, memorable, and the companies involved (tech) are uniquely unlikable. Incumbents that use more resources in ways that create unwanted externalities are better about doing things more stealthily, and look rather boring. Also they've been there the entire time, so easier to accept.
Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so.
(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).
It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.
Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok -inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns…
It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.
People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.
Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…
> There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area.
This is the trumped up rhetoric you speak of.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth.
Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.
What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?
China is certainly thrilled with how this manufactured moral panic is playing out in the US. AI is going to be the most important technology in the world before long.
The water use panic is so ridiculous. The sheep pushing it do so while sipping almond milk lattes. One almond milk latte uses the same water as tens of thousands of chat gpt requests.
~80–90 liters for one typical almond milk latte vs. ~0.3–15 mL for one ChatGPT request. Using a mid-range AI figure of ~5 mL: one latte ≈ 16,000–18,000 ChatGPT requests. Using OpenAI’s ~0.32 mL figure: one latte ≈ 250,000+ requests. Even with a higher AI estimate of 50 mL: still roughly 1,600–1,800 requests per latte.
Step 1: Convince the public (voters) that Data Centers are the evil boogeyman
Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies).
General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations!
Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around.
Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage.
Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure.
Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason?
“Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!”
Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players.
Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”.
i2p = dead Hyphanet = dead TOR = dead [insert self hosted service] = dead
I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.
This post is quite hilarious to read, it has to be satire
The article isn't about warming the planet. So you're the one trumping up something that isn't there.
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.
That is using FUD to avoid accountability. In this case is the last one "doubt". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.
> My skeptic meter
Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD
> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.
Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center.
It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers.
If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.
>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.
It's both.
As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.
You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.
The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.
It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)
Reminds me of how Shake Shack got rid of all of their peanut butter milkshakes years ago because one single person complained that their child with a peanut allergy couldn't have them.
It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right?
Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.
> Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it?
At some point, their 401Ks are going to depend on it.
I think that's another example of the social contract breaking down. Lots of people either cannot afford to invest or no longer believe that investing will allow them to afford things like a house or retirement that were traditionally part of being middle class.
I imagine that things would be dramatically different if most people believed that the success of data centers would directly lead to their economic success.
45.7% of Americans don’t have a 401k. That’s not a convincing argument.
That's more people than elected the sitting president. Numbers don't really mean what you're trying to imply. Going the other way, 1% of the population hold the vast majority of the wealth while yielding all of the power.
The outrage is real to the individual, but manufactured. Media (e.g. 404media, Ed Zitron) promotes anything that engages for clicks, views, and subscriptions. Other parties do it to hinder competition, weaken the US, or distract from much worse polluters.
You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.
One HUGE issue is that datacenters don't have an afterlife in the communities where they're located.
They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices.
If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised.
Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
It’s just a big tip-up warehouse with precast walls. If you stripped out all of the extra electrical distribution and cooling equipment, you’re left with a giant warehouse which can easily be repurposed.
If the ai bubble bursts, these buildings will be able to be repurposed unlike rust belt factories. With all of that cooling, you could turn them into a weird form of multi-family housing. Or use them for indoor skate parks, kart racing tracks, whatever you can imagine. I don't think rust belt is an appropriate comparison. Also, these places don't hire that many people like a factory did. If the factory shut down, entire towns could collapse with it. If a data center shut down, maybe 20 people would notice????
> Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
The issue is an incentive one, for the companies involved in the construction.
Right now, they are getting paid so much to build it fast. Time is of the greatest importance. Nothing else is mattering to anyone involved except how fast datacenters are being built. At best, this is an after-thought.
As such, I believe that we have to change the incentives to create more sustainability but it requires time, discussion. Perhaps laws can help in making them more sustainable but currently, the sad reality is that for all the parties actually involved, I don't think that many truly care about the after-math or repurcussions of it as much as its the only thing that they want right now
It is real but it's about the unaccountability, dishonesty, and misanthropy of corporate overlords, rather than about the externalities of data centers per se. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901
It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one.
Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing.
In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.
From my research, data centers and - more importantly - the electricity required to run data centers, are consuming a lot of water.
Sure you can argue that it's less than other industries, but that ignores the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure in the US. Any statistic you use right now is obsolete in 18-36 months when X times more data centers are running.
Also on a local level the water use can even be significant. I don't think you can rightfully tell residents who are seeing an outsized amount of their water going to data centers that they're "panicking" over nothing.
The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down.
But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.
If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth
We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.
My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.
It’s not so binary
Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact
Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done
They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.
But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous
AI datacenters are a completely different beast than the "normal" cloud ones.
