The page mentioned in the article seems to focus on "AI Data Centers". Looks like it's a much smaller set of hyperscale stuff, not every telco building with a bunch of racks.
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
Erin Brockovich is popular enough that it justifies duplicacy of efforts, amount of visibility her name will brings in much more value than cost of building it.
This is about " major AI-focused and hyperscale data centers running AI workloads". Not any random one.
It also accepts user reporting of new developments, breaks them down in several categories (tracking proposed, operational, under construction, etc).
And eventually it can also track more information about them, specific to their cases (amount of water and energy used, pollution reports, etc). E.g. it has information like "1.2 GW AI factory broke ground May 12, 2026 at Eastgate Commerce Center (Little Blue Pkwy & MO-78). 400 acres, up to 10 buildings. ~1,200 construction jobs / ~130 full-time. Multi-billion-dollar investment; $150bn taxable industrial development revenue bonds secured." for some.
This map is inaccurate, for at least one major FAANG player. General metro area seems to be good but actual physical location is way wrong, not even the campus is right
Living downwind of Colossus I and Colossus II in Memphis has orders of magnitude more weight than even a convention large data center. On par with a large cargo airport like MEM (FedEx hub).
That is a good question. The existing data center map above is commercial so creating a free version with a clear goal seems to align with why OSM was started. The social aspect of OpenStreetMap was more important than the technical part.
Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever xAI is doing with "mobile" generators.
The heat has to go somewhere and that is the environment. 300 MWh is enough energy to boil over 3k metric tons of water. That's 107 medium fuel trucks for perspective.
Google confused you. One needs 730 kWh to fully evaporate 1 ton of water.
Otherwise it's 1.16 Wh/kg (or kWh/ton) to rise the temprature by 1°C. Thus one needs a delta of 80°C, so 93 Wh to boil a kg of 20°C water. That's what my napkin math was based on. I used that metric a lot to calculate heat deltas in storage tanks.
I think it's the context that's confusing here. Given the topic the first thought is evaporative cooling but IIUC your intention was to give perspective by comparing to a volume of water raised to the boiling point.
300 MW hr is approximately nothing to the broader environment. A constant gigawatt load is (off the top of my head, probably off a bit) something like 5 sq km of solar over a 24 hour period on average. Granted some of that light would otherwise be reflected but that gets us in the rough ballpark.
In local terms its a fair bit of heating but zooming out it's a drop in the bucket.
Luckily AI data centers produce nowhere near that amount of heat. Remember the heat is waste and 300 MWh is the total draw. Some of that energy becomes heat. That ratio is somewhere like 100:1 though. Also, the waste water is only like 10F hotter than the intake. We build GW sized PP all the time and they will leak far more heat (as like on the order of 100x) than a 300 MWh AI data center. Thought there were supposed to be engineers on this site.
I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).
Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.
An electronic circuit drawing 1W of input power will dissipate all of that 1W as heat (assuming it's not outputting light or sound or other physical side effects).
Also powerplants are quite (relatively) efficient in terms of heat-to-energy output, often >50% afair. So a 1GW power plant will generate something like 2GW of heat (or less), not 30GW.
Data centers are massive consumers of water. There are closed loop designs that technically use less water but they: A) Make up less than 10% of data centers; B) Cost much more upfront; C) Require massive investment in waste water treatment. These designs still need to "bleed the lines" once a month and get rid of sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, anti-fungals, and PFAS
It is not at all inaccurate to say data center consumption of water is a huge concern. Too many on HN seem to be puppetting industry lines without realizing it. Closed loop systems are still uncommon and come with their own problems.
Is it a canard? In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing. Even if datacenters are highly efficient, if the water supply is strained, you can pollute people’s supply by drawing wells down too far and things like that.
It is absolutely not a canard. The vast majority of data centers use evaporative cooling which is in fact a major consumer of water.
The industry is pushing a line about little to no use of water based on the "existence" of closed loop designs. But even the closed loop designs come with major drawbacks and require investment in waste water treatment infrastructure since they still have to "bleed the lines" monthly to get rid of the sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, PFAS, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives.
This happened to me in the middle of the city of Philadelphia when construction of a new apartment building caused a water main collapse. Took them three days to repair. It wasn't anyone's fault. The pipe was simply very old. My water had soil in it and basically I had to run the water until all the soil was flushed. Could have been a lot worse and thankfully I was renting. A lot of these situations are simple construction issues and old pipes. It's not like a data center is pushing gray water into the system.
When AOC is waving a jar of brown water in congress she's being disengenous. Just like the killed Amazon office in NYC it's just gonna kill jobs.
>In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing.
Can you cite a source for this? I can't find it anywhere.
There are lots of nonsensical stories like this circulating on social media right now. Water draw for datacenters can't turn tap water brown. That's a supply or piping issue.
https://hellawater.com/why-is-my-water-brown-causes-solution...
Here's one link amongst many a quick Google search that explains how low system pressure from increased demand can cause discolored water. (Check out the section on municipal water supply disruptions) I live in new orleans and entire neighborhoods need to boil water in periods of high demand.
Your page: "This discoloration happens because of rust, dirt, or old pipes in your plumbing. Problems with the city water supply can also cause it."
We're saying the same thing. It's the responsibility of the water system to pump clean water to people. Customers actually using that service can't be blamed for the system's failure to deliver it, as the customers aren't actually making the water brown themselves.
That's a strawman, nobody is saying that the datacenters are directly turning the water brown. But if adding a single customer (the datacenters) causes the supply not being able to meet the demand and the water turns brown, then yes the datacenters was the cause. Saying it's a supply issue is like if I come to a party at your house and load all the drinks into my car and saying that there's no drinks left is a supply issue
I mean, the wastewater issues can be real in some environments. It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed and mitigated. It's not like these things have the ecological impact of steel foundries or fruit orchards, but they're not parks either.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
I don't see it that way at all, but then I'm a housing activist, and I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers. People just like opposing development. It's very satisfying!
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized by concentrated minority interests in specific spots in the country. The only big picture thing about it is the left-populist sideshow it's created.
That Gizmodo article says none of the things you characterize it as saying.
Except sorta - "Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, who spoke to Heatmap, expects only about 10% of the projects that are currently underway to ever be completed."
Perhaps that's why he's a "former director" but that doesn't really qualify as an "insider."
I do think it's a bit ridiculous though to not consider someone a tech insider who was a director for a decade at one of the biggest tech companies in history...
> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.
That seems very untrue - multiple areas have already banned data centers, and senators like Bernie Sanders have proposed stopping data centers nationwide. This is just the next phase of NIMBY-ism. Alternatively, source that the "data centers the industry wants are all going to get built"?
> I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers.
I'm guessing you're referring to rather cherry-picked data? I've seen data center opposition making even the national news, but I don't recall any '4-story apartment buildings' opposition doing so? And senators like Bernie Sanders are proposing halting data centers nationwide - are there any similar proposals to similarly outlaw such housing construction nationwide?
> People just like opposing development.…
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
Of course multiple areas have already banned data centers. So what? The United States is absolutely enormous. Data center buildout --- especially for AI training --- has a much easier problem than housing does. Housing needs to be built near centers of economic activity, which means that every marginal unit of housing is likely to be infill and has to pass muster with relatively dense neighborhoods of people who hate development. Data centers tend to be sited in underutilized industrial tracts. There are lots of those around the country.
I feel like what's obviously happening here is that people have a rooting interest against AI, and highly-publicized pushes against "AI data centers" in specific areas are simply sparking joy for people.
Is the argument that opposition to, and proposed bans of, data centers are only occurring on sites near dense population centers, as opposed to even covering incredibly low density sites? I'd say data center opposition goes beyond housing opposition as state-wide or even national bans have been proposed.
Many people similarly have a 'rooting interest' against public housing, public transit, even new housing in general in their area, and similarly celebrate when housing, transit, etc. get stopped. <shrug>
> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable".
A lot of the "sneering" I see from everyone who isn't an investor or an executive is a consequence of resistance to outreach. It's very difficult to discuss subjects with people when many now interpret factual explanations as propaganda and reassurance as manipulation.
By the way, plenty of people feared electricity a great deal (and it wasn't exactly implemented safely when it was new). In the 90s, many people also thought the Internet was a temporary fad, a mere novelty that would fade in some years.
Maybe the issue is the "reassurance" is identical to propaganda and manipulation. It definitely doesn't help that the companies having to "reassure" people have aligned themselves with so many others that have been pushing propaganda to manipulate others for some time now. Nor does it help that many of the same companies that need to "reassure" people are also actively doing the opposite - see the billboards bragging about not hiring humans, or CEOs bragging about how AI will replace the majority of people and leave them destitute.
There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.
Reassurance is identical to propaganda and manipulation insofar as all attempt to convey beliefs. Reassurance, here, should be apparently different in that it conveys true information. In the history of mankind, it has never been easier to discern between true and false information.
If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty not to as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to actively pursue policies based on falsehoods. Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
If somebody does want to give up on research and working out the truth, please actually give up and say you don't know. Stop coming to the city council meetings and plastering "millions of gallons" on even the social medias where that's surprising.
How can the average citizen who knows nothing about engineering/technology determine that their electric bill [as the result of a new datacenter in town] won't go up as truthful or falsehood?
Condescending responses like these are only reinforcing the original point. People don't want data centers because they don't want AI forced on them.
> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.
I think the marketing about not hiring humans is mostly what it is. There are also foreign entities actively spreading propaganda. But their claims are so wildly insane they get shot down pretty quickly. So it isn't just about messaging. It is about not being hated. If they hate you, the truth doesn't really matter.
> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though.
The industry is actually doing real work on water issues in response to these complaints. Big tech companies are funding projects that will allow them to replenish more water than their datacenters consume. This isn’t actually that hard of a goal for them to meet, because as we know, the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale. Regardless, this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
Anyway, all of this is a distraction compared to the real problem of carbon emissions. It confuses me that environmentalists are getting sidetracked by the water use distraction here when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
>...the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale.
Water issues are always local issues. There is no national water distribution system or national aquifer.
>this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
This will remain to be seen. So far, if it had worked out that way then there would be less vocal opposition to these data centers. Local perception seems to be that there will be nuisance to dangerous noise levels; heat islands which can cause local disruptions to weather events; closed-door agreements to build this infrastructure instead of open community involvement in the process; and other issues including concerns about excessive water usage especially in areas where there are already troubling water availability trends due to other forms of development.
>when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
Here in NTexas, the availability of and proximity to natural gas compression stations is key to data center siting from the ones that I have monitored. Plans seem to include construction of gas turbine generators to power the new data centers and these generators are sited on parcels very close to existing compressor stations and high-voltage power lines and small or medium local lakes.
If it's not rational it's not reasonable. The two words are more or less synonyms, unless you're using the word reasonable to mean something like "not uncommon".
AI does have clear tangible benefits everyone can see and understand! That's why ChatGPT has 800M+ actives! Those people aren't just experimenting anymore, they're getting real value. I myself ask models questions about all kinds of things many times per day, it's entirely replaced search engines for me. It's much more immediately useful than something like aviation which created a lot of noise and risk (objects falling out of the sky!) yet took many decades to become available at a price point ordinary people could afford.
That seems needlessly pedantic, even for HN. I genuinely thought the scare quotes were spelling out the distinction I was making, but for the record:
"Rational" is used in the sense of "derived from logic", or "correctly understood". "Reasonable" is used in the sense (this is very common in legal paradigms, for example) of "an understandable opinion", or "an idea likely to be held by a typical person".
I really think advocating against building data centers in Box Elder County Utah kind of gives away the whole game here. The impact logic is so clearly motivated.
Have you ever been there? Or even near there? Like, driven from San Francisco to the East Coast at one point? It's a literal wasteland. It is like being on the moon.
