> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever.
'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'
'Minor source.'
I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those terms forever. It will take significant work to not refer to these as 'minor sources' when debating if they are a minor source.
FTA: 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'
From the researcher: 'We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date.' [0]
Still enormous, but there is a significant difference between being 'THE X of all time, and being 'among the X of all time'.
Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
> Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
I just love the irony of being absurdly callous and dismissive of human life while also getting the basic math wrong.
Nevermind that the 100,000 figure is across the nation of 300 million and includes things like automotive exhaust, while the other number is likely to be borne by that one specific community. Indeed, if you look at the study[0] your article cites -- which is looking at what we should be working on reducing -- industrial deaths are under 30,000, and electrical are around 10,000. So below half of your figure.
I think you're getting a lot of unfair pushback on this, when you're making some excellent points. Just to clarify, I think you're making these points:
- Existing air pollution causes a ton of harm.
- Realistically, the optimal amount of air pollution is probably not zero.
- Logically, we should treat the cost/benefit of adding this "new" air pollution the same as the cost/benefit of removing existing air pollution.
- As an absolute number, the harm caused by this facility is very large, but as a percentage it is tiny.
People seem to be interpreting your conclusion as, "therefore it's completely fine to build this facility because only percentages matter, not absolute numbers." But I think your conclusion is more like, "our society has a complex relationship with air pollution and our existing choices reveal that we are willing to accept some air pollution sometimes, so you have to do a cost/benefit analysis, not just look at costs."
Some of these residents will die, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.
How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?
There is already very little to make these projects pay the externality costs; at this point paying enough remediation costs to reduce additional deaths should be the minimum.
> How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?
That’s a good question. It seems in this case that 3 to 6 deaths a year qualifies as ‘minor’ for the government. I don’t know where the line should be but, based on the number of people that suffer and die from air pollution related causes in the US each year, I thought that 6 additional deaths probably meant it qualified as minor. I’d be just as interested as you to know what the answer is.
Edit to add: ‘minor’ in this case doesn’t mean people deserve to die or that we should be happy they are suffering, just that compared to some other even worse projects, this one is less important.
60 people over a decade dying is not minor. If a school killed two entire classes of kids over their k-12 education, that'd be a shocking amount of death. If a sports team lost 6 players every year we'd shut down the team instantly. Treating 6 deaths as minor is absurd and callous.
It only feels ok because it's so abstractly connected to pollution.
If this data center killed 6 people every year on site due to industrial accidents, we'd almost certainly close it. What Amazon warehouse kills half a dozen people on site every year?
Health costs don't matter, because someone else is paying them. We handwave them with "well only 3-4 additional people die after paying that cost.
The air pollution does not matter, because global warming already exists and air is already polluted. And making all that worst also does not matter, because who cares about anything but what AI companies want.
> Based on Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ) air permit
No. 74242, the facility is authorized to operate eight natural-gas simple-cycle turbines and more than fifty diesel generators, including emergency and black-start units
People complain when you violate the rules and externalize harms, yes. They should be made to turn off the generators and pay enough for the electricity so as not to impact everyone else's prices.
Good luck with that. Order books for gas turbines are full for decades. Diesels will probably get used and pollute everything with their stink and noise.
I'm seeing a lot of these sorts of articles talking about things like air pollution, but something seems a bit off, given that, to my knowledge, computers do not produce any emissions at all.
The article lumps data centers in with landfills, laundromats, and steel mills. But landfills, laundromats, and steel mills all involve physical waste products that can have chemical or biological effects on the surrounding environment. What waste products do data centers output?
The article talks about expanding a fossil fuel plant as the source of the pollution question in the Virginia example. This seems only tangentially related to data centers, which don't care what specific technologies are used to generate fungible electricity.
Are these disingenuous attempts to attribute pollution originating from power plants to one specific, cherry-picked application of electrical power (despite the increasing prevalence of clean generation technologies over polluting ones, and despite lots of other, unrelated drivers of increased demand for electrical power)? Or is there something more to these arguments that I'm missing?
There's a surge in data centre building - a massive surge of power hungry hungry hyper scaled hippos.
Many local grids are currently unable to meet that demand, therefore various "solutions" so far include:
* buying up jet engines from COVID era bankrupted / downsized air fleets and running them continuously in banks along side data centres to spin generators.
You'll note these aren't the cleanest solution, are a bit noisy, and not renewable.
* building a data centre AND and onsite LNG gas extraction facility to directly on site gas supply and derived electrical power.
This one is expected to be the single largest CO2 source in mainland USofA (or some similar stat, it was recent news).
So these are fossil fuel polluting sources that are directly attached to specific data centres and not being used for non data centre purposes.
So it seems like confirmation that this really is a case of disingenuous conflation of power-generation concerns with data centers per se.
I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers" any more than concerns about, using the same jet engines to power charging stations in remote areas would, for example, amount to "opposition to EVs".
> I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers"
Clearly you don't.
For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.
Obviously, since I'm the one discussing it here. The broader question is whether the people who are conflating them together are doing so out of honest confusion or out of ulterior motives.
> For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.
This seems like a hodgepodge of concerns that are all quite distinct from each other. None of them is necessarily invalid in its own right, but lumping them all together and treating them as irresolvable problems in order to oppose data centers per se -- rather than issues that can and should be mitigated independently of anything related to AI -- seems to be disingenuous.