They use order of magnitudes more resources.
the information I have says they use 3-5x, which isn't even one order of magnitude
I've done a bit of research into it, and I think it's a mix.
The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.
The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.
The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem.
I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.
Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much.
I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.
> The energy thing is exaggerated.
https://www.wpr.org/news/wisconsin-energy-demand-to-rise-dri...
> Wisconsin energy demand to rise 40 percent by 2032, driven by data centers, draft report finds
> Draft report: Over 72% of peak electricity load is 'associated with three active data center developments'
https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-d...
https://www.cleanwisconsin.org/wisconsin-ai-data-center-powe...
> Two AI Data Centers Require More Energy Than All Wisconsin Homes Combined: Just two AI data center projects — the Microsoft data center in Mt. Pleasant and Vantage data center in Port Washington — will require a combined 3.9 gigawatts (GW) of electric power, which is enough energy to power 4.3 million Wisconsin homes. There are only 2.8 million housing units in the entire state.
Compare with the city of Los Angeles - https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/power-system
> In fiscal year 2023-24, we supplied more than 20,749 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of power for more than 1.6 million electric service customers, including nearly 6,000 in the Owens Valley.
That's an average of 2.3 GW over the year.
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> The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/15/as-googles-water-dema...
> When Google purchased a defunct aluminum smelter in The Dalles, it also acquired the right to pump massive amounts of water from underground — up to 3.88 million gallons a day. That’s almost as much water as the entire city averaged per day in 2024.
> The corporation transferred those water rights to the city in 2021, Bentz noted, allowing The Dalles to pump more water from underground. The city only obtained part, not all, of the former smelter’s water rights, Mays said after OPB’s story published.
It's the rights to pump the water. Google can pump up to 3.88 million gallons per day and the city can't bill them a penny for that. Also, because it's an old claim, it's likely more senior to other water rights.
https://www.oregon.gov/owrd/programs/waterrights/pages/defau...
> The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.
It doesn't work like that because skipping your DoorDash burrito doesn't make the energy not used for that available for data center use.
The AI data center energy problem is that they use an order of magnitude more than regular data centers and they are being built at a massively higher rate than regular data centers and they are being built in places where many are being built and their owners are in a hurry.
The electric grid is designed to handle growth in demand, but this is growth way beyond anything that was anticipated.
> I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.
Not Phoenix, but I learned an interesting fact about some of the huge data centers in Las Vegas, which pre-date AI: since it's 72 degrees or cooler for more than 70% of the year, during those months they can just pipe in outside air without needing to cool it first.
On top of that, I think both Phoenix and Vegas have fewer natural disasters than other major metro areas.
> Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.
A closed cycle cooling system doesn't solve the overall problem of water usage. Yes you have a cycle within the datacenter, but you need to then move that energy somewhere else, out of the system. Eventually that energy needs to find its way in the environment. A close loop system for a datacenter reduces the water use on site, but actually increase electro use. If that electricity comes from a power plant that is cooled by water you just moved the problem upstream
That's true. Making them pay enough for water might mean the data center doesn't even get built there. It gets built somewhere more logical with abundant cheap water.
It's gotta be costs, right? Everyone wants this done fast and at large scale, so they're going for any sites with existing large electrical connections I assume.
TikTok and social media
Of course, that's why the US wanted to buy it.
It's more like, not having Trump, and controlling the complete manufacturing pipeline from beginning to end
Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.
The Texas grid is largely independent of the national grid. Abbott wants an audit to ensure data center plans comply with the rules. "Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first."
It's not a pro or anti business stance it's just a deal-is-a-deal stance.
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comp...
There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.
Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.
Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.
It's like literally any other change to society:
You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.
At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.
It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.
Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up
What recent mass-media panics have been legit?
For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.
It is 100% deranged nonsense. These people have absolutely lost their minds.
These days there always seems to be panic regardless. I find it better to look at the merits of individual claims rather than try to group everything together into a binary answer like a possible conspiracy on one thing means nothing else needs to be considered.
Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere.
I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already.
For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list. I say this as someone who has traditionally voted for environmentally conscious options/representatives - my previously existing circle doesn't spend that much time talking about AI compared to other causes.
I did some digging and lots of anti data center accounts were from India.
I imagine China bought the accounts or pay $20 for a post.
Degrowth has always been a big part of Anglophone culture. This is just the latest part of that. If you see the various parties as those downwardly mobile vs those succeeding you can automatically place people predictably into where they’ll land on various issues.
It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.
If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts.
I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.
> even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed
This site has as much of an ideological slant as any other site, this isn't a unique oasis in a sea of partisan echo chambers.