I knew someone would come out and say that. To answer your question, I have driven through, multiple times. I suggest starting with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire to raise your awareness.
You missed the point. Ecosystems are not wastelands. Abbey’s descriptions of his Utah are compelling, but he’s still in places the uninformed would call dusty wastelands.
What ecosystem is it endangering? Is using the land a problem? Utah has 10.5 million acres of farmland that I would think has some impact on the ecosystem too, should we stop doing that too?
For comparison, that 40,000 acres receives somewhere on the order of 40 GW solar radiation (averaging over night/day and winter/summer). Box Elder County overall receives something like 3600 GW average. There's a lot of power in that sunshine.
I remember I was surprised to learn that the heat released from burning all these fossil fuels doesn't really impact the temperature of the environment all that much. There's always just so much more radiative energy always going in and out all the time, the heat from the combustion is insignificant (or more specifically: it's quickly balanced out by increased radiative output).
To generate that 9 GW of electrical energy typically about twice that amount in heat will be generated at the thermal engines converting the fuel chemical energy to electicity. Has anyone studied this 18 GW heat load at the site of electricity generation?
The total head load for consuming electrical energy of 9 GW is thus approximately 3*9 GW = 27 GW = 9 GW at the GPU's and 18 GW at the electricity generation plant.
They mention a gas plant would have to be about 7.5 x 40 acres = 300 acres.
By your calculation its 1 GW / 1000 acres of natural incident solar power; so natural solar power on 300 acres would be just 0.3 GW on the would-be plant.
Instead its dissipating 18 GW (!) 60 x higher!
That is ignoring the 9 GW on the GPU site.
Poor nations desiring developed nation level energy per capita consumption combined with developed nation exploding energy consumption for the AI rat race means humanity ogles consuming energy at such power levels that mere prompt heating approaches similar power levels and densities as GHG radiation forcing did!
In other words, even if we succeeded in phasing out all fossil fuel energy use and replace them with renewables, and even if we somehow extracted all the excess CO2 back out, we will relatively quickly replace the cause of global warming from GHG emissions to prompt heating for generating and dissipating our electric energy use.
2 Exceptions: wind energy and hopefully someday exploiting the temperature difference at ground level versus the tropopause.
Humans have made aerostats (balloons with a tether), humans have made aerostats that went much higher than the tropopause, although only in acceptable weather.
At the tropopause the temperature is about 60 degrees C colder (up to about 100 degrees C in tropical regions).
Imagine a heat loop or huge inflatable levitating heat pipe (using phase transition). The new access at ground level to a cold bath in addition to the environmental warm bath can be used to drive a thermal engine and generate electricity (day and night, winter and summer). It behaves more like baseload energy, and it helps cool the planet: the heat transported from surface level if released at the tropopause level is above about ~70% of the CO2 of the atmosphere, so there it can more quickly escape to the CMB's low temperature bath.
We could be cooling the planet while generating useful electrical energy. The first prototypes should avoid any inhabited areas by a distance at least equal to the structure height (so it doesn't cause damage to population residences). Most humans live "close" to a coast line, so place the first such structures about 15 km into the sea. Another advantage is that the sea water has a high heat capacity, is pumpable, and can provide as a very stable reference thermal hot side bath. I.e. the system shouldn't stall because it has depleted local heat in the environment, you can always pump lukewarm seawater into the device, which can also be used to freeze seawater (desalinating it, see freeze desalination). The frozen seawater can be brought to conventional energy plants to lower their cold side bath temperatures, increasing the efficiency of solar but also gas / fuel / nuclear energy plants.
None of this contradicts the laws of thermodynamics, its an engineering problem: how do we build an inflatable structure that withstands the wind shear forces, dampens structure resonances, identifying the ideal carrier for transporting the heat (a pure substance? a mixture?, ...), a group of specialists should comb through the space of options to get a rough first overview of which directions would be more or less promising than alternatives.
Why do you presume yourself to be part of the "we" in question? This seems like it's a case of other people using their own resources to do things that don't involve you; what's your stake in it?
And given your correct acknowledgement that it's "just you" expressing subjective normative opinions about things you're not involved in, what valid basis do you have for assessing what anyone who is involved actually needs?
But I also think there's very little chance that they even get 1 GW up and running anytime soon, and less than 3 GW before the whole thing gets scrapped (just like plenty of the other hyperscale data center projects that keep getting shouted about).
No one needs that much AI, even if they did need that much AI there are more efficient and cheaper ways to make it happen, and even if there weren't these boxes will be obsolete within 3-4 years.
The whole thing is baffling.
If I were cynical I'd wonder if they're actually trying to cook the planet.
Yea, I wonder the same. Something I've been wanting to read up on is how the land ownership works with these data center deals.
Because developers promising massive projects to scoop up a bunch of land, do little to nothing with it, sit on it for awhile, and then eventually just sell it for a profit...that's not a new thing at all and isn't unique to the tech industry.
I wouldn't be surprised if a not-so-insignificant part of all of this winds up being just banking land that you got zoning, entitlements, and maybe some utility infra stuff setup for.
That may also explain some of the kind of puzzling cloak and dagger behavior with so many of these data center initiatives in local communities. If you truly think you're about to build something that is going to "imminently transform the way we do everything" and become some kind of $X trillion dollar industry, I'd imagine you'd be showing up with better "gifts" to ensure quick frictionless approval. But if they're more so viewing project proposals as speculative investments for control of land that is hopefully desirable to a bunch of tech firms (whether that's now or years from now), then keeping costs low and details vague early on makes more sense.
It's absolutely likely that this Stratos project is a way to lock up land for future development. From Ogden to Provo there are really only two places to expand. West along I-80 a bit into the Oquirrh Mountains, but that runs into the salt flats and DoD land, or NW along I-84 into - you guessed it - Box Elder county. And for those calling it a wasteland, it’s easy to justify turning it into suburbs much like the suburbs of LA. Provided you can get water rights. Proposing an AI hyperscale data center to scoop up money and water for the entire area is the perfect scheme for a pivot to development.
If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage in comparison if we measure in per person consumption
Right, see, again, giving away the game. It's not about the water (if it was, the objection would be easy to dismiss). Everything is downstream of a populist argument against AI progress.
Is this a serious comment? No one, in an environmental discussion, ignores how much water beef needs. It’s a central part of most vegan/vegetarian commentary.
But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.
You can go ahead and try to do that. Politically, to say its a DOA bill, is the understatement of the century. Also, water is renewable. This entire discussion is absurd and scientifically illiterate. There is a reason why nobody says, "party of science" anymore.
>> If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage
> Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Almost all other foods don't use trillions of gallons of water like beef does. If someone's goal was to reduce water use, then shouldn't they be making at least as much noise about the non-necessary thing using far more water compared to data center's billions, not trillions, of gallons?
Point I am making is if we need to tackle the water issue then we need to do it via 80/20 rule, focus on the elephant in the room first. Data centers are a fly in a room with an elephant in this case.
It’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?
I was asking myself the same question about whether there is duplication in the site locations. I believe that there is based on looking at my own area. I see several reports from nearby zip codes but none of them locate the proposed data center at the correct site even though I figured out where it was supposed to end up by doing a minimal level of study of the area. I didn't see a link to the articles that a couple of the site locations referenced so it isn't possible to determine whether three people saw and reported the same article without providing a link or whether there is are fact three different data center locations proposed or in the works.
I believe clusters of dots with no reference links probably are duplicates in many cases. The ones that are ground-truth are the ones where site names and owners are listed or where a supporting article is linked.
That's like saying Big Industry didn't do a good job of marketing factories in the industrial revolution. Datacenters aren't meant to be directly marketed. The benefits accrues to those who purchase the resulting services, and the marketing is for those services.
Why does the construction of buildings to run business operations of any kind need to be "marketed" in the first place, absent manipulative media campaigns trying to manufacture a controversy around them?
Because the public is affected? If they were to run a highway through the middle of San Fransisco, a lot of people would also be affected. Like in Eastern Oregon a data center used agricultural water for evaporative cooling. The remaining water that was pumped out has nitrate levels over 5x the legal limit. Enough to cause cancer and miscarriages in nearby homes.
Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
"Telecommunications" would have to, by any reasonable standard, include Telephonic Communications and the vast switching networks for voice.
Clearly that's a domain that has been automating at the very least since the human operated plug and board switching centres with human operators that answered phones and hand routed calls left the network centres.
You'll need to compare how many job postings there are as well to get the full picture, especially for junior roles. That's one of the most contentious effects and has an outsized impact on society.
Not much layoffs and they're probably due to the Trump #1 tax hikes on engineering anyway. But you can't say that without getting tariffed. Saying you're using AI is a much safer bet
What? The people against datacenter construction are absolutely not the same as the people freaking out about 5g towers. The latter share circle on the venn diagram with horse paste connoisseurs.
People objecting to buildings existing on account of the possibility that other people might do things they don't like inside them are in the same category as horse paste connoisseurs, in my opinion.
That’s a a ludicrous comparison. Not liking what people do in a building is the same as believing in baseless conspiracy theories? Regardless that’s not even why people are rejecting them.
People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise. And with almost zero upside for the community. The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
> Not liking what people do in a building is the same as believing in baseless conspiracy theories?
Yes. Obsessing over what people you have no relationship with are doing in their own facilities based on loose-associative, emotion-laden reasoning that leads you to believe that they are somehow harming you is 100% the conspiracy-theory mindset.
> People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise.
No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.
Any opposition to data centers that's statistically greater than the baseline opposition to any economic development (which perennially comes from certain quarters) can be reasonably attributed to worry about AI technology particularly.
> The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
The fact that they're owned by unlikable charlatans is also a driver of motivated reasoning and conspiracy theories.
> No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.
Do you not recognize that half of the things you listed are ESSENTIAL for a community? The rest at least provide employment. Datacenters bring nothing for the community besides a handful of jobs not nearly commensurate with the downsides.
The point you're trying to make here seems to depend on an underlying premise that for people to use their property in certain ways, it's not enough that they comply with the various rules intended to minimize negative externalities, but that they must also somehow create positive externalities for others in proximity.
That premise isn't one that's generally adhered to as either a moral or legal principle, especially in the US, where we tend to have a strong preference for protecting property rights, and only justify restrictions on the basis of preventing harm to others, not some obligation to create benefit for them.
But aside from that, you seem to be conceding the point -- that opposition to new data centers is coming from concerns about AI itself, and not concerns related merely to the constriction of new commercial infrastructure.
No, my point is that is how most people evaluate these things. How does this massive infrastructure project benefit me and my community. And the math with datacenters is very clearly that they don't. You may think that they have no right to restrict building on private property but that is simply not the case. Municipalities usually do have the right to restrict usage of private property based on their laws. This premise plays out literally everywhere. Not always positively, re NIMBYs.
The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI. AI is in the zeitgeist. And also datacenter construction is increasing as a direct result of AI. I fully agree that the reason datacenter memes are on instagram right now is because of AI.
But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative. AI does have some small part because, as much as you may dislike it, sentiment about the purpose of a project does have an effect on a community's willingness to give a green light. But it's far from the defining issue at a local level where the actual resistance is. Communities were rallying against datacenter construction well before AI entered the conversation.
I don't think most people see things this way. That itself is likely an exaggerated perception, and NIMBYism isn't quite as much of a controlling factor as is often believed. These projects usually do get built, but when NIMBYs do succeed, it's because they manage to demonstrate how the project runs afoul of rules that are there to prevent negative externalities. Again, there are no rules mandating positive ones, and even if that mindset motivates some people, it is not and never has been actionable in its own right.
> The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI.
Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
> But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative.
No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.
> Again, there are no rules mandating positive ones, and even if that mindset motivates some people, it is not and never has been actionable in its own right.
I never said there was??