The specific issue is that because it's a data center, from a company with unlimited money and therefore political power, it's being allowed to skip all the rules about clean generation. The ones in question are building on-side dirty power.
If building a data center essentially necessitates building more fossil fuel plants (and/or indeed comes with its own gas and diesel generators because the grid could not handle the extra load, plus generating their own dirty electricity is cheaper for the megacorp because a corrupt govt allows them to externalize costs), the extra emissions are obviously caused by the data center. No matter whether it could maybe in the future run on renewables instead.
There is also the giant "Tax Incentives" being given to these projects under the guise of them being "job creators". Unfortunately, data center's only need a bunch of jobs at the initial construction + installation of hardware. Once it's operational, it'd need about a dozen staff to maintain round-the-clock on premise supervision.
The data centers described incorporate dedicated power generation into their design. The power generation is fossil fuel based and high-pollution, and is being deployed at scale.
It seems like there will be a collapse in building data centers, to the point that a large amount of the newly built ones will be reclaimed for other things. There is a very large group of people who are against building new data centers because they hate AI (and any pollution related arguments these people make are in support of their primary concern, being AI). But on the flip side of that, even people that I know that go out of their way to use AI, mostly seem interested in building their own AI rigs and running everything locally. I know that's what I do; I almost never use any hosted AI services these days, but I'm using more tokens than ever. The demand for data centers from people who actually like AI even seems to be plummeting.
We're already at the point where a few months worth of an SMB's token usage from the SaaS LLM providers costs is equivalent to the cost of installing on-prem infrastructure capable of running cutting-edge open-weight models at scale. At my company, we recently installed a server with an array of Gaudi 2 cards on our server rack, and have set up an Open WebUI frontend to expose an LLM connected to all of our internal resources to our staff. The total cost was about $20k, which we'd easily eat up with six months worth of equivalent Claude usage.
We'd originally set this up to be able to locally run larger models, in the 300-400 billion parameter range, but the rate of improvement of open-weight models has been so fast that, coupled with extensive custom skill creation, we're now getting similar results out of Qwen3.8 27B to what we were getting out of Qwen 3.5 297B when we started out with the project, which frees enough memory to allow 20-25 users to have 256K context concurrently. Both the hardware, the software, and the models are improving at an accelerating rate.
Investing in data centers to support SaaS LLM providers today feels a bit like investing in mainframes and minicomputers in the late '70s, with a massive paradigm shift lurking right around the corner.
Actually, it's probably already closer to the early '80s, given that purpose-built local AI workstations are already available at price points lower than the inflation-adjusted initial price of the original IBM PC.
You don’t get to 25 or 30 trillion total addressable market by providing AI for the people who like AI. The whole plan is to replace all white collar work with AI. This requires more data centers. The people who benefit the most from this will see the least of the negative effects.
What? (Edit: I think you misread "in support of their primary concern, being AI" as "in support of AI"? People who complain about pollution are usually mostly concerned about AI, and they use arguments of pollution to strengthen their argument against AI related things.)
> And even if you do inference at home you are not training the models.
No, and training does use a large amount of energy on a large amount of hardware. But:
- That sort of workload doesn't really require many distributed data centers, only a few powerful ones. I believe training is also getting cheaper for the achieving higher levels of capabilities, but I don't think the efficiency advancement has been as dramatic as it has been for inference.
- I believe we are really hitting a wall of diminishing returns, especially at the high end of large models. There is lower demand for training, because models are good enough to have a reasonably long shelf life at this point. Year+ old models that were SOTA in their time are still useful today. The demand for training is going down.
> Moreover, most people certainly are not doing inference locally.
Maybe not, but I think most people who go out of their way to use LLMs because they find them useful for their work actually are. Though most inference is probably from people who do it accidentally (as a part of a search result or something) or students who don't have the resources to do it themselves. But basically every software engineer that I personally know that uses AI for programming is either running their inference on their own hardware, or is talking about building a rig to do it.
It’s wild to accuse people who are anti pollution of being anti ai, look how fucked the climate is, people don’t want to see it more fucked , is that hard to understand ?
While I cautiously circle the AI programming concept, one thing close to my mind has definitely been whether the ultimately cloud-tied nature of it is what makes me much more stand offish to it.
I am GPU poor and have a piece of crap rx570 8GB but still get ok performance out of qwen3.5-9B-4bit and various fine tuned versions. Plan on finally buying a decent gpu like a amd 7900 xtx. I still use claude for coding primarily but do research locally. What everyone has said about qwen3.8 though is making me feel I really need to invest in a decent rig.
Also running Qwen 3.8 27b, on a 7900 XTX. I've been able to comfortably do a large majority of my programming locally since about Qwen 3.5.
I also use pi.dev as my agent harness, and ollama as my inference engine. Though I've been considering switching out the latter for something else, since the main advantage of ollama is the ease of switching models, which I don't really do often anymore.
There isn’t much the federal government can do here. Planning permission is very local in the US. If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening.
In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.
> If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening.
Until the company behind the data center sues the small town, who can’t afford the fight, and are forced to roll over. That seems to be what happened in Michigan.
After how many years of making it through the court system? Because 5 years of delay all but guarantees that the potential builder is no longer interested.