We need some gatekeeping. We need automated fact checking. We need moderation based on someone's domain expertise and not how well their argument appeals to readers. User moderation is fundamentally broken and maybe only worked for a while due to the participants tending towards a particular background. Also, in the age of AI it's questionable if community forums can even continue to exist.
Turns out people have quite strong feelings about career -ruining and planet-burning tech advances.
I think it's good that there are topics that elicit emotional responses. It does make the discussion a bit difficult, gotta admit that.
I do not believe for one instance that people are coming from a legitimate concern around planet-burning and reaching their conclusions about AI vs. reasoning backwards from wanting reasons to be anti-AI. Very few people I've met seems willing to make one iota of earnest personal sacrifice for avoiding actual in-real-life planet-burning industries.
Actively pisses me off hearing climate rationale for opposing something so relatively inconsequential while the house is on fire from pre-existing industry that is grandfathered in.
You must not live in a planet-burned spot yet. But, direct experience shouldn't be the only way to build empathy for viewpoints that aren't yours.
I live in a place with sufficient books that I know how to understand the written word, but I understand not everyone replying to my comments is so fortunate.
Do any of those books include 101 climate change or Cadillac Desert.
A lot of those aren't really online problems. People will always be discussing from feelings, bickering, so on. Go to any town hall meeting or debate club and you can see the same. Take a look at politicians and their discussions too, yeah?
If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.
if you've ever read Plato's dialogues or are familiar with the court politics of the eunuchs during, well, any Chinese dynasty, you might be convinced that even those that sit squarely in the seat of power and have the best access to food, education, and disposable time in their era are all still just a bunch of ideologues prone to bickering, constantly arguing from feelings and having little echo chambers, and so on
has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations
When you label people who disagree with you ideological extremists, you're part of the problem. They're properly labeled "people who believe things that I don't believe" and they deserve a counterargument rather than a curt dismissal or demand for silencing. If you have the courage of your own beliefs, it should be trivial to offer one.
It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answer, it's good AI slop.
Agreed, also with the people claiming foreign influence or fake accounts. I like AI, I use it a lot for work. I do not think people opposed to data centers are under foreign influence. It's pretty obvious why someone wouldn't want a huge building in their neighborhood. It's also pretty obvious to me that we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates in places like Phoenix Arizona! There can be discussion for sure, but to accuse people (who are quite frankly taking a pretty obvious and easy to understand position) of being "foreign agents" or "extremists", is just wrong. If anyone is the extremists, it's us, the heavy AI users.
> we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates
Jesus.
>even on hacker news.
come on now, HN is just a step above reddit. some of these discussions are pretty solid.
> HN is just a step above reddit.
It didn't used to be this way. The line between HN and reddit is converging and now sometimes it's difficult to tell them apart.
I do think the quality has gone down over my seven-ish years on HN, but that could be me just remembering "the good ol' days". Still so much better than Reddit though. It's not close. Reddit has a much lower quality set of posts and comments on average across technical subreddits.
I remember the Ivermectin/Hydroxychloroquine fights where people were gaslighting others for some unknown reason. People sharing dubious studies, with questionable results.
Meanwhile many of those people had a secondary agenda to keep the FDA from releasing the covid vaccine. America's Frontline Doctors (the group) promoted drugs over vaccines, etc.
Granted there was a lot of fear in the air back then. But this site is not immune from toxicity.
Yeah COVID really showed the darker side of HN. It was madness and still sticks out in my mind. Any question that didn't toe the line was shouted down from all sides. Don't forget Youtube was even censoring content then. It was a mess.
I’ve been reading that same line for 15-20 years now.
Yeah, maybe I'm just getting older. Not sure how you would measure it, but maybe it would be % of posts with "nuanced" discussions. It feels like HN was gone way downhill in this regard, but who knows.
This is technically explicitly a rule violation. Yes, yes we've been hearing it for years but it is much more true in the past 2-3 years than anytime in the past imo.
Frankly, it's a shame that the only high quality discussion I can find is on gross platforms like 'the everything app' or more obscure forums.
It’s just reversion to the mean / Eternal September. I use blocklists to manage my consumption of the site and the experience is much nicer.