> No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.e
I did not. I said the online AI fervor brings eyeballs to local datacenter projects and once people are aware of these projects they are against them because of the negative impacts to their community not simply because they are against AI if they even are. In fact many people in Utah are pro AI but against the construction of Stratos simply because it is _bad_for_their_community_.
> Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
You can say power consumption and resultant increase in costs for residents isn't an "externality", I don't really care. If my power bill goes up by $5 a month then a datacenter is bad for me and my community and I don't want it on my grid. You can say I don't have the right to stop construction and they have the free ability to build what they want and buy any power they want from the power company, I don't care. I have to power to use my government to stop the construction of something through whatever means are available to it or me.
The reality we live in is that these datacenter projects require buy-in from the states and municipalities. These projects almost universally require discretionary approval from governing bodies to some degree. That may be regarding tax incentives necessary for profitability or zoning or a myriad of other red tapes. Many of those governments are responsive to the people and the people _do_not_want_ datacenters in their community.
You can say they only don't want it because of AI fearmongering mindrot, I don't agree. I think it's because once people are aware of the projects and understand the facts they recognize datacenters are only to the detriment their community and I don't care to argue that further with you on their motivations. Regardless of their motives they are free to use their government to block datacenter construction by any legal means.
Most of the datacenters in my city are concentrated near the warehouse zoned area by the expressway, railroad and interstate leading to the airport. Basically nobody lives there, and those that do are probably much better off now that the diesel trains no longer running.
It does seem most of the pro-AI people aren't actually affected by any of the negative aspects of it. It's a lot easier to be in favor of something that doesn't actually affect you or anyone you care about.
It appears to be not so much about the datacenters themselves as it is limiting the growth capabilities for the LLMs. From their understanding fewer datacenters means more congestion which means less possibility LLMs can be shoved into more places where the public thinks they are intrusive. Which seems to be everywhere.
We don't build the chips or even the machines that build the machines that build the chips. We don't own all the rare earths and our ability to generate electricity isn't anything special.
The data centers are getting built. Up to us if it's in Utah or overseas.
Very well thought out argument, I'm sure spamming it some more will really convince people. You're telling me people aren't affected by AI in any way whatsoever? That's a very bold and obviously untrue claim. No wonder people don't trust AI sycophants, you can't even keep your story straight.
The water usage is floating point error compared to ethanol and the electricity prices near the centers are some of the cheapest you can get. In terms of the physical world this is maybe the lowest impact industry in history.
Some people have empathy for those who are, even if they are not.
I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it.
And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.
I often see empathy being mentioned in places where I can totally see the self-preservation link: if other people are negatively affected, it will sooner or later also affect me personally negatively. I am totally fine with seeing empathy and compassion as tools for self-preservation, without assigning any morality to it. Unless I kill you and all of your tribe and anyone else who cares about you, not caring about your needs will backfire on me. It simply makes rational sense to see what you need and make you happy so I can stay happy too.
What negative impact is that? For context there are only five houses within half a mile of xAI's data center, the building for which has been there for decades, and any homes in the area have been living by the existing giant natural gas power plant next door to the data center for 20+ years. It's really not introducing anything that hasn't been there forever
How would you know? I mean, I'm surrounded by lots of buildings, but I'm not usually aware of what's going on in ones I don't go inside of. There are lots of warehouse-sized buildings all over, and whether those buildings contain racks full of servers or something else entirely isn't something I'd immediately discern.
The stated reasons are "populist brainrot". They aren't scientific or based on reality at all. What has happened is the AI folks have made themselves very very disliked. Saying you are going to take everyone's jobs will do that. So whatever they try to do, people will oppose it. It doesn't matter if the reasons are based in reality or not.
The average person's inattention to nuance could be labeled as "populist brainrot" in this case, and the cases of poor zoning could be used as examples of the issues with datacenters that the average person does not evaluate with the proper attention to nuance.
Sure, the water use is often a simplified argument against these data centers, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons but they are in fact more nuances and context dependent based on the specific location.
I live near a datacenter, well, technically, there's a farm on one side and an abandoned factory on the other side. Tell me, is living in one or the other optimal to be able to participate in this discussion without being dismissed?
It's amazing how Karen Hao's (Empire of AI) confusion of cubic meters with liters of water for datacenters continues to get amplified, even after this error was publicly revealed.
Something like 20 years on we’re still hearing that “most” bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, even though that study (authored in part by Elizabeth Warren of all things!) was methodological nonsense.
How isn't this the actual link in the post? Have to go through all these loops and hoops and the post doesn't even link to the source from what I can tell.
People have gotten so intense with the anti-AI sentiment that I hope this doesn't end up guiding people to places where they can exercise violence "for a just cause".
Companies have gotten increasingly comfortable doing deeply unpopular things because they know, so long as the right people make money from it, the worse thing that will happen to them is some people being mean to them on Bluesky.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
"The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. "
Not this shit again. Someone writes in clean English, people on HN are like iT muST bE Ai caUSe NoONe wouLD wrITe lIKE tHAt
> I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"?
It's just vibes. There really are no reliable, simple criteria to determine if something was made with AI, and that shouldn't be surprising, since the whole point of LLMs is to mimic humans' work.
For code, I haven't read as much slop so I'm not as sure but one big tell is an unusual number of basic & unnecessary comments. And if it's version controlled, hilariously long commit messages with multiple sections.
Almost everything on that list seems invalid, at least as a simple checklist criteria. All of the tropes involved are ubiquitous in ordinary semi-formal writing, which is why the LLMs are using them in the first place.
It's more reasonable to suggest that a mismatch in tone or register between the style of writing and the venue it's being published in could be an indicator of AI, and it's possible that people misidentifying these tropes as being AI indicators per se may themselves be suffering from a filter-bubble effect, e.g. someone who doesn't typically read long-form writing might only be encountering conventions of long-form writing in AI-generated content, and misattributing them to AI in itself.
That itself isn't such a great criteria on some sites where you have different userbases who interact with the site in different ways. For example, Reddit has a large "old guard" userbase that treats it like a traditional message board, with longer-form and more in-depth discussion, along with a lot of more recent users who treat it like Twitter, and expect everything to be short and informal. Users in the latter group misidentify posts by those in the former group as AI more and more frequently.
It obviously has signal if the website is all about attacking AI. It shows hypocrisy and a lack of attention to detail that undermines their credibility.
I was thinking some of the community ones are bogus and then I started looking closer at a few of the hotspots. There is what appears to be a compelling site for a datacenter right in the middle of a cluster of these reports:
I looked around North Dakota and there are several that say community reported. Pretty sure those either don't exist or aren't significant in size if they do exist.
> WILLISTON, N.D. – Gov. Doug Burgum today announced the construction of one of the largest data centers in the world near Williston as North Dakota continues to emerge as a hub for high-performance computing, including cryptocurrency mining.
> The Atlas Power Data Center being built by FX Solutions Inc. is part of a $1.9 billion, multiyear project that will require more than 100 workers during the two-year construction period and create more than 30 permanent jobs, according to Richard Tabish, president of Missoula, Mont.-based FX Solutions. Atlas Power, an operator of high-density facilities serving cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing utilizing alternative power generation, will own and operate the data center following its completion.
> ...
> The first phase of the project will consist of 16 buildings, each 350 feet long by 30 feet wide, to house tens of thousands of servers that will conduct high-performance computing using 240 megawatts of electricity. Phases 2 and 3 call for expanding to 500 megawatts and then 700 megawatts, adding additional buildings and servers.
> WILLISTON, N.D. (KFGO) – Residents west of Williston were hopeful for a few hours on Tuesday, June 20, after the Williams County Commission voted unanimously to instruct the local power co-op to shut off electricity in a portion of a local cryptocurrency mine. But Corey Seidel said he knew the effort had failed by nightfall, when the servers were still operating at their usual levels.
I started a project similar to this early this year [1] when I got frustrated with the lack of decent free resources documenting data centre build out. The plan was to focus on AI build out specifically, the ones costing billions and the recipients of all the Nvidia chips rather than the boring 'normal' datacenters.
I also wanted to add useful and accurate tools on things like local noise, water or grid impact. In addition to actually monitoring progress via satellite imagery and building a basic graph model for filling in missing attributes.
The reason why I stopped was that I significantly underestimated the effort required to complete such a project to the standards that I wanted to. As you can probably tell the site itself is AI assisted but all of the information was collected by hand which just takes time that I no longer had (~30 mins per site). The only way this would have made sense was as research project or something which sadly didn't line up.
What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
Data center mech eng here - from our perspective it's higher rack densities typically due to GPUs. It's certainly possible to have high densities due to CPUs as well but I've seen a significant spike in rack densities in the last couple of years which has caused a switch from air cooling to liquid to chip.
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled condensers which leads to large amounts of water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled condensers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data center waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
The distinction is scale. "AI Datacenters" are a new level of scale with new levels of power consumption and heat generation. Sure you could run regular compute and w/e in them but it's not practical to build these mega sites for regular compute. GPU Compute / AI workloads require network/interconnect bandwidth and latencies where distance matters so you're forced to solve problems you wouldn't otherwise have to. Those problems are mostly solved with money.
This strikes me as a combination of semantics and false equivalence. You might as well argue that a new crowd of people illegally dirt-biking in a public park isn’t a meaningful change because people with baby strollers are have also technically been violating the “no vehicles” sign for years.
> Riot Platforms has initiated a large-scale, 1 gigawatt development to expand its Bitcoin mining and hosting capabilities in Navarro County, Texas with its new Corsicana Facility.
> Development of the Corsicana Facility has begun with an initial 400 megawatts of capacity on a 265-acre site. The substation was energized in April 2024 and mining operations have begun.
> In 2008, the city of Rockdale lost about 80 percent of its workforce following the closure of the Alcoa steel plant. Today, the old Alcoa plant is occupied by Riot Blockchain’s Whinstone facility, believed to be the largest single Bitcoin mining operation in North America. As an industry that relies on high levels of electricity, the company was drawn to the facility due to its existing power infrastructure, including valuable high-voltage transmission lines and large substations.
I'm not sure why but my reaction to this is pretty negative.
This page must be hosted from a data center as well...they could add a star to the map for their own hosting?
How much electricity does their site use, etc? I've seen counters like this before, I think, about the electricity a site uses based on the weight of the page, etc.
I came here to say this. I'm highly confident the site was built with Claude. I asked Claude how it was built and Claude was confident it was built with Claude. Kind of ironic, honestly.
Software running modern farming runs in datacenters. For example, AI checking images from drones monitoring health of crops, then directing drones with treatment.
Software ate the world, now the world eats software.
Nah. Not buying it. Nobody needs ai checking or drone-based pesticide dispersal. Sure maybe those tech are used here and there, but not widespread enough to say that I am eating stuff that only exists because of datacenters that haven’t been built yet. In top of that you can run all the image processing you need on a $500 consumer GPU, and afaik crop dusting drones are human operated for the most part
God I hope this idiocy stays within the United States. I have heard some rumblings about a protest against a local equinix expansion. I just cant tolerate living on a planet with this level of instant, reactive stupidity to the latest trendy thing to hate.
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
They do. All of my friends are non-tech and I've given up trying to explain any of this. The average person just does not understand how "the internet" gets into their phones, what makes a website tick, how their iPictures get backed up, etc. It's all magic. If they haven't had a lifetime of at least a passing interest/curiosity in tech, all of my explanations sound like bullshit. Watch their eyes glaze over as you try to explain how Netflix uses CDNs or how their catering website is a VM in AWS. It's just too fucking abstract coming from 0 tech knowledge, which is where the average person is. It's really sad how rabid people have gotten over this.