I watched the forest protected by the Commonwealth’s environmental laws get dynamited and built. I like your optimism but find it misplaced in this case.
No? This isn't a planning permission question, the federal government has eminent domain and can simply take land for federal use. Just like with the railroads and power grid.
Of course building datacenters is absolutely not what eminent domain is for, but rules don't apply anymore, so they'll probably do it anyway until the supreme court stops them.
Well the reason data center stuff is news is that local boards are resisting all the usual efforts. It’s been quite extraordinary, but town after town is sending the data center folks packing.
How naive I was to hope that the strain data centers will place on the electric grid would spur very big, very public investment in renewable energy and nuclear.
Somebody has to realize that gas turbines are backordered to the 2030s meanwhile the ROI on solar is getting impossible to ignore.
It might "spur" through higher prices, since electricity is basically a private concern is (most? All?) of the US and many Western countries. Of course the general public hates this inflation and hence the cause.
The only fair and workable solution is to make the data center investors pay for the grid upgrade before the data center is turned on. They can wait a decade for nuclear reactors, right?
Many data centers will move north into the Nordic countries where the climate is colder and there is a lot of hydroelectric and wind power. Canada and the Nordic countries will end up building a lot of data centers in remote areas where they are less visible.
At the same time, the more the US government acts to support data centers, the greater the reaction will be against them. It is the classic situation where the more the government does, the less people will like it.
What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere.
Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.
They can, surely, but I presume that in some cases there's a lack of preexisting regulation on land use and on others politicians are not properly representing the interests of their constituency.
It’s funny as Greg Abbott says the data center industry did this to themselves and people’s complaints are justified; the feds say it’s “paid protestors”, the same way they say any protests are inorganic paid leftist agitators. Meanwhile “real” American patriots know data centers make America great, and can’t wait to have one built down the road.
I saw a photo of him sitting down in a very concerned about data centers interview and the thing that struck me was that his wheelchair was visible. This represents a change in his style. (if he thinks it's going to make him more sympathetic to the average person I'd cynically say that's probably true, since he's starting from zero...)
He declared a surprise moratoriun on new data centers one day not too long ago.
It was such a stark about-face it seemed like a dramatic response to some new polling data his campaign was not expecting.
I would think if he is not re-elected he would immediately drop the moratorium right after the election, than pull out all the stops to accelerate permitting and building as much as possible before his term is up, against the peoples' will who voted in a non-Trumpard of some kind.
OTOH if he is re-elected he would probably do the exact same thing :\
How is this degrowth? Individuals who had a nice neighborhood now living next to the noise and pollution equivalent of an airport running 24/7 have a point that it sucks. Households complaining that their power flow is getting cut off but the data center isn't have a point. People whose water sources are carefully measured due to drought and loss of replenishment being worried have a point.
Growth can be done carefully and well, or it can be cancer. The current data center boom is not being done carefully and well. How you do things matters a lot.
I'm sure the luddites got all their ideas from TikTok aye?
At least were not at this point yet:
"Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the Luddites were suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites."
Why? The hacker ethos is all about understanding systems as they actually are; not as the people at the top want them to be. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the Luddites were right; the industrialization of weaving did destroy their profession, and, contrary to the opinions of the political leaders, this had a direct, negative impact on society for many decades. The curious-minded hacker should not ignore that reality, even if they think the circumstances are different this time.
Only if you don't know what the Luddites were concerned about. HN users tend to be better educated, and understand that the Luddites probably were right -- they weren't anti technology at all. They just wanted the benefits of the technology to be split between the factory owners and the workers. Instead, the factory owners wanted to keep all the benefits and fire all the workers.
HN isn’t a monoculture. And the Luddites weren’t against tech. They were against the avoidable harm by thoughtless adoption of automated looms. Their argument was distorted and smeared much like is happening here.
Hackers used to be counter culture and want to push power down to individuals. If anything this techno fascist push to merge big tech with government while steamrolling humans is not hacker culture.
We should home brew data centers for open weight models and open labelled datasets.
What part confuses you? The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply? The water, light and noise pollution? The threat to jobs? The threat to truth and transparency? The threat to privacy?
> The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply
The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations. The idea that we will from here on just have degrown and decline is insane. I'm not up for that. Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
As for water supply. Data centers barely make a blip on the water usage.
> The water, light and noise pollution?
The only one of these which actually has any validity is noise pollution, and the US has one of the lowest population densities of any country in the world, and data centres don't need to be close to population centres.
> The threat to jobs?
CEOs saying they are laying people off because of AI is not the same as anyone losing their job because of AI, but even if that was the case, it's about as smart as not using an electric drill to save jobs.
> The threat to truth and transparency?
AI does not only not threaten truth and transparency, it makes it easier to find the truth and to circumvent transperency restrictions.
On our present course we're probably not going to reach Type I on the Kardashev scale, let alone Type II, because of collapse. We need to embrace long term planning instead of short term profits if we want to avoid that.
> The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations
That is straight up not true. Theres currently a threat due to the imprudently started war in the Middle East, there will be more once rivers start drying up and hydropower becomes unreliable or nuclear power plants can no longer be cooled.
> Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
This is an ideological dogma smuggled in as a self-evident truth. Please do make a point, not just an unsupported declaration.
> That is straight up not true. Theres currently a threat due to the imprudently started war in the Middle East
The US does not use crude oil from the Gulf to generate electricity. The US could scale electricity production at least 100 times without needing to import anything from the Middle East.