> The mean air temperature on the upwind side of the facility was approximately 42.7 °C, increasing to 43.5 °C in the neighborhood near the eastern boundary of the data center campus on the downwind side. The observed ΔT of approximately 0.8 °C extended roughly 500 m downwind
Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated over, seems like 500-1000m was their search window from their text. The next paragraph discusses how one of the sites they compare to is a relatively lower average temperate than the rest of Phoenix. Not really convinced by this methodology. Seems like doing something in a flat field with an array of temperature sensors would be a much more robust way to look at heating effects over some reasonable distance. Plenty of data centers fit the bill of flat and semi-isolated, curious why they chose these sites to look at
The title is correct. You are looking at average temperature rise. The article states by up to which is the maximum temperature rise.
If you catch me on fire my average temperature rise doesn't go up very much, but I have the barest of hints that it might have an impact.
No it's not correct, because no causal relationship has been established between the data center and the most extreme difference measured.
I understand that the study only showed that this was the maximum observed difference downwind of one data center during one run.
Never said anything about correctness.
If only we had the same amount of concern about oil refineries and gas stations.
https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in...
https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic...
They did though. This was 3 years later: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration...
The group trying to do that got voted out of all majorities of power
The environmental concerns around oil refineries are a huge barrier to construction across much of the world.
Fossils use, production and trade needs to be rapidly ramped down to mitigate the climate catastrophe and resulting megadeaths on all fronts.
democracies will not vote for this. even in California, politicians run on policies like $500 gas rebates for anyone owning a gas powered vehicle
Won't someone think of the shareholders of the oil conglomerates?
On second thought, fuck 'em.
Let 'em burn.
... and solar panels.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
>but it's all people seem to care about.
This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:
>Why is that?
The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.
So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?
Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.
Right, but even then, why would we not discuss noise pollution?
The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States.
There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
Noise pollution is definitely being discussed: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
There are many reasons to not like these things nearby (anywhere it affects power or water too). And on top of that they've been "somehow" getting massive incentives and tax cuts, despite bringing in very little money or employment, which costs the area even more in future years.
It's everything combined, and pushback has been somewhat successful. Success in a protest tends to help bring more success to the same protest elsewhere.
> The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking generically why no one talks about it
But, had I been, it is not all of these things because one of those things is abject misinformation - water usage is not a real problem and touting it as the issue hurts the protests. 30B gallons of water globally for data center cooling is 100x less than the leaky pipes in just the United States
If data centers are such a big issue that we must stop them, communicating that without lying is the protestor's responsibility. You'll never have a successful protest if it is motivated by falsifiable information and water usage is still the number one thing I see written about and spoken about my protestors. It is impossible to get on board so long as that misinformation is front and center of most arguments
It can be an issue for the community in the same watershed, as well as being affected by what they do with any waste water. There have been quite a lot of extremely-drawn-out lawsuits about them drawing more than claimed, dumping hot water into streams and damaging the ecosystem, and polluting other water sources by dumping dirty water into drinking water affecting areas.
I agree the total usage isn't particularly large, and any "they'll use up all the fresh water everywhere" FUD is flat out wrong. But it can be a large jump for an area, and they've broadly shown themselves to be incredibly amoral and willing to fight legal battles with infinite money just because they can. They are not good neighbors.
Agreed, it can. And by reserving that argument for when it is an actual problem, it strengths the overall position
> There have been quite a lot of extremely-drawn-out lawsuits about them drawing more than claimed, dumping hot water into streams and damaging the ecosystem, and polluting other water sources by dumping dirty water into drinking water affecting areas.
And I support strict EPA guidelines and heavy fees for violators! I just think that we should keep the conversation clear and not introduce facts that can be easily overturned as it moves the conversation away from impact and to the argument being made
Let's say a DC is being built in my area and I read how in some locations tap water is being polluted by these DCs. Wouldn't it be better to address that before it's built rather than after?
Supporting strict Zoning/EPA guidelines is me supporting the ability to address it before it is built. If you local tap water is being polluted by a data center, then we did not have strict Zoning/EPA guidelines. The fines exist because big corporations routinely lie and screw us. They are large penalties, not the way we prevent it from happening.
I am in full support to address it ahead of time and nothing I have said goes against this.
By then it is too late, plus they never pay enough in damages. And the EPA does not have teeth currently, and damage will be done while fixing that too.
So people fight by pattern recognition: abnormally incentivized and extremely large? Kill it with fire immediately. It's mostly reasonable and more effective than anything else at the moment.