When I was a kid in the 80s I was excited at the progress of PCs and thought how cool will it be when everyone can compute! We will be so empowered! It seems the exact opposite happened and no one knows or appreciates how any of it works. "I just want to consume digital content, use it in all aspects of my life, and also fuck data centers! I want this awesome digital life but I don't want those jobs in my state!"
I feel bad because a data center was just rammed through in a city near me and I thought "good, the people protesting this shit don't know what they're talking about anyway." There's a lot of current issues where I honestly think the public has no business chiming in on because they don't have the expertise to have an opinion on it anyway, which feels gross to me, but here we are.
it's a mind boggling delusion to believe that fighting data centers will defeat proliferation of AI. they'll just be built in Romania instead, or maybe even in Russia after the war - electricity and water are borderline free there.
there is almost no reason to build them in the US even without this luddite bullshit.
I love this. Yeah there's some FUD out there about water usage and whatnot, but using the internet to spread actual awareness about local concerns is a fine demonstration of free speech at work.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
Is there a map of munitions plants and spy centers and other facilities whose sole purpose is to active oppress, harm and outright kill people?
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
False equivalencies, you can be against ai and imperialism and ads. Go make those maps if you think they’re problems, otherwise you’re just shutting someone down for caring about something that impacts them but you don’t care about
Can you be more specific? There has been opposition against most things.
AI is also the new thing currently being forced on basically every person and upending society. It shouldn't be surprising it's on the forefront of people's minds or that they might want to try to prevent it.
Opposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?
No one is stopping them from building out their own renewables and if they were doing that while also _fully_ accounting for water usage and any other externalities I don't think there would be much (if any) opposition to them. But that's really expensive so they (by and large) aren't doing that so there's opposition. Seems normal and expected to me.
If water usage is an externality, there's some other and more fundamental problem going on, since under normal circumstances, users of infrastructure are expected to pay for what they are consuming. Opposing data centers themselves, rather than whatever is going on that's artificially turning them into uncompensated externalities, makes little sense.
Then it will be nuclear or natural gas then. Probably natural gas. We price it as a waste product in the US anyway. Should be nuclear but the same type of ill-informed people will be protesting the NPP too.
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing. Jobs aren’t a left-right thing.
I don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.
Nobody is complaining about the acreage used. The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. If they were just purchasing 100 acre lots of land and letting it sit vacant I don't think anyone would really care for the most part.
> The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community.
That seems a bit bizarre, since people opening new facilities are usually responsible for paying for their inputs with their own funds -- if merely increasing demand for power or water is itself generating externalities, that implies that there's a much more fundamental economic problem that needs to be resolved.
the one gripe I do have is with the power companies in one state building new infrastructure for a neighboring state to pipe power out for data centers but then raises rates on the locals to fund it, something def needs to be done about that
Agreed. I don't know whether that's a significant problem, though, or if it's being overblown in the media, given that most states already have oversight mechanisms for utility pricing from monopoly service providers.
Where I live, for example, consumer rate increases above a certain level have to be validated by the state's Public Service Commission.
AI compute is a major emerging export industry that the U.S. could become the global leader in. Strong First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control also make the U.S. uniquely well-suited for AI, unlike, let's say, manufacturing, where authoritarian states seem to have an advantage.
The U.S. has much stronger free speech protections than any peer. Have you seen the speech (chat) control laws being instituted in Europe in the last few years?
the money being talked about is so large that eventually the lobbyists will get their checks and the politicians will pass laws forbidding local scrutiny of data centers
AI is good, but the impact of data centers on the environment cannot be ignored. Over a longer time scale, AI is just one wave, while the environment will take much longer to recover.
It seems pretty insincere of a complaint, when in those communities, 100x more land and water is used for farming, just because farming is a heritage, no?
AI is useful for programmers and a few other groups of people to do their jobs faster.
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.
automation is pervasive in farming. it's already an AI business. it will be a generative AI business in many ways too. farming, lots of kinds of farming, especially the most profitable kinds, is unpopular too. to me, this popularity contest thing, that boils down to, "everything visible that people do for money is invalid, except for the thing i do," is not a good way to lead.
I'm hearing from you: "People shouldn't have the right to determine how their country is run - I should - because I'm a technology-man, so I'm better than them."
* if that's a sarcastic / troll comment, congratulations, you got me but good :-)
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
I purchase surplus xeons on ebay, grind them into powder, and mix them into my milkshakes. If you aren't going that route then the real question here is what you're supplementing with to get the necessary computational boost. I'm aware of the complaints that surplus gear has a lower overall nutritional value but you'll see that it's highly cost effective if you can just be bothered to do the math.
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
look, you're having a conversation on a website hosted by a datacenter, right? it's kind of a reductionist point of view. i don't think it's a very interesting question that you're asking, it's bad faith.
there's lots of ways food production is malevolent. the animal cruelty, the worker abuse, not just its environmental impacts.
i don't know. my point is that, this kind of stylistic aesthetic vibes stuff about datacenters is kind of bullshit. i'm not the only one who is saying this. are people in the places with cheap electricity near urban centers that are appealing to datacenters and seeking to ban them also going to ban bad farming operations from their communities? that's a LOT of farming operations! i can come up with some way that almost all farming operations are malevolent. no. they're not going to do that. i don't think they should.
you can have a national policy for this kind of stuff, because the consumers and producers are in different places and our way of geography self-determination is kind of stupid. if it's a market failure because of how the borders are arranged - which happens a lot with environmental stuff especially! - don't let these little bitty communities decide.
Why go through the effort when such work has already been done?
https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/
Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?
The page mentioned in the article seems to focus on "AI Data Centers". Looks like it's a much smaller set of hyperscale stuff, not every telco building with a bunch of racks.
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
Erin Brockovich is popular enough that it justifies duplicacy of efforts, amount of visibility her name will brings in much more value than cost of building it.
This is about " major AI-focused and hyperscale data centers running AI workloads". Not any random one.
It also accepts user reporting of new developments, breaks them down in several categories (tracking proposed, operational, under construction, etc).
And eventually it can also track more information about them, specific to their cases (amount of water and energy used, pollution reports, etc). E.g. it has information like "1.2 GW AI factory broke ground May 12, 2026 at Eastgate Commerce Center (Little Blue Pkwy & MO-78). 400 acres, up to 10 buildings. ~1,200 construction jobs / ~130 full-time. Multi-billion-dollar investment; $150bn taxable industrial development revenue bonds secured." for some.
This map is inaccurate, for at least one major FAANG player. General metro area seems to be good but actual physical location is way wrong, not even the campus is right
DCR is a business. The datacentermap.com website is a way to promote their services
Brockovich is an environmental activist. Her project uses the public as a source of data for the map ("community reports")
DCR does not
To document the impacts and organize people against the harms.
Giving equal weight to real data centers and 1000sqft telco switches on this map is sort of misleading.
Neither have much impact on the local area so equal weight makes sense
Living downwind of Colossus I and Colossus II in Memphis has orders of magnitude more weight than even a convention large data center. On par with a large cargo airport like MEM (FedEx hub).
What does “has more weight” mean in this context?
Impact and externalities.
Such as
I mean, why was OpenStreetMap created?
That is a good question. The existing data center map above is commercial so creating a free version with a clear goal seems to align with why OSM was started. The social aspect of OpenStreetMap was more important than the technical part.
It puts a number greater than 4,000 in the middle of the US. Maybe that’s reliable, maybe it’s accurate, but it’s certainly not useful.
You can click on that to see more detail :)
I guess it’s just not designed for mobile. Tapping didn’t reveal anything.
It works well on Android. Just zoom in and click the number, and you can breakdown per state. Click on any state number and it breaks down per city.
Pretty functional design.
I had to click the blue number twice to get it to open on iOS, though I was also confused at first.
you click on that number to drill down into more and more granular information
At least 3 amazon AWS locations are missing in Sweden... This just from checking my own town.
EDIT: NO! Wth is this map? I have to click to expand the clusters. Ah well, all is good.
The Erin Brockovich page itself repeats the canard, on the front page, that these sites endanger ecosystems with their water consumption.
Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever xAI is doing with "mobile" generators.
The heat has to go somewhere and that is the environment. 300 MWh is enough energy to boil over 3k metric tons of water. That's 107 medium fuel trucks for perspective.
[delayed]
This seemed high to me.
According to Google, one ton of water takes about 730kWh to boil. So I think you’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s only ~450 metric tons.
(But this assumes that no heat is radiated away in other forms.)
Google confused you. One needs 730 kWh to fully evaporate 1 ton of water.
Otherwise it's 1.16 Wh/kg (or kWh/ton) to rise the temprature by 1°C. Thus one needs a delta of 80°C, so 93 Wh to boil a kg of 20°C water. That's what my napkin math was based on. I used that metric a lot to calculate heat deltas in storage tanks.
I think it's the context that's confusing here. Given the topic the first thought is evaporative cooling but IIUC your intention was to give perspective by comparing to a volume of water raised to the boiling point.
300 MW hr is approximately nothing to the broader environment. A constant gigawatt load is (off the top of my head, probably off a bit) something like 5 sq km of solar over a 24 hour period on average. Granted some of that light would otherwise be reflected but that gets us in the rough ballpark.
In local terms its a fair bit of heating but zooming out it's a drop in the bucket.
Luckily AI data centers produce nowhere near that amount of heat. Remember the heat is waste and 300 MWh is the total draw. Some of that energy becomes heat. That ratio is somewhere like 100:1 though. Also, the waste water is only like 10F hotter than the intake. We build GW sized PP all the time and they will leak far more heat (as like on the order of 100x) than a 300 MWh AI data center. Thought there were supposed to be engineers on this site.
> Some of that energy becomes heat.
I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).
Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.
Some? Where else does the energy go?
An electronic circuit drawing 1W of input power will dissipate all of that 1W as heat (assuming it's not outputting light or sound or other physical side effects).
Also powerplants are quite (relatively) efficient in terms of heat-to-energy output, often >50% afair. So a 1GW power plant will generate something like 2GW of heat (or less), not 30GW.
Yeah it gets radiated into space
Data centers are massive consumers of water. There are closed loop designs that technically use less water but they: A) Make up less than 10% of data centers; B) Cost much more upfront; C) Require massive investment in waste water treatment. These designs still need to "bleed the lines" once a month and get rid of sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, anti-fungals, and PFAS
It is not at all inaccurate to say data center consumption of water is a huge concern. Too many on HN seem to be puppetting industry lines without realizing it. Closed loop systems are still uncommon and come with their own problems.
Is it a canard? In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing. Even if datacenters are highly efficient, if the water supply is strained, you can pollute people’s supply by drawing wells down too far and things like that.
It is absolutely not a canard. The vast majority of data centers use evaporative cooling which is in fact a major consumer of water.
The industry is pushing a line about little to no use of water based on the "existence" of closed loop designs. But even the closed loop designs come with major drawbacks and require investment in waste water treatment infrastructure since they still have to "bleed the lines" monthly to get rid of the sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, PFAS, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives.
This happened to me in the middle of the city of Philadelphia when construction of a new apartment building caused a water main collapse. Took them three days to repair. It wasn't anyone's fault. The pipe was simply very old. My water had soil in it and basically I had to run the water until all the soil was flushed. Could have been a lot worse and thankfully I was renting. A lot of these situations are simple construction issues and old pipes. It's not like a data center is pushing gray water into the system.
When AOC is waving a jar of brown water in congress she's being disengenous. Just like the killed Amazon office in NYC it's just gonna kill jobs.
>In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing.
Can you cite a source for this? I can't find it anywhere.
There are lots of nonsensical stories like this circulating on social media right now. Water draw for datacenters can't turn tap water brown. That's a supply or piping issue.
https://hellawater.com/why-is-my-water-brown-causes-solution... Here's one link amongst many a quick Google search that explains how low system pressure from increased demand can cause discolored water. (Check out the section on municipal water supply disruptions) I live in new orleans and entire neighborhoods need to boil water in periods of high demand.