> there will be more once rivers start drying up
Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.
> The US does not use crude oil from the Gulf to generate electricity.
And yet, reserves are at historic lows. Markets are weird, huh?
> Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.
That wasn't the claim made, rivers will be drying up because of climate change (they are already!), which is a threat to energy supply. Data centers will accelerate said climate change, but that's not even relevant to disprove your previous assertion of regulation being the only factor.
I'll also note you still haven't justified your core ideological assertion you tried smuggling in earlier in any way.
> stable and affordable electricity and water supply
Look, I think you misspelled "demand" there. It's an understandable error; those keys are so close together.
Data centers present a demand on resources. A demand that wasn't there previously. You hook a DC up to the grid, and it will demand more electricity from existing generation capability. The DC proposals, without provision for their own generation, present extra demand.
So yeah, unless the supply of those resources can be commensurately increased in some way, the DCs will present extra demand on what we already have, and that means someone, somewhere, will have less available.
It’s not “de growth”. I want sustainable growth, which to me means:
- no NDAs signed with elected officials who then stonewall the public and hide behind them
- paying the same prices for water and electricity that I pay
- paying the same property taxes and income taxes that I pay
- building in a fashion that doesn’t leave area residents stuck with bigger electric bills and water bills
All of these things can be done.
I have a tiny data centre. I get no sweetheart deals on the above tho bf s.
are you confident the demand for massive ai datacenters peppered everywhere isn't just some financial gambit? wouldn't you ask for consequences and side-effects that are socially desirable, even if the facility brings no wealth to the immediate area (either as a consequence of being owned by a remote corp, or by the investment failing completely).
It’s not degrowth. It’s anti monopoly, anti wealth concentration. Anti tax avoidance. Anti price on water and electricity. Anti raising the ambient temperature of a community.
Let’s put the data center in Palo alto or Atherton.
Why would people possibly not want something that uses up water in times of constant draught, uses up energy in an energy crisis and pollutes the air and contributes to climate change in times of climate catastrophe, all so a few already way-too-rich dudes can become even richer?
It just doesn't make sense! Surely they were manipulated to hate progress!
You’re going to get modded down but you’re right. Go look at these sites in Google Maps compared to datacenter sites that already exist and have existed for a decade.
> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever.
'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'
'Minor source.'
I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those terms forever. It will take significant work to not refer to these as 'minor sources' when debating if they are a minor source.
FTA: 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'
From the researcher: 'We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date.' [0]
Still enormous, but there is a significant difference between being 'THE X of all time, and being 'among the X of all time'.
Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
[0]: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/analyzing-air-pollution-health...
[1]: https://www.pecva.org/wp-content/uploads/Health-Impacts-Vant...
[2]: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/identifying-sources...
> Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
I just love the irony of being absurdly callous and dismissive of human life while also getting the basic math wrong.
Nevermind that the 100,000 figure is across the nation of 300 million and includes things like automotive exhaust, while the other number is likely to be borne by that one specific community. Indeed, if you look at the study[0] your article cites -- which is looking at what we should be working on reducing -- industrial deaths are under 30,000, and electrical are around 10,000. So below half of your figure.
[0]: https://pubs.acs.org/estlcu/article/7/9/639/504911/Reducing-...
Apparently when there's value to be extracted, everything else can be dismissed.
Reading these kinds of things make my blood boil, and I'm not someone who gets angry.
I think you're getting a lot of unfair pushback on this, when you're making some excellent points. Just to clarify, I think you're making these points:
- Existing air pollution causes a ton of harm.
- Realistically, the optimal amount of air pollution is probably not zero.
- Logically, we should treat the cost/benefit of adding this "new" air pollution the same as the cost/benefit of removing existing air pollution.
- As an absolute number, the harm caused by this facility is very large, but as a percentage it is tiny.
People seem to be interpreting your conclusion as, "therefore it's completely fine to build this facility because only percentages matter, not absolute numbers." But I think your conclusion is more like, "our society has a complex relationship with air pollution and our existing choices reveal that we are willing to accept some air pollution sometimes, so you have to do a cost/benefit analysis, not just look at costs."
Some of these residents will die, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.
How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?
There is already very little to make these projects pay the externality costs; at this point paying enough remediation costs to reduce additional deaths should be the minimum.
> How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?
That’s a good question. It seems in this case that 3 to 6 deaths a year qualifies as ‘minor’ for the government. I don’t know where the line should be but, based on the number of people that suffer and die from air pollution related causes in the US each year, I thought that 6 additional deaths probably meant it qualified as minor. I’d be just as interested as you to know what the answer is.
Edit to add: ‘minor’ in this case doesn’t mean people deserve to die or that we should be happy they are suffering, just that compared to some other even worse projects, this one is less important.
And this reasoning is exactly how we got here in the first place.
“It’s not that bad, just a little bad, so it’s okay”
We’re talking about air pollution and death rates, not financial risk.
I’m not suggesting it is OK or not OK, just that ‘minor source’ of air pollution is probably the right term to use in context for this single site.
60 people over a decade dying is not minor. If a school killed two entire classes of kids over their k-12 education, that'd be a shocking amount of death. If a sports team lost 6 players every year we'd shut down the team instantly. Treating 6 deaths as minor is absurd and callous.