Right, but misinformation is ineffective as it forces the conversation to revolve around the misinformation and not the topic we were attempting to discuss. If we need an example, we need look no further than this thread
Beyond this, it is my opinion that people are cowards. The few who care about this issue enough to perform terroristic actions won't spur any sort of meaningful change in the general population because the general population is not made up of extremists. The general population will not do anything that endangers their lives no matter how much they praise another for doing so
Luigi kills a healthcare CEO. Endless chatter about how this is the end for big pharma, the people are rising up, they better count their days because the people are paying attention. Nothing has happened since but more dead people due to denied insurance claims. But there sure are a lot of people talking about how another Luigi will show up sometime soon
An arsonist burned down a large warehouse. Endless chatter about how this is the end for big corporations screwing us at the register, how workers will rise up and burn even MORE if they don't get treated better. Nothing has happened since to these big businesses. There is no tiktok trend for large scale arson, no worker unionization. Nothing changed but boy do people talk about i
I would rather solve it politically by strengthening the EPA. We may just disagree here and that is fine.
Honestly, anything that gets people paying attention to stuff that has been building for decades is good in my book.
I agree that'll be a much better end-state to be in, but is it the best right now? ... idk. We're in an increasingly blatant "smash and grab" phase for major corporations right now, and they need to be stopped quickly.
Sure, but what is this comment if not a plea for someone else to do something? No one can live your ideals for you, if you think something should be done, you should do it, and quickly at that. If it is that urgent, why are you not doing anything?
You've been complaining that people blocking datacenters (which is partly succeeding) is worse than fixing the EPA.
Something is being done, urgently (vastly faster than the larger legal system), and public outrage is loud and annoying and widely visible, which is indeed what I want. Beyond that it isn't especially fair to say "if you like to eat, why haven't you solved world hunger", particularly when those EPA/zoning laws aren't in place yet, so I'll just ignore that part.
No one has ever complained about people blocking data centers. Just over the top bad-faith to even type that out, this will be our final back and forth.
My points have consistently been (1) lying is the quickest way to make an issue divisive as they focus on the lies and not the cause and that (2) that you cannot trust members of the general public to undertake radical actions nor can you sit by and egg them on to achieve your goals for you.
Data centers are coming up left and right and no violent uprising has stopped them from being built. What has slowed them down in certain communities are those communities coming together, organizing, and making themselves heard via political action. Which is the avenue I am advocating for here in this conversation with you.
You are here discussing how someone must do something and how it needs to be done urgently because it is so pressing. No one challenged you to solve it. Equating any call to action, especially for an issue that you yourself declare urgent, to solving world hunger is an immediate end to this conversation. If you cannot take your own views seriously, neither can I. No one is going to take care of the bothersome priest for you as living out your ideals is your problem, not theirs.
>No one can live your ideals for you, if you think something should be done, you should do it, and quickly at that. If it is that urgent, why are you not doing anything?
This is the world-hunger-equivalent bit fwiw. It's rather explicitly "if you care about this, why haven't you solved it", an over-the-top bad-faith argument.
> I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem.
You are lying here.
> it's all people seem to care about.
You were specifically asking why what "all people seem to care about" is "the whole data center heat/water thing," and when somebody told you that's this is not the only thing people care about, you immediately lied about what you just said.
Even by the end of the comment:
> water usage is still the number one thing I see written about and spoken about my protestors.
So you're still not talking specifically to this person, but making easily falsifiable generalizations. And you still haven't claimed why water and power usage are not problems, you've just decided that people must only talk about "the main problem" but somehow not being the "main problem" becomes "falsifiable information" by the end.
It's just garbled when it's not dishonest.
I have "mixed" feelings about data centers, although they're pretty clear. I do not think that we will get the utilization out of data centers that we are expecting, I do not think there is as much revenue as needed in it, so I think this is a massive waste of resources. But if I am wrong and we do, I think noise pollution, heat pollution, power usage and water usage are worth it. I also think that poor and powerless people are being victimized by the placement of these things, just like they are in most large polluting capital expenditures. This should be compensated for. I also think that the longer data centers are delayed, the better idea we will have of their potential utilization.
The idea that current data center water use is as much as 1% of all of the leaky pipes in the US is not a statement of its insignificance, it's a statement of its massive significance. You might as well say that all of the shootings in the world are only 1% of all of the deaths from heart disease.
Yes, comments can make points and then support those points with their own anecdotal evidence. Maybe take a break, you are acting unhinged.
> The idea that current data center water use is as much as 1% of all of the leaky pipes in the US is not a statement of its insignificance, it's a statement of its massive significance. You might as well say that all of the shootings in the world are only 1% of all of the deaths from heart disease.
Google what fallacies are. You should start with False Equivalence
I've seen lots of talk about noise pollution with them? There's infrasound concerns and etc. No idea how real that impact is, but it's apparently measurable for a few miles away.