Me: "that's a supply or piping issue"
Your page: "This discoloration happens because of rust, dirt, or old pipes in your plumbing. Problems with the city water supply can also cause it."
We're saying the same thing. It's the responsibility of the water system to pump clean water to people. Customers actually using that service can't be blamed for the system's failure to deliver it, as the customers aren't actually making the water brown themselves.
Or the responsibility of the city government not to permit a project which exceeds the capacity of the system to handle
That's a strawman, nobody is saying that the datacenters are directly turning the water brown. But if adding a single customer (the datacenters) causes the supply not being able to meet the demand and the water turns brown, then yes the datacenters was the cause. Saying it's a supply issue is like if I come to a party at your house and load all the drinks into my car and saying that there's no drinks left is a supply issue
Hyperscalers are a drain on existing infrastructure- which is exactly why the Netherlands banned them.
Companies are in the business of privatizing profits and socialising losses.
I mean, the wastewater issues can be real in some environments. It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed and mitigated. It's not like these things have the ecological impact of steel foundries or fruit orchards, but they're not parks either.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
I don't see it that way at all, but then I'm a housing activist, and I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers. People just like opposing development. It's very satisfying!
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized by concentrated minority interests in specific spots in the country. The only big picture thing about it is the left-populist sideshow it's created.
> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.
If that was the case then why are the majority of data center projects getting scrapped?
https://gizmodo.com/data-center-project-cancellations-quadru...
Why are insiders saying they only expect about 10% of data center projects to ever be completed?
Why is 2026 already shaping up to have less than half of planned data centers break ground on construction?
Local community opposition is a big driver but so is permitting and infra procurement.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/why-...
All of this is inconvenient to big tech's "inevitability" narratives.
That Gizmodo article says none of the things you characterize it as saying.
Except sorta - "Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, who spoke to Heatmap, expects only about 10% of the projects that are currently underway to ever be completed."
Perhaps that's why he's a "former director" but that doesn't really qualify as an "insider."
Yea, my bad. "majority getting scrapped” was sloppy wording.
More accurate to say would be that a big chunk of the AI data center pipeline looks delayed/speculative. 16GW is slated for 2026, but only 5GW is actually under construction. https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outloo...
I do think it's a bit ridiculous though to not consider someone a tech insider who was a director for a decade at one of the biggest tech companies in history...
> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.
That seems very untrue - multiple areas have already banned data centers, and senators like Bernie Sanders have proposed stopping data centers nationwide. This is just the next phase of NIMBY-ism. Alternatively, source that the "data centers the industry wants are all going to get built"?
> I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers.
I'm guessing you're referring to rather cherry-picked data? I've seen data center opposition making even the national news, but I don't recall any '4-story apartment buildings' opposition doing so? And senators like Bernie Sanders are proposing halting data centers nationwide - are there any similar proposals to similarly outlaw such housing construction nationwide?
> People just like opposing development.… When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
Agreed.
Of course multiple areas have already banned data centers. So what? The United States is absolutely enormous. Data center buildout --- especially for AI training --- has a much easier problem than housing does. Housing needs to be built near centers of economic activity, which means that every marginal unit of housing is likely to be infill and has to pass muster with relatively dense neighborhoods of people who hate development. Data centers tend to be sited in underutilized industrial tracts. There are lots of those around the country.
I feel like what's obviously happening here is that people have a rooting interest against AI, and highly-publicized pushes against "AI data centers" in specific areas are simply sparking joy for people.
Is the argument that opposition to, and proposed bans of, data centers are only occurring on sites near dense population centers, as opposed to even covering incredibly low density sites? I'd say data center opposition goes beyond housing opposition as state-wide or even national bans have been proposed.
Many people similarly have a 'rooting interest' against public housing, public transit, even new housing in general in their area, and similarly celebrate when housing, transit, etc. get stopped. <shrug>
That's exactly what I'm saying. This is an old story; it's just getting airplay because of the "AI" connection.
Bernie Sanders proposes a lot of things that are never implemented. I’m not sure his support is actually a useful signal of greater support.
it is (unfortunately) quite the opposite, if you see what he supports there is a high likelyhood of that not happening.
So you are why rents are so high then.
> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable".
A lot of the "sneering" I see from everyone who isn't an investor or an executive is a consequence of resistance to outreach. It's very difficult to discuss subjects with people when many now interpret factual explanations as propaganda and reassurance as manipulation.
By the way, plenty of people feared electricity a great deal (and it wasn't exactly implemented safely when it was new). In the 90s, many people also thought the Internet was a temporary fad, a mere novelty that would fade in some years.
Maybe the issue is the "reassurance" is identical to propaganda and manipulation. It definitely doesn't help that the companies having to "reassure" people have aligned themselves with so many others that have been pushing propaganda to manipulate others for some time now. Nor does it help that many of the same companies that need to "reassure" people are also actively doing the opposite - see the billboards bragging about not hiring humans, or CEOs bragging about how AI will replace the majority of people and leave them destitute.
There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.
Reassurance is identical to propaganda and manipulation insofar as all attempt to convey beliefs. Reassurance, here, should be apparently different in that it conveys true information. In the history of mankind, it has never been easier to discern between true and false information.
If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty not to as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to actively pursue policies based on falsehoods. Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
If somebody does want to give up on research and working out the truth, please actually give up and say you don't know. Stop coming to the city council meetings and plastering "millions of gallons" on even the social medias where that's surprising.
How can the average citizen who knows nothing about engineering/technology determine that their electric bill [as the result of a new datacenter in town] won't go up as truthful or falsehood?
Condescending responses like these are only reinforcing the original point. People don't want data centers because they don't want AI forced on them.
> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.
I think the marketing about not hiring humans is mostly what it is. There are also foreign entities actively spreading propaganda. But their claims are so wildly insane they get shot down pretty quickly. So it isn't just about messaging. It is about not being hated. If they hate you, the truth doesn't really matter.
I keep thinking back to that e-card, "once you hate someone, everything they do is offensive."
I don't think tech companies appreciate the extent to which they used to get the benefit of the doubt just because people liked them.
> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though.
The industry is actually doing real work on water issues in response to these complaints. Big tech companies are funding projects that will allow them to replenish more water than their datacenters consume. This isn’t actually that hard of a goal for them to meet, because as we know, the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale. Regardless, this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
Anyway, all of this is a distraction compared to the real problem of carbon emissions. It confuses me that environmentalists are getting sidetracked by the water use distraction here when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
>...the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale.
Water issues are always local issues. There is no national water distribution system or national aquifer.
>this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
This will remain to be seen. So far, if it had worked out that way then there would be less vocal opposition to these data centers. Local perception seems to be that there will be nuisance to dangerous noise levels; heat islands which can cause local disruptions to weather events; closed-door agreements to build this infrastructure instead of open community involvement in the process; and other issues including concerns about excessive water usage especially in areas where there are already troubling water availability trends due to other forms of development.
>when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
Here in NTexas, the availability of and proximity to natural gas compression stations is key to data center siting from the ones that I have monitored. Plans seem to include construction of gas turbine generators to power the new data centers and these generators are sited on parcels very close to existing compressor stations and high-voltage power lines and small or medium local lakes.
If it's not rational it's not reasonable. The two words are more or less synonyms, unless you're using the word reasonable to mean something like "not uncommon".
AI does have clear tangible benefits everyone can see and understand! That's why ChatGPT has 800M+ actives! Those people aren't just experimenting anymore, they're getting real value. I myself ask models questions about all kinds of things many times per day, it's entirely replaced search engines for me. It's much more immediately useful than something like aviation which created a lot of noise and risk (objects falling out of the sky!) yet took many decades to become available at a price point ordinary people could afford.
> If it's not rational it's not reasonable.
That seems needlessly pedantic, even for HN. I genuinely thought the scare quotes were spelling out the distinction I was making, but for the record:
"Rational" is used in the sense of "derived from logic", or "correctly understood". "Reasonable" is used in the sense (this is very common in legal paradigms, for example) of "an understandable opinion", or "an idea likely to be held by a typical person".
> It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed
Actually it's a completely insane idea that can't be reasonably discussed.
Can you tell me with a straight face that this proposed and approved datacenter will not endanger the ecosystem of northwestern Utah?
O'Leary Digital Stratos Project
O'Leary Digital · Box Elder County, UT
Up to 9 GW off-grid (natural gas) AI data center campus on ~40,000 acres of private land plus 1,200 acres of military/state-owned land.
I really think advocating against building data centers in Box Elder County Utah kind of gives away the whole game here. The impact logic is so clearly motivated.
Have you ever been there? Or even near there? Like, driven from San Francisco to the East Coast at one point? It's a literal wasteland. It is like being on the moon.
I knew someone would come out and say that. To answer your question, I have driven through, multiple times. I suggest starting with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire to raise your awareness.
I've been there. If you could pick any place in the world to site a data center, Box Elder County would be high on the list.
Edward Abby wrote about southern Utah. Red rock country. Box Elder County is northern Utah. Night and day.
You missed the point. Ecosystems are not wastelands. Abbey’s descriptions of his Utah are compelling, but he’s still in places the uninformed would call dusty wastelands.
That is an argument against building data centers --- or anything else --- anywhere in the world.
What ecosystem is it endangering? Is using the land a problem? Utah has 10.5 million acres of farmland that I would think has some impact on the ecosystem too, should we stop doing that too?
Heat. 9 GW puts off a staggering amount of heat. In an already arid environment. What's the worst that can happen?
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...
> 9 GW puts off a staggering amount of heat.
For comparison, that 40,000 acres receives somewhere on the order of 40 GW solar radiation (averaging over night/day and winter/summer). Box Elder County overall receives something like 3600 GW average. There's a lot of power in that sunshine.
I remember I was surprised to learn that the heat released from burning all these fossil fuels doesn't really impact the temperature of the environment all that much. There's always just so much more radiative energy always going in and out all the time, the heat from the combustion is insignificant (or more specifically: it's quickly balanced out by increased radiative output).
To generate that 9 GW of electrical energy typically about twice that amount in heat will be generated at the thermal engines converting the fuel chemical energy to electicity. Has anyone studied this 18 GW heat load at the site of electricity generation?
The total head load for consuming electrical energy of 9 GW is thus approximately 3*9 GW = 27 GW = 9 GW at the GPU's and 18 GW at the electricity generation plant.
They mention a gas plant would have to be about 7.5 x 40 acres = 300 acres.
By your calculation its 1 GW / 1000 acres of natural incident solar power; so natural solar power on 300 acres would be just 0.3 GW on the would-be plant.
Instead its dissipating 18 GW (!) 60 x higher!
That is ignoring the 9 GW on the GPU site.
Poor nations desiring developed nation level energy per capita consumption combined with developed nation exploding energy consumption for the AI rat race means humanity ogles consuming energy at such power levels that mere prompt heating approaches similar power levels and densities as GHG radiation forcing did!
In other words, even if we succeeded in phasing out all fossil fuel energy use and replace them with renewables, and even if we somehow extracted all the excess CO2 back out, we will relatively quickly replace the cause of global warming from GHG emissions to prompt heating for generating and dissipating our electric energy use.
2 Exceptions: wind energy and hopefully someday exploiting the temperature difference at ground level versus the tropopause.
Humans have made aerostats (balloons with a tether), humans have made aerostats that went much higher than the tropopause, although only in acceptable weather.
At the tropopause the temperature is about 60 degrees C colder (up to about 100 degrees C in tropical regions).
Imagine a heat loop or huge inflatable levitating heat pipe (using phase transition). The new access at ground level to a cold bath in addition to the environmental warm bath can be used to drive a thermal engine and generate electricity (day and night, winter and summer). It behaves more like baseload energy, and it helps cool the planet: the heat transported from surface level if released at the tropopause level is above about ~70% of the CO2 of the atmosphere, so there it can more quickly escape to the CMB's low temperature bath.