It only feels ok because it's so abstractly connected to pollution.
If this data center killed 6 people every year on site due to industrial accidents, we'd almost certainly close it. What Amazon warehouse kills half a dozen people on site every year?
On a scale of billions of years, what's an extra death or two?
/s
Irony is wasted on the stupid (on @docdeek).
But that’s already the framing.
A minor source should never lead to deaths or to put it otherwise No deaths = minor source
deaths = major source
Many deaths = majormost source
Now we just need define many but we already know its a major source of pollution that kills people
Health costs don't matter, because someone else is paying them. We handwave them with "well only 3-4 additional people die after paying that cost.
The air pollution does not matter, because global warming already exists and air is already polluted. And making all that worst also does not matter, because who cares about anything but what AI companies want.
https://www.pecva.org/wp-content/uploads/Health-Impacts-Vant... the report
> Based on Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ) air permit No. 74242, the facility is authorized to operate eight natural-gas simple-cycle turbines and more than fifty diesel generators, including emergency and black-start units
So it is a low efficiency power station with some servers attached to it.
People complain when you hook them up to the high efficiency generators that power the grid, so this is what they get.
People complain when you violate the rules and externalize harms, yes. They should be made to turn off the generators and pay enough for the electricity so as not to impact everyone else's prices.
Gee, I wonder why people were complaining about that?
Good luck with that. Order books for gas turbines are full for decades. Diesels will probably get used and pollute everything with their stink and noise.
I'm seeing a lot of these sorts of articles talking about things like air pollution, but something seems a bit off, given that, to my knowledge, computers do not produce any emissions at all.
The article lumps data centers in with landfills, laundromats, and steel mills. But landfills, laundromats, and steel mills all involve physical waste products that can have chemical or biological effects on the surrounding environment. What waste products do data centers output?
The article talks about expanding a fossil fuel plant as the source of the pollution question in the Virginia example. This seems only tangentially related to data centers, which don't care what specific technologies are used to generate fungible electricity.
Are these disingenuous attempts to attribute pollution originating from power plants to one specific, cherry-picked application of electrical power (despite the increasing prevalence of clean generation technologies over polluting ones, and despite lots of other, unrelated drivers of increased demand for electrical power)? Or is there something more to these arguments that I'm missing?
There's a surge in data centre building - a massive surge of power hungry hungry hyper scaled hippos.
Many local grids are currently unable to meet that demand, therefore various "solutions" so far include:
* buying up jet engines from COVID era bankrupted / downsized air fleets and running them continuously in banks along side data centres to spin generators.
You'll note these aren't the cleanest solution, are a bit noisy, and not renewable.
* building a data centre AND and onsite LNG gas extraction facility to directly on site gas supply and derived electrical power.
This one is expected to be the single largest CO2 source in mainland USofA (or some similar stat, it was recent news).
So these are fossil fuel polluting sources that are directly attached to specific data centres and not being used for non data centre purposes.
So it seems like confirmation that this really is a case of disingenuous conflation of power-generation concerns with data centers per se.
I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers" any more than concerns about, using the same jet engines to power charging stations in remote areas would, for example, amount to "opposition to EVs".
> I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers"
Clearly you don't.
For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.
> Clearly you don't.
Obviously, since I'm the one discussing it here. The broader question is whether the people who are conflating them together are doing so out of honest confusion or out of ulterior motives.
> For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.
This seems like a hodgepodge of concerns that are all quite distinct from each other. None of them is necessarily invalid in its own right, but lumping them all together and treating them as irresolvable problems in order to oppose data centers per se -- rather than issues that can and should be mitigated independently of anything related to AI -- seems to be disingenuous.
The specific issue is that because it's a data center, from a company with unlimited money and therefore political power, it's being allowed to skip all the rules about clean generation. The ones in question are building on-side dirty power.
Oh add in the Texas railroad commission just voted to end public participation... they are the regulators that permit natural gas pipelines.
So ya, add that to the corruption.
If building a data center essentially necessitates building more fossil fuel plants (and/or indeed comes with its own gas and diesel generators because the grid could not handle the extra load, plus generating their own dirty electricity is cheaper for the megacorp because a corrupt govt allows them to externalize costs), the extra emissions are obviously caused by the data center. No matter whether it could maybe in the future run on renewables instead.
>to my knowledge, computers do not produce any emissions at all.
>is there something more to these arguments that I'm missing?
Yes.
You can't be expected to know everything that comes into play, each person rarely has a very good grasp of the big picture.
Have you ever smelled the type of acids and toxic gases that need to be handled before you even get computer chips to build computers with?
Where do people think the toxic wastes from these processes end up?
Plus the emissions from the freight across different modalities which scales linearly with massiveness of the tonnage.
And that's before you even consider the power needs of development when it exceeds the clean energy available at any one time.
There is also the giant "Tax Incentives" being given to these projects under the guise of them being "job creators". Unfortunately, data center's only need a bunch of jobs at the initial construction + installation of hardware. Once it's operational, it'd need about a dozen staff to maintain round-the-clock on premise supervision.
The data centers described incorporate dedicated power generation into their design. The power generation is fossil fuel based and high-pollution, and is being deployed at scale.
Behind the meter power generation is being included on site with the data centers.
> What waste products do data centers output?