It mostly needs zoning as you say and maybe require each project put down a bond to supply a power plant expansion / new plant that covers their projected energy uses, imo. That sorts out a lot of issues. Maybe put some kinda tax on them and use it to pay for local infrastructure or schools for PR too
I'm not saying the noise pollution concerns aren't real, but these are often the same people who had "concerns" with 5G.
Most datacenters I've been to around the world are barely noticeable. Most of them are in warehouse districts and the AC chillers are barely noticeable over the chillers on other nearby buildings. Often, they WANT to be nondescript.
That being said, I've not been to any of these new ones which are both significantly larger and also can have onsite turbines that run all the time and not just during power outages.
> The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking generically why no one talks about it
"residential zoning" looks like an intentional misunderstanding of the problem. Putting one outside of "residential zoning" surely isn't a problem even if it robs an entire residential zone of power, right? Or then governments can't just re-allocate residential zones to industrial zones to get those juicy deals, right?
The way you're using language here is putting the problem so close to the edge that abuse, ignoring the quality of lives of residents, would seem just so logical.
> Or then governments can't just re-allocate residential zones to industrial zones to get those juicy deals, right?
Which is why we need laws around where data centers can and cannot be built. Something I clearly alluded to in my first comment. Do you want to make up things I never said such that you can make some snarky comment and feel good about yourself or have a real conversation? If it is the former, fuck off.
It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.
Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest, which includes LA, and LA's water system includes NorCal consequences, and California water issues include all-country impacts due to the farming there.
If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
California and Arizona use literally orders of magnitude more water for alfalfa farming than they do for data centers.
> Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest
no, it's a thing because you can put water in terms that even a hair dresser can be convinced to get scared and angry about. No technical knowledge required.
The impact is highly geography dependent.
For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.
> it's all people seem to care about.
You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.
Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers.
All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.
Pretty sure everyone cares about their power bills and water bills going up. The people living next to them care about this other stuff.
It's much more tangible for your average person than circular financing deals or chip supply constraints. And unfortunately social media is an amplifier for tangible misinformation.
Industry build-out in the USA? It's raising our energy and water costs.
Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese.
Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!
When you have no arguments on your side you have to make them up.
People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons.
That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.
There's a certain group of people (the kind of people who used to spend a lot of time on twitter and now spend a lot of time on bluesky) that's convinced that their environmental activism is what defeated NFT and are trying to repeat that to defeat AI because it's the same "tech bros we hate".
Because they are hitting people's water and electricity bills (and or ability to get either at all) RIGHT NOW
Yea decreasing them
These comments are full of the "but you participate in society" fallacy.
Data centers can do a thing positively and yet have negative impacts that should be discussed. It's not that hard.
Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem.
If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
Something smells wrong. You could dump a gigawatt into resistive heating and not see such temperature rises so far away.
Luckily, modern cooling techniques like heat pumps are much more efficient than resistive heating, 300% to 500% efficiency is easily attainable. You can keep the inside of a data center nice and chilly at room temperature even in the middle of a heat wave.
Then there is also the heat island effect. Concrete boxes will heat up an area more than dirt or wood, even if those boxes are completely empty inside. If you build them near where people live, people are gonna notice. Houses have gardens, industrial complexes such as data centers and factories don't.
Also, the effect is more concentrated downwind, so the heat effect is not some kind of uniform distribution in all directions.
That's surprising to me. You think a gigawatt of heat cannot be felt 500 meters downwind? How near before you experience the temperature rise in the article, if not that?
where there is a demand for results, academia will meet the supply
Right, yes, if people want something studied, grants usually are made available to study it.
i think we both know that this is not what i meant
HN guidelines are that I should choose the most generous interpretation of your comment, not the most likely one. It would be uncharitable and insulting to you to take your comment at face value.
HN guidelines also say something about flamebait but I guess you read past that part :) cheers, obviously not going to continue replying to you
A modern data center (1GW) is about the same as 140k additional cars in traffic in terms of direct heating.
Seems more likely that the heating is climate change driven primarily. But, 140k cars 24/7 is a lot of cars, so???
Interesting, as we increase our total global power consumption, losses in the form of heat will increase proportionally.
This is more of a zoning problem
"...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"
With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks?
The benefit to effort ratio seems fishy to me.
Coding agents are increasingly popular right now, and they can use millions of reasoning tokens per hour. Basic ChatGPT queries hardly use any tokens by comparison.
Even at today's demand Anthropic and OpenAI often return 'model overloaded' errors.
Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this:
>I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years
Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy.
Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world.
If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice.
The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.
One almost milk latte uses more water than tens of thousands of Chat GPT requests, by the way.