We could be cooling the planet while generating useful electrical energy. The first prototypes should avoid any inhabited areas by a distance at least equal to the structure height (so it doesn't cause damage to population residences). Most humans live "close" to a coast line, so place the first such structures about 15 km into the sea. Another advantage is that the sea water has a high heat capacity, is pumpable, and can provide as a very stable reference thermal hot side bath. I.e. the system shouldn't stall because it has depleted local heat in the environment, you can always pump lukewarm seawater into the device, which can also be used to freeze seawater (desalinating it, see freeze desalination). The frozen seawater can be brought to conventional energy plants to lower their cold side bath temperatures, increasing the efficiency of solar but also gas / fuel / nuclear energy plants.
None of this contradicts the laws of thermodynamics, its an engineering problem: how do we build an inflatable structure that withstands the wind shear forces, dampens structure resonances, identifying the ideal carrier for transporting the heat (a pure substance? a mixture?, ...), a group of specialists should comb through the space of options to get a rough first overview of which directions would be more or less promising than alternatives.
You're right, we should build it in a third world country instead!
I'd argue we don't need to build a 9 GW data center anywhere. But that's just me.
Why do you presume yourself to be part of the "we" in question? This seems like it's a case of other people using their own resources to do things that don't involve you; what's your stake in it?
And given your correct acknowledgement that it's "just you" expressing subjective normative opinions about things you're not involved in, what valid basis do you have for assessing what anyone who is involved actually needs?
There is very little we do that is "needed" if you break it down to actual necessities (basic needs pyramid).
This new flavor of NIMBY is pretty funny.
A major flyway for millions of migratory birds.
It seems fairly likely that a comically gargantuan data center like Stratos would endanger the surrounding ecosystem, at a minimum.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...
But I also think there's very little chance that they even get 1 GW up and running anytime soon, and less than 3 GW before the whole thing gets scrapped (just like plenty of the other hyperscale data center projects that keep getting shouted about).
No one needs that much AI, even if they did need that much AI there are more efficient and cheaper ways to make it happen, and even if there weren't these boxes will be obsolete within 3-4 years.
The whole thing is baffling.
If I were cynical I'd wonder if they're actually trying to cook the planet.
Or maybe there's some kind of tax grift involved.
Makes no sense at all otherwise.
Yea, I wonder the same. Something I've been wanting to read up on is how the land ownership works with these data center deals.
Because developers promising massive projects to scoop up a bunch of land, do little to nothing with it, sit on it for awhile, and then eventually just sell it for a profit...that's not a new thing at all and isn't unique to the tech industry.
I wouldn't be surprised if a not-so-insignificant part of all of this winds up being just banking land that you got zoning, entitlements, and maybe some utility infra stuff setup for.
That may also explain some of the kind of puzzling cloak and dagger behavior with so many of these data center initiatives in local communities. If you truly think you're about to build something that is going to "imminently transform the way we do everything" and become some kind of $X trillion dollar industry, I'd imagine you'd be showing up with better "gifts" to ensure quick frictionless approval. But if they're more so viewing project proposals as speculative investments for control of land that is hopefully desirable to a bunch of tech firms (whether that's now or years from now), then keeping costs low and details vague early on makes more sense.
It's absolutely likely that this Stratos project is a way to lock up land for future development. From Ogden to Provo there are really only two places to expand. West along I-80 a bit into the Oquirrh Mountains, but that runs into the salt flats and DoD land, or NW along I-84 into - you guessed it - Box Elder county. And for those calling it a wasteland, it’s easy to justify turning it into suburbs much like the suburbs of LA. Provided you can get water rights. Proposing an AI hyperscale data center to scoop up money and water for the entire area is the perfect scheme for a pivot to development.
What does "absolutely likely" mean?
Because they do.
If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage in comparison if we measure in per person consumption
you quickly went from "AI water consumption isn't a problem", to "it's okay because cows consume water too"
Cows don't steal people's jobs.
Right, see, again, giving away the game. It's not about the water (if it was, the objection would be easy to dismiss). Everything is downstream of a populist argument against AI progress.
The loss of income of people displaced by AI may end up eating less meat to survive.
Is this a serious comment? No one, in an environmental discussion, ignores how much water beef needs. It’s a central part of most vegan/vegetarian commentary.
But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.
1. Beef uses trillions of gallons of water per year, while data centers use billions - data center water use is nowhere remotely as much as beef.
2. Despite beef using far more water, is it getting anywhere remotely as much coverage as data center water use?
3. Senators like Sanders proposed stopping data center construction nationwide - have senators proposed similar nationwide bans for beef?
You can go ahead and try to do that. Politically, to say its a DOA bill, is the understatement of the century. Also, water is renewable. This entire discussion is absurd and scientifically illiterate. There is a reason why nobody says, "party of science" anymore.
> Also, water is renewable.
Tell that to the aquafers we’re emptying that won’t refill for generations.
Water is renewable, but not necessarily in the right place or in timely manner.
Using treated potable water to cool servers is just taxpayers subsidizing server cooling.
Beef uses water, but you can eat beef.
Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Can you see the difference?
>> If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage
> Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Almost all other foods don't use trillions of gallons of water like beef does. If someone's goal was to reduce water use, then shouldn't they be making at least as much noise about the non-necessary thing using far more water compared to data center's billions, not trillions, of gallons?
Point I am making is if we need to tackle the water issue then we need to do it via 80/20 rule, focus on the elephant in the room first. Data centers are a fly in a room with an elephant in this case.
Was anyone proposing to eat AI? Was anyone proposing to do data processing with a pot roast?
Why is the difference in what specific use case the consumers of these products are serving with them one that's relevant to the discussion?
No, that logic does not make any sense whatsoever.
Not inherently they don’t.
Sure, but we don’t live in theory, we live in reality. Here in reality, they usually do.
Inherently, they don't.
The way they are operated, they do.
It’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?
I was asking myself the same question about whether there is duplication in the site locations. I believe that there is based on looking at my own area. I see several reports from nearby zip codes but none of them locate the proposed data center at the correct site even though I figured out where it was supposed to end up by doing a minimal level of study of the area. I didn't see a link to the articles that a couple of the site locations referenced so it isn't possible to determine whether three people saw and reported the same article without providing a link or whether there is are fact three different data center locations proposed or in the works.
I believe clusters of dots with no reference links probably are duplicates in many cases. The ones that are ground-truth are the ones where site names and owners are listed or where a supporting article is linked.
Seems under-reported to me (as far as PDX goes).
For reference: https://www.datacenterjournal.com/data-centers/oregon/portla...
Are privately-held datacenters counted? Like, prssumably chipmakers have a few of their own in their home regions..?
“Privately-held”? I don’t think governments are building them.
The US government has a lot.
Just one random Google result:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Companies that aren’t publicly traded, is another way to say that.
This datacenter stuff is such populist brainrot.
Big Tech isn't exactly doing a great job of marketing them. Saying they're for AI while doing mass layoffs attributed to AI isn't a winning message.
That's like saying Big Industry didn't do a good job of marketing factories in the industrial revolution. Datacenters aren't meant to be directly marketed. The benefits accrues to those who purchase the resulting services, and the marketing is for those services.
Why does the construction of buildings to run business operations of any kind need to be "marketed" in the first place, absent manipulative media campaigns trying to manufacture a controversy around them?
Because the public is affected? If they were to run a highway through the middle of San Fransisco, a lot of people would also be affected. Like in Eastern Oregon a data center used agricultural water for evaporative cooling. The remaining water that was pumped out has nitrate levels over 5x the legal limit. Enough to cause cancer and miscarriages in nearby homes.
Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
- https://idahoconservation.org/blog/the-dark-side-of-data-cen...
- https://www.akcp.com/index.php/2025/09/02/truth-about-data-w...
And saying they’ll bring in jobs, while neglecting to mention that is during the construction phase.
And also they come with huge tax breaks.
Any individual layoff is truly awful.
But at the macro level, it is not really a big number so far. From ~2.48 million in 2023 to ~2.37million now. Or a 5% drop in employment in 3 years.
Fred: All Employees, Computer Systems Design and Related Services (CES6054150001)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ces6054150001
Interesting stats to look at.
Is "Telecommunications" the only tech that's actually been steadily automating it's workforce since 2000:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051700001
edit: or is "Telecommunications" the old school landlines and such, and this is just the effect of the Internet
"Telecommunications" would have to, by any reasonable standard, include Telephonic Communications and the vast switching networks for voice.
Clearly that's a domain that has been automating at the very least since the human operated plug and board switching centres with human operators that answered phones and hand routed calls left the network centres.
You'll need to compare how many job postings there are as well to get the full picture, especially for junior roles. That's one of the most contentious effects and has an outsized impact on society.
Not much layoffs and they're probably due to the Trump #1 tax hikes on engineering anyway. But you can't say that without getting tariffed. Saying you're using AI is a much safer bet
People don’t want to live next to a factory either. At least those make things and employ people in the community though.
There's a class of people who'll run with it - the same people who were protesting 5G towers 5 years ago.
What? The people against datacenter construction are absolutely not the same as the people freaking out about 5g towers. The latter share circle on the venn diagram with horse paste connoisseurs.
People objecting to buildings existing on account of the possibility that other people might do things they don't like inside them are in the same category as horse paste connoisseurs, in my opinion.
That’s a a ludicrous comparison. Not liking what people do in a building is the same as believing in baseless conspiracy theories? Regardless that’s not even why people are rejecting them.
People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise. And with almost zero upside for the community. The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
> Not liking what people do in a building is the same as believing in baseless conspiracy theories?
Yes. Obsessing over what people you have no relationship with are doing in their own facilities based on loose-associative, emotion-laden reasoning that leads you to believe that they are somehow harming you is 100% the conspiracy-theory mindset.
> People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise.
No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.
Any opposition to data centers that's statistically greater than the baseline opposition to any economic development (which perennially comes from certain quarters) can be reasonably attributed to worry about AI technology particularly.
> The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
The fact that they're owned by unlikable charlatans is also a driver of motivated reasoning and conspiracy theories.
> No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.
Do you not recognize that half of the things you listed are ESSENTIAL for a community? The rest at least provide employment. Datacenters bring nothing for the community besides a handful of jobs not nearly commensurate with the downsides.
The point you're trying to make here seems to depend on an underlying premise that for people to use their property in certain ways, it's not enough that they comply with the various rules intended to minimize negative externalities, but that they must also somehow create positive externalities for others in proximity.
That premise isn't one that's generally adhered to as either a moral or legal principle, especially in the US, where we tend to have a strong preference for protecting property rights, and only justify restrictions on the basis of preventing harm to others, not some obligation to create benefit for them.
But aside from that, you seem to be conceding the point -- that opposition to new data centers is coming from concerns about AI itself, and not concerns related merely to the constriction of new commercial infrastructure.
No, my point is that is how most people evaluate these things. How does this massive infrastructure project benefit me and my community. And the math with datacenters is very clearly that they don't. You may think that they have no right to restrict building on private property but that is simply not the case. Municipalities usually do have the right to restrict usage of private property based on their laws. This premise plays out literally everywhere. Not always positively, re NIMBYs.
The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI. AI is in the zeitgeist. And also datacenter construction is increasing as a direct result of AI. I fully agree that the reason datacenter memes are on instagram right now is because of AI.
But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative. AI does have some small part because, as much as you may dislike it, sentiment about the purpose of a project does have an effect on a community's willingness to give a green light. But it's far from the defining issue at a local level where the actual resistance is. Communities were rallying against datacenter construction well before AI entered the conversation.