Energy production consequences aside, they produce tons of e-waste
This is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446879
- 'How many fingers, Winston?'
It seems like there will be a collapse in building data centers, to the point that a large amount of the newly built ones will be reclaimed for other things. There is a very large group of people who are against building new data centers because they hate AI (and any pollution related arguments these people make are in support of their primary concern, being AI). But on the flip side of that, even people that I know that go out of their way to use AI, mostly seem interested in building their own AI rigs and running everything locally. I know that's what I do; I almost never use any hosted AI services these days, but I'm using more tokens than ever. The demand for data centers from people who actually like AI even seems to be plummeting.
We're already at the point where a few months worth of an SMB's token usage from the SaaS LLM providers costs is equivalent to the cost of installing on-prem infrastructure capable of running cutting-edge open-weight models at scale. At my company, we recently installed a server with an array of Gaudi 2 cards on our server rack, and have set up an Open WebUI frontend to expose an LLM connected to all of our internal resources to our staff. The total cost was about $20k, which we'd easily eat up with six months worth of equivalent Claude usage.
We'd originally set this up to be able to locally run larger models, in the 300-400 billion parameter range, but the rate of improvement of open-weight models has been so fast that, coupled with extensive custom skill creation, we're now getting similar results out of Qwen3.8 27B to what we were getting out of Qwen 3.5 297B when we started out with the project, which frees enough memory to allow 20-25 users to have 256K context concurrently. Both the hardware, the software, and the models are improving at an accelerating rate.
Investing in data centers to support SaaS LLM providers today feels a bit like investing in mainframes and minicomputers in the late '70s, with a massive paradigm shift lurking right around the corner.
Actually, it's probably already closer to the early '80s, given that purpose-built local AI workstations are already available at price points lower than the inflation-adjusted initial price of the original IBM PC.
You don’t get to 25 or 30 trillion total addressable market by providing AI for the people who like AI. The whole plan is to replace all white collar work with AI. This requires more data centers. The people who benefit the most from this will see the least of the negative effects.
How is anti pollution argument pro ai?
And even if you do inference at home you are not training the models. Moreover, most people certainly are not doing inference locally.
> How is anti pollution argument pro ai?
What? (Edit: I think you misread "in support of their primary concern, being AI" as "in support of AI"? People who complain about pollution are usually mostly concerned about AI, and they use arguments of pollution to strengthen their argument against AI related things.)
> And even if you do inference at home you are not training the models.
No, and training does use a large amount of energy on a large amount of hardware. But:
- That sort of workload doesn't really require many distributed data centers, only a few powerful ones. I believe training is also getting cheaper for the achieving higher levels of capabilities, but I don't think the efficiency advancement has been as dramatic as it has been for inference.
- I believe we are really hitting a wall of diminishing returns, especially at the high end of large models. There is lower demand for training, because models are good enough to have a reasonably long shelf life at this point. Year+ old models that were SOTA in their time are still useful today. The demand for training is going down.
> Moreover, most people certainly are not doing inference locally.
Maybe not, but I think most people who go out of their way to use LLMs because they find them useful for their work actually are. Though most inference is probably from people who do it accidentally (as a part of a search result or something) or students who don't have the resources to do it themselves. But basically every software engineer that I personally know that uses AI for programming is either running their inference on their own hardware, or is talking about building a rig to do it.
It’s wild to accuse people who are anti pollution of being anti ai, look how fucked the climate is, people don’t want to see it more fucked , is that hard to understand ?
What are you running at home, out of interest?
While I cautiously circle the AI programming concept, one thing close to my mind has definitely been whether the ultimately cloud-tied nature of it is what makes me much more stand offish to it.
I am GPU poor and have a piece of crap rx570 8GB but still get ok performance out of qwen3.5-9B-4bit and various fine tuned versions. Plan on finally buying a decent gpu like a amd 7900 xtx. I still use claude for coding primarily but do research locally. What everyone has said about qwen3.8 though is making me feel I really need to invest in a decent rig.
Not the parent, but I'm enjoying Qwen 3.8 27B on my Strix Halo machine.
Also running Qwen 3.8 27b, on a 7900 XTX. I've been able to comfortably do a large majority of my programming locally since about Qwen 3.5.
I also use pi.dev as my agent harness, and ollama as my inference engine. Though I've been considering switching out the latter for something else, since the main advantage of ollama is the ease of switching models, which I don't really do often anymore.
There isn’t much the federal government can do here. Planning permission is very local in the US. If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening.
In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.
> If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening.
Until the company behind the data center sues the small town, who can’t afford the fight, and are forced to roll over. That seems to be what happened in Michigan.
FERC is some sort of law that takes control of local ordnances to force local municipalities to accept energy infrastructure.
https://ferc.gov/
In theory yes. In practice if the local congressman wants to keep their job they’ll block it at any cost if there’s local opposition.
I watched Massachusetts fail at this opposition about a decade ago. Courts sided with the feds.
https://ferc.gov/ https://nofrackedgasinmass.com/massachusetts-pipelines/
> Courts sided with the feds.
After how many years of making it through the court system? Because 5 years of delay all but guarantees that the potential builder is no longer interested.
I watched the forest protected by the Commonwealth’s environmental laws get dynamited and built. I like your optimism but find it misplaced in this case.
No? This isn't a planning permission question, the federal government has eminent domain and can simply take land for federal use. Just like with the railroads and power grid.