That's not an exaggeration.
And plenty of anti-datacenter folks are sipping that every day.
Out of curiosity, how are large data centers zoned?
When I worked at a big cloud provider the large sites were either within an existing industrial area, or off by themselves with lots of buffer.
I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now.
For me, noise would be my first concern
Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.
The zoning for Mesa AZ is some of the craziest I've ever seen. The obviously unsustainable car-choked sprawl near NTT PH1 is listed in the growth plan as "sustain" while the industrial area is listed as "evolve". The industrial/commercial strip is between two sprawl neighborhoods. In the general plan the car-oriented cul-de-sac hellscape is noted to be "traditional residential" while the data center area is "regional employment". It appears online that the city of Mesa actively encourages data centers in their "technology corridor"
https://selectmesa.com/business-environment/incentives-progr...
industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits
honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
If they're zoned like heavy industry, that seems fine for any noise/ heat etc. If they're zoned for light industry or similar to office buildings like the other comment says I feel like that could have different impacts - an office building will have some of this but probably has much less equipment and energy needs, less venting heat out maybe?
But if we're going to keep factories and chemical plants away from housing we can keep data centers over with them I think. Out of sight, out of mind, less chance of local protestors, maybe even closer to good power plants for transmission. Everyone wins?
a couple things to note that complicate it:
* a bunch of places didn't have the foresight to actually put buffers between industrial and residential zoned areas (either due to space limitations and/or poor planning)... sometimes people only notice when the empty lot they lived next to for a decade actually gets something built
* currently some protests are whipping up enough fervor where location doesn't really factor, people are fighting against any data centers within city limits at all
It's the issue du jour because of foreign influence. The situation in Phoenix is due more to poor zoning since the DC is right across the street from a residential area.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
If you want people to be more supportive of it, there are pretty direct ways to do that. Donate heavily to the local community to make up for impact, build new power plants for the project to pay for itself, don't put in gas powered generators, stay away from housing...
Or because people see:
1) their electricity bills rising
2) their land prices (read: rent) rising
3) actual fucking nutjobs in charge of these companies who can't seem to simply not say actual nutjob shit all the fucking time
4) entry level jobs disappearing
5) the obvious fact that "I am building the most powerful technology ever" means "the already-powerful people who own these technologies and companies are working to become vastly more powerful"
And I say this as someone who uses and loves using AI heavily across both my personal and professional life. It's better to grapple directly with the fact that people have very legitimate fears and concerns around this technology and the people who own it.
The Chinese and Russians didn't double my electricity rates this year.
Neither did the data centers. Datacenters use less than 5% of US electricity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
Reading only the abstract: "We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach... We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
I've only heard about datacenter protests in the past 2 years. So perhaps what the authors warned about is happening now?
Is your implication that something responsible for 5% of the demand is responsible for 5% of the price?
Because... that's not how prices work. And certainly not energy prices, which have both significant capex requirements, spot-market pricing dynamics, and capacity headroom requirements.
Data centers directly led to my rates increasing over the last ~6 months where several came online locally without supply increasing. Natural gas prices also impacted it, but the data center buildout over the last year has not helped.
That article is two years out of date, and looking at nationwide electricity usage doesn't account for the local impacts of these data centers.
(* nb4 "it's summer": talking about price per kWhr)
Which power utility do you use?
> I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too
If anything about this paper is accurate, which it clearly is not, then the >8000MW rejected to the atmosphere from the nearby Palo Verde power station should be raising the air temperature at least 250C, 1km downwind. Which it obviously does not.
Using energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas.
But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
Not necessarily; a building satisfied by its own rooftop solar should be roughly heat neutral since that energy was already there. The problem is with the power density these buildings imply, requiring energy movement. Everyone could run Qwen 3.8 27B at home with a solar panel and it'd make no difference. Companies could run their traditional servers on-site at their offices, etc.
Not quite. If the roof were highly reflective and it's a clear sky, it would reflect sunlight (including infrared) back into space. Of course, we're talking about such minimal levels of power here compared to, say, heating a house in the winter that it's irrelevant.
It needs around 300 W to run Qwen 3.8-27b here, which is roughly eqivalent to me as a human walking around and doing basically anything other than sitting still.
> But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment
The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.
The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.
Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.
1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.
“Everyone in McKinney is dead”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzA8DcAiijc
My first real job was in McKinney, sad to hear they are all dead.
4 degrees Fahrenheit:
> "... air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C ..."