I don't think most people see things this way. That itself is likely an exaggerated perception, and NIMBYism isn't quite as much of a controlling factor as is often believed. These projects usually do get built, but when NIMBYs do succeed, it's because they manage to demonstrate how the project runs afoul of rules that are there to prevent negative externalities. Again, there are no rules mandating positive ones, and even if that mindset motivates some people, it is not and never has been actionable in its own right.
> The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI.
Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
> But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative.
No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.
> Again, there are no rules mandating positive ones, and even if that mindset motivates some people, it is not and never has been actionable in its own right.
I never said there was??
> No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.e
I did not. I said the online AI fervor brings eyeballs to local datacenter projects and once people are aware of these projects they are against them because of the negative impacts to their community not simply because they are against AI if they even are. In fact many people in Utah are pro AI but against the construction of Stratos simply because it is _bad_for_their_community_.
> Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
You can say power consumption and resultant increase in costs for residents isn't an "externality", I don't really care. If my power bill goes up by $5 a month then a datacenter is bad for me and my community and I don't want it on my grid. You can say I don't have the right to stop construction and they have the free ability to build what they want and buy any power they want from the power company, I don't care. I have to power to use my government to stop the construction of something through whatever means are available to it or me.
The reality we live in is that these datacenter projects require buy-in from the states and municipalities. These projects almost universally require discretionary approval from governing bodies to some degree. That may be regarding tax incentives necessary for profitability or zoning or a myriad of other red tapes. Many of those governments are responsive to the people and the people _do_not_want_ datacenters in their community.
You can say they only don't want it because of AI fearmongering mindrot, I don't agree. I think it's because once people are aware of the projects and understand the facts they recognize datacenters are only to the detriment their community and I don't care to argue that further with you on their motivations. Regardless of their motives they are free to use their government to block datacenter construction by any legal means.
I take it you don't live next to a data center.
Most of the datacenters in my city are concentrated near the warehouse zoned area by the expressway, railroad and interstate leading to the airport. Basically nobody lives there, and those that do are probably much better off now that the diesel trains no longer running.
It does seem most of the pro-AI people aren't actually affected by any of the negative aspects of it. It's a lot easier to be in favor of something that doesn't actually affect you or anyone you care about.
Most everybody isn't affected by data center build outs.
It appears to be not so much about the datacenters themselves as it is limiting the growth capabilities for the LLMs. From their understanding fewer datacenters means more congestion which means less possibility LLMs can be shoved into more places where the public thinks they are intrusive. Which seems to be everywhere.
Can't put new technology back in the box.
We don't build the chips or even the machines that build the machines that build the chips. We don't own all the rare earths and our ability to generate electricity isn't anything special.
The data centers are getting built. Up to us if it's in Utah or overseas.
Maybe not, but the people near them sure are. And the majority of people are definitely impacted by the downstream effects.
They really aren't.
Very well thought out argument, I'm sure spamming it some more will really convince people. You're telling me people aren't affected by AI in any way whatsoever? That's a very bold and obviously untrue claim. No wonder people don't trust AI sycophants, you can't even keep your story straight.
The water usage is floating point error compared to ethanol and the electricity prices near the centers are some of the cheapest you can get. In terms of the physical world this is maybe the lowest impact industry in history.
Some people have empathy for those who are, even if they are not.
I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it.
And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.
I often see empathy being mentioned in places where I can totally see the self-preservation link: if other people are negatively affected, it will sooner or later also affect me personally negatively. I am totally fine with seeing empathy and compassion as tools for self-preservation, without assigning any morality to it. Unless I kill you and all of your tribe and anyone else who cares about you, not caring about your needs will backfire on me. It simply makes rational sense to see what you need and make you happy so I can stay happy too.
What negative impact is that? For context there are only five houses within half a mile of xAI's data center, the building for which has been there for decades, and any homes in the area have been living by the existing giant natural gas power plant next door to the data center for 20+ years. It's really not introducing anything that hasn't been there forever
Except the people living next to them but they don't count because reasons.
No they aren't.
Very similar to the pro-illegal immigration crowd
How would you know? I mean, I'm surrounded by lots of buildings, but I'm not usually aware of what's going on in ones I don't go inside of. There are lots of warehouse-sized buildings all over, and whether those buildings contain racks full of servers or something else entirely isn't something I'd immediately discern.
That's a zoning issue the local residents should take up with their town/city.
But isn't the parent post implying objections to datacenters is just "populist brainrot"?
The stated reasons are "populist brainrot". They aren't scientific or based on reality at all. What has happened is the AI folks have made themselves very very disliked. Saying you are going to take everyone's jobs will do that. So whatever they try to do, people will oppose it. It doesn't matter if the reasons are based in reality or not.
Sure, lots of people parrot the water wasting and it's often not true, but it came out of truth.
There are communities that are on water restrictions where datacenters have no such restrictions (and pay less).
It's also true after some datacenters opened the local aquifers were polluted.
Then there are legit concerns about noise, air quality from LNG generators, etc
Plenty of very legitimate reasons to dislike them, and each community likely has a different set of concerns.
The average person's inattention to nuance could be labeled as "populist brainrot" in this case, and the cases of poor zoning could be used as examples of the issues with datacenters that the average person does not evaluate with the proper attention to nuance.
Sure, the water use is often a simplified argument against these data centers, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons but they are in fact more nuances and context dependent based on the specific location.
I live near a datacenter, well, technically, there's a farm on one side and an abandoned factory on the other side. Tell me, is living in one or the other optimal to be able to participate in this discussion without being dismissed?
It's amazing how Karen Hao's (Empire of AI) confusion of cubic meters with liters of water for datacenters continues to get amplified, even after this error was publicly revealed.
Welcome to the memetic discourse!
Something like 20 years on we’re still hearing that “most” bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, even though that study (authored in part by Elizabeth Warren of all things!) was methodological nonsense.
Direct Link: https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/
How isn't this the actual link in the post? Have to go through all these loops and hoops and the post doesn't even link to the source from what I can tell.
People have gotten so intense with the anti-AI sentiment that I hope this doesn't end up guiding people to places where they can exercise violence "for a just cause".
Companies have gotten increasingly comfortable doing deeply unpopular things because they know, so long as the right people make money from it, the worse thing that will happen to them is some people being mean to them on Bluesky.
It's poetically beautiful that the tool was very very clearly built mostly if not entirely using AI
It might be, I'm not sure.
The code is interesting though, it's not minified, it's very readable, and nicely indented with lots of comments.
The curated data center list is just some inline JSON.
The javascript uses var instead of let or const, I'm not sure if this is just style choice, or there is some code post processing.
It doesn't use react, AI seems to almost always opt for react for front end design, unless told otherwise.
A lot of the copy also looks like AI.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
"The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. "
Not this shit again. Someone writes in clean English, people on HN are like iT muST bE Ai caUSe NoONe wouLD wrITe lIKE tHAt
I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"?
Like I get it looks a lot like apps built with AI but weren't LLMs trained on real website and a metric ton of website templates?
Is it possible they used a template or other UI library?
> I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"?
It's just vibes. There really are no reliable, simple criteria to determine if something was made with AI, and that shouldn't be surprising, since the whole point of LLMs is to mimic humans' work.
"I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"?"
I wrote a whole post about it. Tldr: "I dont like this shit so it must be AI". BENEATH. EVERY. FUCKING. POST.
https://write.as/shantnu/llm-witch-hunts-are-getting-really-...
They're heuristics but yes there are some clear tells. For prose, Wikipedia has a great list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
For code, I haven't read as much slop so I'm not as sure but one big tell is an unusual number of basic & unnecessary comments. And if it's version controlled, hilariously long commit messages with multiple sections.
Almost everything on that list seems invalid, at least as a simple checklist criteria. All of the tropes involved are ubiquitous in ordinary semi-formal writing, which is why the LLMs are using them in the first place.
It's more reasonable to suggest that a mismatch in tone or register between the style of writing and the venue it's being published in could be an indicator of AI, and it's possible that people misidentifying these tropes as being AI indicators per se may themselves be suffering from a filter-bubble effect, e.g. someone who doesn't typically read long-form writing might only be encountering conventions of long-form writing in AI-generated content, and misattributing them to AI in itself.
That itself isn't such a great criteria on some sites where you have different userbases who interact with the site in different ways. For example, Reddit has a large "old guard" userbase that treats it like a traditional message board, with longer-form and more in-depth discussion, along with a lot of more recent users who treat it like Twitter, and expect everything to be short and informal. Users in the latter group misidentify posts by those in the former group as AI more and more frequently.
The list isn't invalid. Those tropes existed before AI but they weren't used incessantly like AI does.
What mechanism do you suppose would cause LLMs to use writing tropes at a significantly greater rate than than is found in their training data?
I have no idea, but the fact is they do!
Probably something to do with the way they do RLHF?
The most boring comment on the whole internet now - just blindly calling every single thing slop and pretending that has any vague value whatsoever.
All noise, no signal.
It obviously has signal if the website is all about attacking AI. It shows hypocrisy and a lack of attention to detail that undermines their credibility.
"The most boring comment on the whole internet now just blindly calling every single thing slop and pretending that has any vague value whatsoever."
I 100% agree. And I notice you are being downvoted by the LLM Witch Hunt Committee.
I saw a comment from another site that a lot of the data center locations on this map aren’t accurate. Is there any truth to that?
I was thinking some of the community ones are bogus and then I started looking closer at a few of the hotspots. There is what appears to be a compelling site for a datacenter right in the middle of a cluster of these reports:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/nZyt5Yb3kqxj5thc8
I looked around North Dakota and there are several that say community reported. Pretty sure those either don't exist or aren't significant in size if they do exist.
They're possibly bitcoin mines.
https://www.governor.nd.gov/news/burgum-one-worlds-largest-d...
> WILLISTON, N.D. – Gov. Doug Burgum today announced the construction of one of the largest data centers in the world near Williston as North Dakota continues to emerge as a hub for high-performance computing, including cryptocurrency mining.
> The Atlas Power Data Center being built by FX Solutions Inc. is part of a $1.9 billion, multiyear project that will require more than 100 workers during the two-year construction period and create more than 30 permanent jobs, according to Richard Tabish, president of Missoula, Mont.-based FX Solutions. Atlas Power, an operator of high-density facilities serving cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing utilizing alternative power generation, will own and operate the data center following its completion.
> ...
> The first phase of the project will consist of 16 buildings, each 350 feet long by 30 feet wide, to house tens of thousands of servers that will conduct high-performance computing using 240 megawatts of electricity. Phases 2 and 3 call for expanding to 500 megawatts and then 700 megawatts, adding additional buildings and servers.
And later...
https://kfgo.com/2023/06/25/williams-co-residents-frustrated...
> WILLISTON, N.D. (KFGO) – Residents west of Williston were hopeful for a few hours on Tuesday, June 20, after the Williams County Commission voted unanimously to instruct the local power co-op to shut off electricity in a portion of a local cryptocurrency mine. But Corey Seidel said he knew the effort had failed by nightfall, when the servers were still operating at their usual levels.
There’s lots of anti ai and anti tech coming from hn and in general lately. I guess this is start of the hit list.
Reference Cipolla's basic laws of human stupidity. The commenters are genuinely unaware of how they are harming others and themselves.
I started a project similar to this early this year [1] when I got frustrated with the lack of decent free resources documenting data centre build out. The plan was to focus on AI build out specifically, the ones costing billions and the recipients of all the Nvidia chips rather than the boring 'normal' datacenters.
I also wanted to add useful and accurate tools on things like local noise, water or grid impact. In addition to actually monitoring progress via satellite imagery and building a basic graph model for filling in missing attributes.
The reason why I stopped was that I significantly underestimated the effort required to complete such a project to the standards that I wanted to. As you can probably tell the site itself is AI assisted but all of the information was collected by hand which just takes time that I no longer had (~30 mins per site). The only way this would have made sense was as research project or something which sadly didn't line up.