Of course building datacenters is absolutely not what eminent domain is for, but rules don't apply anymore, so they'll probably do it anyway until the supreme court stops them.
They can certainly look the other way when these small town boards get paid off to allow the datacenter.
Well the reason data center stuff is news is that local boards are resisting all the usual efforts. It’s been quite extraordinary, but town after town is sending the data center folks packing.
How naive I was to hope that the strain data centers will place on the electric grid would spur very big, very public investment in renewable energy and nuclear.
Somebody has to realize that gas turbines are backordered to the 2030s meanwhile the ROI on solar is getting impossible to ignore.
It might "spur" through higher prices, since electricity is basically a private concern is (most? All?) of the US and many Western countries. Of course the general public hates this inflation and hence the cause.
The only fair and workable solution is to make the data center investors pay for the grid upgrade before the data center is turned on. They can wait a decade for nuclear reactors, right?
They'll just buy you out, no more power or water for you, peasant
Many data centers will move north into the Nordic countries where the climate is colder and there is a lot of hydroelectric and wind power. Canada and the Nordic countries will end up building a lot of data centers in remote areas where they are less visible.
At the same time, the more the US government acts to support data centers, the greater the reaction will be against them. It is the classic situation where the more the government does, the less people will like it.
The question is who will service massive data centers in northern Québec or Norwegian mountains in winter.
They will have to be robotized to a large degree. And the few humans necessary will have to be very well paid. The social cost is real.
Original
E.P.A. Moves to Curb Public Input on Data Centers
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/climate/epa-data-centers-...
What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere.
Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.
Because they need the local infrastructure to support them, which would be difficult and expensive to reproduce out in the middle of nowhere.
Americans believe in the free market but it was the feds who in the 1930s rolled out electricity to every little house on the prairie.
It seems that e.g. OpenAI is mostly power constrained. To go to the middle of nowhere would mean also basically no power grid to speak off?
They can, surely, but I presume that in some cases there's a lack of preexisting regulation on land use and on others politicians are not properly representing the interests of their constituency.
It's difficult getting a grid connection and fiber optic uplinks in the middle of nowhere.
Plenty of power in northern Quebec.
There is a bunch of relativly big cities even in the arctic circle.
Murmansk (population 295,374) Russia; Norilsk (178,018) in Russia; Tromsø (75,638) in Norway; Vorkuta (58,133) in Russia; Bodø (52,357) Norway; Harstad (24,703) in Norway; Kiruna, Sweden (22,841)
Datacenters need a source of water, and human populations are usually concentrated in those places too for the same reason.
Plenty of ice cold water in northern Quebec.
So much democracy and freedom.
That is totally going to work, doubling down on something unpopular by un unpopular government has never caused exponentially bigger blowback.
They're counting on blowback not mattering.
In this time of drones? I don't see that working out for them...
Data center pushback is inevitable when entire neighborhoods feel the heat and noise.
It’s funny as Greg Abbott says the data center industry did this to themselves and people’s complaints are justified; the feds say it’s “paid protestors”, the same way they say any protests are inorganic paid leftist agitators. Meanwhile “real” American patriots know data centers make America great, and can’t wait to have one built down the road.
Data Centers is the only time in my memory that Greg Abbott has even thought about listening to citizen concerns.
And of course, when the citizens selling THC beverages were concerned about the legislature making the product illegal.
Me thinks the Data Center people have been stingy with the checkbook.
I saw a photo of him sitting down in a very concerned about data centers interview and the thing that struck me was that his wheelchair was visible. This represents a change in his style. (if he thinks it's going to make him more sympathetic to the average person I'd cynically say that's probably true, since he's starting from zero...)
Isn't he talking about data centers because he is up to reelection in november?
He declared a surprise moratoriun on new data centers one day not too long ago.
It was such a stark about-face it seemed like a dramatic response to some new polling data his campaign was not expecting.
I would think if he is not re-elected he would immediately drop the moratorium right after the election, than pull out all the stops to accelerate permitting and building as much as possible before his term is up, against the peoples' will who voted in a non-Trumpard of some kind.
OTOH if he is re-elected he would probably do the exact same thing :\
It doesn't matter, as long as officials are still elected by locals.
Right? These people approvinf these projects are still living in the communities they are damaging
And this doesn't make you question the narrative that they are really damaging anything?
This move to hide the data only reinforces the legitimate public concern.
This degrowth anti-technology mindset just does not make sense to me, and I think it's mostly astroturfed from TikTok.
How is this degrowth? Individuals who had a nice neighborhood now living next to the noise and pollution equivalent of an airport running 24/7 have a point that it sucks. Households complaining that their power flow is getting cut off but the data center isn't have a point. People whose water sources are carefully measured due to drought and loss of replenishment being worried have a point.
Growth can be done carefully and well, or it can be cancer. The current data center boom is not being done carefully and well. How you do things matters a lot.
I'm sure the luddites got all their ideas from TikTok aye?
At least were not at this point yet:
"Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the Luddites were suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites
"The luddites were right" seems like an odd position to have on HN.
Why? The hacker ethos is all about understanding systems as they actually are; not as the people at the top want them to be. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the Luddites were right; the industrialization of weaving did destroy their profession, and, contrary to the opinions of the political leaders, this had a direct, negative impact on society for many decades. The curious-minded hacker should not ignore that reality, even if they think the circumstances are different this time.