My first thought: Phoenix is a large city. Google maps tells me that it is north-to-south is about 38km, and west-to-east about 28km. Plus, it seamlessly blends into other cities to the west and east, similar to Los Angeles County (it is endless!). The headline is wildly overstated. Literally, they are measuring residential neighborhoods built next to large data centers. Yeah, no shit Sherlock. If I built housing next to some industrial plant that emits lots of heat, the same effect would probably occur. The reality of people living in a place that experiences summertime temperatures of forty-five degrees Celcius, your enormous air conditioning unit will just work a little bit harder. You spent hardly anytime outside during weather like that. If anything, this just sounds like bad land zoning laws in Phoenix. The intent of this peer-reviewed study seems suspicious to me.
this is within 500m of the datacenter. this is a deeply unserious problem. parking lots are probably a bigger contributor.
Can we please state the measuring system in use.
4F is not enough to rise above a noise floor; 4C is getting close.
Just wait until people hear about the temperature increases caused by parking lots....
the fact ppl reading this are not lol-ing makes me sad.
"The attribution of this warming to data center waste heat is supported by the consistent alignment of the temperature signal with the prevailing wind direction across multiple sites, dates, and meteorological conditions. "
Well, no? That could also mean that the heat island effect of the (statutorily mandated) employee parking lot is causal.
You can look up the NTT PH1 Datacenter from the study on Google Maps. It doesn't have much of a parking lot but due to poor industrial zoning, it's right next to a residential suburb. It's basically a failure of urban planning.
It's in the middle of a large, disturbed area with big commercial buildings, roads, and parking lots, only some of which are data centers. This type of disturbance tends to get hot in the sun. But the larger question is how they are attributing the temperature at the end of the cul de sac to the data center when the somewhat more obvious reason for a hot spot there is that nothing shades it. That is, the measured cooler streets are shaded by the houses, but the edges of the neighborhood are shaded by nothing.
Anyway the main problem with this paper is it does not have an explanation for why the response isn't linear. If areal density of heat rejection was able to raise air temperatures this amount, then nobody would be able to go anywhere near a thermal power station without being vaporized.
Can we also talk about the sheer madness of using single-cycle natural gas turbines to power these things? It's tragic.
All I can think of when reading this was Hank Hill yelling at his neighbor: "Dale you giblet-head, we live in Texas, where it's already 110 in the summer. And if it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!" [1]
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0620288/characters/nm0362548/?i...
Now compare to how much an asphalt parking lot raises temperatures.
Eagerly awaiting your report.
During peak sunlight conditions, a standard black asphalt surface will readily absorb solar radiation, sending its surface temperature to 150°F–190°F . A clean white roof reflects up to 80% of sunlight, and topping out at around 95°F–115°F. (https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roo...)
The key is this says at distances up to 500m downwind. This is a nothing burger sorry
Cool, I'll be putting big data ai machine learning data center in your back yard.
No one has ever built a full datacenter in someones backyard...
The referenced 169 MW location is literally across the street from a residential neighborhood, where the article indicates they measured temperature differences[0].
> This gap is significant because many facilities are sited adjacent to residential neighborhoods (Fig. 1), and their air-cooled condenser arrays discharge air at temperatures 8–14 °C above ambient—often exceeding 50 °C during Phoenix summers—with air velocities of 2–4 m/s [15,16], creating thermal plumes that are advected downwind over inhabited areas. For example, the Iron Mountain Data Center (Fig. 1(c)) has cooling equipment located less than 50 m from the nearest three-story apartment building.
[0] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/33.267398/-111.880313
I wonder why the local government allowed it to be built without a buffer zone.
Well historically it meant that's where poor black families lived, but since these days the lower end of the 1% have more in common with the poorest of the poor than the richest of the rich it's probably where mere millionaires live.
“I haven’t seen it therefore it has never happened anywhere to anyone.”
gives a whole new meaning to 'vertical integration'
will they give me free tokens
so now we are speed-running global warming
there are now record setting gas turbine sales instead of solar/nuclear
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8ziQCWK1w
and for what?
so we can have totally useless "AI" customer service agents where you still have to demand to talk to a human to properly get a problem solved
You haven't used the latest models! AGI is just around the corner! China! Russia!
But ... but ... but ... ai companies have safety teams that ... well ... make sure some kind of singularity mumbo jumbo threat wont happen. The thing they dont care about are ... well ... actual people and actual environment.
Reminder: 4 degrees = 0.0698131701 rad
(article says 2.2 [C/K], btw)
Are people thinking it is better to get AI from Xi?
This is like saying campfires raise nearby temperatures by up to 700°F – 900°F (370°C – 480°C) or so. We need to heavily regulate or even ban camping.