[1] https://investigationsofadifferentkind.com/
What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
Data center mech eng here - from our perspective it's higher rack densities typically due to GPUs. It's certainly possible to have high densities due to CPUs as well but I've seen a significant spike in rack densities in the last couple of years which has caused a switch from air cooling to liquid to chip.
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled condensers which leads to large amounts of water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled condensers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data center waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
It is a nightmare for sparkies! See Meta's creative solution:
https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/132936/changes#diff-...
Isn't that just HPC?
The distinction is scale. "AI Datacenters" are a new level of scale with new levels of power consumption and heat generation. Sure you could run regular compute and w/e in them but it's not practical to build these mega sites for regular compute. GPU Compute / AI workloads require network/interconnect bandwidth and latencies where distance matters so you're forced to solve problems you wouldn't otherwise have to. Those problems are mostly solved with money.
Different I/O, power and cooling requirements for majority GPU workloads?
GPUs have been in high demand since cryptocurrency became a thing? Are you saying that something built for AI can't be used for other workloads?
This strikes me as a combination of semantics and false equivalence. You might as well argue that a new crowd of people illegally dirt-biking in a public park isn’t a meaningful change because people with baby strollers are have also technically been violating the “no vehicles” sign for years.
Not nearly with this density and power.
The power an "AI data center uses" in a single rack used to be, or is still in many cases, the power draw of an entire room or even floor.
Going from a few megawatts to ~10GW.
Did crypto workload ever take over an entire data center?
Yes.
https://www.riotplatforms.com/bitcoin-mining/corsicana/
> Riot Platforms has initiated a large-scale, 1 gigawatt development to expand its Bitcoin mining and hosting capabilities in Navarro County, Texas with its new Corsicana Facility.
> Development of the Corsicana Facility has begun with an initial 400 megawatts of capacity on a 265-acre site. The substation was energized in April 2024 and mining operations have begun.
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/archive/2...
> In 2008, the city of Rockdale lost about 80 percent of its workforce following the closure of the Alcoa steel plant. Today, the old Alcoa plant is occupied by Riot Blockchain’s Whinstone facility, believed to be the largest single Bitcoin mining operation in North America. As an industry that relies on high levels of electricity, the company was drawn to the facility due to its existing power infrastructure, including valuable high-voltage transmission lines and large substations.
Bitcoin Mining is 138–205 TWh annually. Surely that's more than a few data centers.
I'm not sure why but my reaction to this is pretty negative.
This page must be hosted from a data center as well...they could add a star to the map for their own hosting?
How much electricity does their site use, etc? I've seen counters like this before, I think, about the electricity a site uses based on the weight of the page, etc.
"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent"
"...you said on an iPhone. Heh. Gotcha."
I don’t care about the hypocrisy as much as the entire anti-datacenter Luddite movement being based on anti-intellectualism to begin with.
Datacenters provide very high utility with very low per capita externalities. There’s really no reason to care this much about them.
what's funny is the website looks AI generated though that's just the style of the time i guess.
No I actually do think this is AI generated. I came here to say the same.
Brokovich might not know it. But her web people certainly used AI to build this site. From the Emojis, cards, to the single colored left border.
the more I look at it the more I think this is AI yeah. sigh. I'm tired boss.
I came here to say this. I'm highly confident the site was built with Claude. I asked Claude how it was built and Claude was confident it was built with Claude. Kind of ironic, honestly.
And its own map is obviously vibe coded (each Key Concerns box raises when hovered).
It's very weird that what was once a site about technology and entrepreneurship has come to hate both.
Do real people genuinely care about this more than CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) (for example)?
I can eat animals off a feedlot. I can’t eat anything that comes out of an ai data center.
Why are you ok with spending $100 on groceries but not $100 on poison?
Software running modern farming runs in datacenters. For example, AI checking images from drones monitoring health of crops, then directing drones with treatment.
Software ate the world, now the world eats software.
Nah. Not buying it. Nobody needs ai checking or drone-based pesticide dispersal. Sure maybe those tech are used here and there, but not widespread enough to say that I am eating stuff that only exists because of datacenters that haven’t been built yet. In top of that you can run all the image processing you need on a $500 consumer GPU, and afaik crop dusting drones are human operated for the most part
God I hope this idiocy stays within the United States. I have heard some rumblings about a protest against a local equinix expansion. I just cant tolerate living on a planet with this level of instant, reactive stupidity to the latest trendy thing to hate.
I love these new modern-day AI-hating Luddites.
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
They do. All of my friends are non-tech and I've given up trying to explain any of this. The average person just does not understand how "the internet" gets into their phones, what makes a website tick, how their iPictures get backed up, etc. It's all magic. If they haven't had a lifetime of at least a passing interest/curiosity in tech, all of my explanations sound like bullshit. Watch their eyes glaze over as you try to explain how Netflix uses CDNs or how their catering website is a VM in AWS. It's just too fucking abstract coming from 0 tech knowledge, which is where the average person is. It's really sad how rabid people have gotten over this.
When I was a kid in the 80s I was excited at the progress of PCs and thought how cool will it be when everyone can compute! We will be so empowered! It seems the exact opposite happened and no one knows or appreciates how any of it works. "I just want to consume digital content, use it in all aspects of my life, and also fuck data centers! I want this awesome digital life but I don't want those jobs in my state!"
I feel bad because a data center was just rammed through in a city near me and I thought "good, the people protesting this shit don't know what they're talking about anyway." There's a lot of current issues where I honestly think the public has no business chiming in on because they don't have the expertise to have an opinion on it anyway, which feels gross to me, but here we are.
Keep kind lud’s name out your damn mouth. Failure to understand history, doomed to repeat.
> I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025
They of course call them “hyperscalers” because they’re the same size as all the other things. /s
it's a mind boggling delusion to believe that fighting data centers will defeat proliferation of AI. they'll just be built in Romania instead, or maybe even in Russia after the war - electricity and water are borderline free there.
there is almost no reason to build them in the US even without this luddite bullshit.
I love this. Yeah there's some FUD out there about water usage and whatnot, but using the internet to spread actual awareness about local concerns is a fine demonstration of free speech at work.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law predates AI.
Sturgeon's Law measures ratio, not volume :\
Is there a map of munitions plants and spy centers and other facilities whose sole purpose is to active oppress, harm and outright kill people?
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
False equivalencies, you can be against ai and imperialism and ads. Go make those maps if you think they’re problems, otherwise you’re just shutting someone down for caring about something that impacts them but you don’t care about
It's odd that we don't see this kind of ra.. resistance against much worse evils that have been objectively fucking everyone up for far far longer.
Can you be more specific? There has been opposition against most things.
AI is also the new thing currently being forced on basically every person and upending society. It shouldn't be surprising it's on the forefront of people's minds or that they might want to try to prevent it.
objectively, this is a new thing. And new things mean you have a chance to stop them before they’re normal
Opposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?
No one is stopping them from building out their own renewables and if they were doing that while also _fully_ accounting for water usage and any other externalities I don't think there would be much (if any) opposition to them. But that's really expensive so they (by and large) aren't doing that so there's opposition. Seems normal and expected to me.
If water usage is an externality, there's some other and more fundamental problem going on, since under normal circumstances, users of infrastructure are expected to pay for what they are consuming. Opposing data centers themselves, rather than whatever is going on that's artificially turning them into uncompensated externalities, makes little sense.
Then it will be nuclear or natural gas then. Probably natural gas. We price it as a waste product in the US anyway. Should be nuclear but the same type of ill-informed people will be protesting the NPP too.
> We need as many data centers as possible
Why?
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing. Jobs aren’t a left-right thing.
I don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.
Nobody is complaining about the acreage used. The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. If they were just purchasing 100 acre lots of land and letting it sit vacant I don't think anyone would really care for the most part.
> The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community.
That seems a bit bizarre, since people opening new facilities are usually responsible for paying for their inputs with their own funds -- if merely increasing demand for power or water is itself generating externalities, that implies that there's a much more fundamental economic problem that needs to be resolved.
the one gripe I do have is with the power companies in one state building new infrastructure for a neighboring state to pipe power out for data centers but then raises rates on the locals to fund it, something def needs to be done about that
Agreed. I don't know whether that's a significant problem, though, or if it's being overblown in the media, given that most states already have oversight mechanisms for utility pricing from monopoly service providers.
Where I live, for example, consumer rate increases above a certain level have to be validated by the state's Public Service Commission.
AI compute is a major emerging export industry that the U.S. could become the global leader in. Strong First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control also make the U.S. uniquely well-suited for AI, unlike, let's say, manufacturing, where authoritarian states seem to have an advantage.
> First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control
In what fairytale land does this describe the US today?
Describes the US since founding. It’s the Constitution.
The U.S. has much stronger free speech protections than any peer. Have you seen the speech (chat) control laws being instituted in Europe in the last few years?
TIL Erin Brockovich is still alive and only 65 (born 1960), she got famous pretty young in 1993 (33yo)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich
is there one to store bunker locations?
"...investigating data centers is quickly becoming its own beat"
ie it is in the economic interest of the writers to tap into (and foment) the FUD around "data centers."
c'mon now it's not nice to say mean things about ed zitron like that
They should just make the entirety of Silicon Valley as a mega data center.
That data centers are burning fossil fuels and burning up the earth is not FUD.
the money being talked about is so large that eventually the lobbyists will get their checks and the politicians will pass laws forbidding local scrutiny of data centers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249747
Much of the money is funny and doesn’t actually exist (yet).
Ben Jordan did a fantastic piece on how harmful data centers are to the people living near them.
AI is good, but the impact of data centers on the environment cannot be ignored. Over a longer time scale, AI is just one wave, while the environment will take much longer to recover.
It seems pretty insincere of a complaint, when in those communities, 100x more land and water is used for farming, just because farming is a heritage, no?
AI is useful for programmers and a few other groups of people to do their jobs faster.
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.
automation is pervasive in farming. it's already an AI business. it will be a generative AI business in many ways too. farming, lots of kinds of farming, especially the most profitable kinds, is unpopular too. to me, this popularity contest thing, that boils down to, "everything visible that people do for money is invalid, except for the thing i do," is not a good way to lead.
I'm hearing from you: "People shouldn't have the right to determine how their country is run - I should - because I'm a technology-man, so I'm better than them."
You have never set foot on a farm.
* if that's a sarcastic / troll comment, congratulations, you got me but good :-)
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
I purchase surplus xeons on ebay, grind them into powder, and mix them into my milkshakes. If you aren't going that route then the real question here is what you're supplementing with to get the necessary computational boost. I'm aware of the complaints that surplus gear has a lower overall nutritional value but you'll see that it's highly cost effective if you can just be bothered to do the math.
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
Ah yes. If you don’t buy during the surge you’ll have to pay the price later when costs have come down. Makes sense.
look, you're having a conversation on a website hosted by a datacenter, right? it's kind of a reductionist point of view. i don't think it's a very interesting question that you're asking, it's bad faith.
there's lots of ways food production is malevolent. the animal cruelty, the worker abuse, not just its environmental impacts.
i don't know. my point is that, this kind of stylistic aesthetic vibes stuff about datacenters is kind of bullshit. i'm not the only one who is saying this. are people in the places with cheap electricity near urban centers that are appealing to datacenters and seeking to ban them also going to ban bad farming operations from their communities? that's a LOT of farming operations! i can come up with some way that almost all farming operations are malevolent. no. they're not going to do that. i don't think they should.
you can have a national policy for this kind of stuff, because the consumers and producers are in different places and our way of geography self-determination is kind of stupid. if it's a market failure because of how the borders are arranged - which happens a lot with environmental stuff especially! - don't let these little bitty communities decide.