The vast majority of people who think the Luddites were wrong have no idea what they actually stood for
Only if you don't know what the Luddites were concerned about. HN users tend to be better educated, and understand that the Luddites probably were right -- they weren't anti technology at all. They just wanted the benefits of the technology to be split between the factory owners and the workers. Instead, the factory owners wanted to keep all the benefits and fire all the workers.
Luddites wanted a rising tide to raise all ships.
HN isn’t a monoculture. And the Luddites weren’t against tech. They were against the avoidable harm by thoughtless adoption of automated looms. Their argument was distorted and smeared much like is happening here.
Hackers used to be counter culture and want to push power down to individuals. If anything this techno fascist push to merge big tech with government while steamrolling humans is not hacker culture.
We should home brew data centers for open weight models and open labelled datasets.
"The tech bros were right" doesnt exactly have a great track record.
People have often resisted progress of all sorts, particularly if they feel it threatens their position or erodes their sense of superiority.
What part confuses you? The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply? The water, light and noise pollution? The threat to jobs? The threat to truth and transparency? The threat to privacy?
> The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply
The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations. The idea that we will from here on just have degrown and decline is insane. I'm not up for that. Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
As for water supply. Data centers barely make a blip on the water usage.
> The water, light and noise pollution?
The only one of these which actually has any validity is noise pollution, and the US has one of the lowest population densities of any country in the world, and data centres don't need to be close to population centres.
> The threat to jobs?
CEOs saying they are laying people off because of AI is not the same as anyone losing their job because of AI, but even if that was the case, it's about as smart as not using an electric drill to save jobs.
> The threat to truth and transparency?
AI does not only not threaten truth and transparency, it makes it easier to find the truth and to circumvent transperency restrictions.
> The threat to privacy?
It's not.
> There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
There are bounds to the Earth's capacity for our consumption. We won't be prosperous if ecosystems collapse.
Dyson Sphere is the end game. Once you capture and use all of the sunlight hitting the earth, what do you do?
On our present course we're probably not going to reach Type I on the Kardashev scale, let alone Type II, because of collapse. We need to embrace long term planning instead of short term profits if we want to avoid that.
> The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations
That is straight up not true. Theres currently a threat due to the imprudently started war in the Middle East, there will be more once rivers start drying up and hydropower becomes unreliable or nuclear power plants can no longer be cooled.
> Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
This is an ideological dogma smuggled in as a self-evident truth. Please do make a point, not just an unsupported declaration.
> That is straight up not true. Theres currently a threat due to the imprudently started war in the Middle East
The US does not use crude oil from the Gulf to generate electricity. The US could scale electricity production at least 100 times without needing to import anything from the Middle East.
> there will be more once rivers start drying up
Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.
> The US does not use crude oil from the Gulf to generate electricity.
And yet, reserves are at historic lows. Markets are weird, huh?
> Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.
That wasn't the claim made, rivers will be drying up because of climate change (they are already!), which is a threat to energy supply. Data centers will accelerate said climate change, but that's not even relevant to disprove your previous assertion of regulation being the only factor.
I'll also note you still haven't justified your core ideological assertion you tried smuggling in earlier in any way.
> stable and affordable electricity and water supply
Look, I think you misspelled "demand" there. It's an understandable error; those keys are so close together.
Data centers present a demand on resources. A demand that wasn't there previously. You hook a DC up to the grid, and it will demand more electricity from existing generation capability. The DC proposals, without provision for their own generation, present extra demand.
So yeah, unless the supply of those resources can be commensurately increased in some way, the DCs will present extra demand on what we already have, and that means someone, somewhere, will have less available.
It’s not “de growth”. I want sustainable growth, which to me means:
- no NDAs signed with elected officials who then stonewall the public and hide behind them - paying the same prices for water and electricity that I pay - paying the same property taxes and income taxes that I pay - building in a fashion that doesn’t leave area residents stuck with bigger electric bills and water bills
All of these things can be done.
I have a tiny data centre. I get no sweetheart deals on the above tho bf s.
are you confident the demand for massive ai datacenters peppered everywhere isn't just some financial gambit? wouldn't you ask for consequences and side-effects that are socially desirable, even if the facility brings no wealth to the immediate area (either as a consequence of being owned by a remote corp, or by the investment failing completely).
> are you confident the demand for massive ai datacenters peppered everywhere isn't just some financial gambit?
yes.
It’s not degrowth. It’s anti monopoly, anti wealth concentration. Anti tax avoidance. Anti price on water and electricity. Anti raising the ambient temperature of a community.
Let’s put the data center in Palo alto or Atherton.
Not being from silicon valley, I am not sure of the communities mentioned.
But may I suggest we put it right next to Zuck's house? How about in SamA's back yard?
They are noisy buildings, designed to turn electricity into heat. And provide a small number of jobs.
Why would people possibly not want something that uses up water in times of constant draught, uses up energy in an energy crisis and pollutes the air and contributes to climate change in times of climate catastrophe, all so a few already way-too-rich dudes can become even richer?
It just doesn't make sense! Surely they were manipulated to hate progress!
You’re going to get modded down but you’re right. Go look at these sites in Google Maps compared to datacenter sites that already exist and have existed for a decade.