Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.
Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.
What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
Look to Australia if you want to see how these energy policies work out in the long run.
Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy.
They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled grid. All the economics pointing to renewables being the way forward were proven correct.
Everyone gets their back scratched. If you’re a consumer and you invested, you have a massively discounted personal power station that generates you money. If you operate the grid, your transmission costs and peak transmission costs went down. General consumer prices went down because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs. Everyone in won.
Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story. Don’t let rhetoric become your reality.
It's absurd how the propaganda against green energy on certain political spectrums essentially turned into, "It's all money/cash grab for green energy companies!"
As if the established industry has no incentive in the opposite direction? Everyone is going to act in their best interests in this system, that's how it's designed, the whole point of government is to mediate the system in the best interests of the whole.
> Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story.
If only.
Chevron’s Gorgon project will be ongoing for decades and making money hand over fist flogging LNG out of Australia to overseas customers.
It'll be a massive source of previously sequestered CO2 and claimed to be "the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet* .. with the minor catch of (re-) stashing away a very very tiny portion of the CO2 released. Something, something, not let it out in the first place?
Still, could be worse, at least they're not planning on fracking the Kimberley.
> Power prices to fall for most customers, with bigger drops for businesses
> What is driving [lower prices] is a reduction in the cost of producing electricity. We've seen a lot more batteries and solar systems come into the electricity market in the last 12 months. They've been making the market much less volatile," Ms Savage said.
> "We've not needed as much gas and hydro generation in the evening peaks, and that's what's really cut that cost of wholesale generation."
The overall American economy is going to pay the price in the long term. And current foreign policy is reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner, which will make things even worse.
Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
I feel it is hard to grasp for an American how much perception of US shifted in eu. This is just anedoctal of course, but a famous Italian singer famous for having written a song about American and sexual liberation decades ago, wrote an updated version. The former is "America", the latter is "America INC." You can guess which one depicts America in a bad light.
I wouldn't have expected a famous singer to make such a song, given that America was always portrayed in italian pop music with a positive image, and negative views were relegated to mostly political groups or singers with political themes
Simply put, I think Americans don't grasp it because even for us Europeans it is sometimes surprising how repentine and fast the shift has been in the regular Joe's brain - I'm not saying that Americans are stupid bla bla thing -, I'm saying that it is normal not be as up to date with some phenomena as people living where that phenomena happens.
Also, at least the Italian government is still dancing the tip tap regarding a position on America, not taking any definitive stance or doing anything significantly different than before, which is a big rift wrt what people want. Only exception for defense expenses
I find Europe's obsession with America fatally pathological. If I were a European with a family (so a stake on the future) my worries would be like:
1. Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
2. What's it going to be like when Europe is so squeezed by China that the likes of Volkswagen are going out of business (happening now.)
I would find these two things literally existential. But I think these are hard questions to tackle or even ponder it's easier to shit on America instead as a feel-good distraction.
The US has been the foundation of European security since the beginning of NATO. Now Europe has good reason to think that American security guarantees are no longer reliable, and the US president keeps threatening to invade a European country, while Russia fights a war of aggression nearby. If I were European then I guess I'd find this rather more worrying than brown people moving in, or the struggles of car companies.
I assumed that was what the commenter above was talking about, but perhaps I'm wrong. From the little I know about it, most of the immigrants that right-wing Europeans complain about are from places to the south.
In case my understatement made things unclear, it's not the sort of thing I worry about at all.
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
Are you sure they are not more concerned about 'Will my kids be able to get a good job, own a house and generally be at least as prosperous as me, if not more?'
You know what the best way is to ensure that your children don't become second-class citizens because they're an ethnic minority?
Treat the ethnic minorities well today.
Lay the foundation for an inclusive, multicultural society now, rather than falling for the same old bullshit about immigrants stealing yer jerbs and using that as an excuse for rampant racism that will reverberate down the line.
> > Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
> What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?
European countries take great care in maintaining and strengthening their traditions and cultural heritage. That would be at risk. Now, whether or not that actually matters or not is debatable, but Europeans DO seem to care to keep their cultures and traditions alive.
This fear of "the others" that don't look like us or dare to have their own culture coming and "stealing" your cake has been used as a cheap distraction tactic for ages. It backfired for Germany, it's gonna backfire for the US.
I really like this metaphor:
A politician, a voter, and an immigrant are at a BBQ. There's 100 sausages on the grill.
The politician goes up, takes 99 sausages, turns to the voter and says "quick, that immigrant is gonna steal your sausage".
It's truly frustrating how effective it is to distract the general population by just inciting fear like that.
I lived all over the place after growing up in the Catholic German country side. I think the places most afraid from cultural dilution are the ones that needed it the most.
It's also so funny how folks in the US keep forgetting that they literally used to be immigrants of all sorts of origins and what made them so successful is leveraging the diverse perspectives. Most of this whole AI boom is based on work from people that came to the US from less privileged places all working together for something greater than them.
What do you think about all the money and energy that European countries spend on propping up their traditions and cultural heritage VS just letting it evolve "naturally" as demographics shift?
What are all these presently dominant cultures that are so fragile that the mere presence of others represents an existential threat? Sounds like an excuse for xenophobia more than a sincere concern.
you can't fault people for being confused. just because some people in the US have latched on 'cultural integrity' as their new favorite racist dogwhistle doesn't mean that it makes sense at all to anyone else.
its really funny. some people are fighting a fictional war that the 'other side' isn't really engaged in, and they're losing.
the other funny thing is that if you asked someone what the largest threat to their cultural identity is, a lot of them wouldn't answer immigrants - they would be more concerned about the cancerous US style anodyne consumer culture and media as being the most corrosive
I think there are very few countries that can claim to have a good setup for an ethnic minority. Singapore, US, Israel, western Europe. Most of the world - being an ethnic minority sucks. As western Europe changes the ethnic western Europeans may not enjoy their treatment.
When facts can't be dismissed or debated we move to labelling and insults. We on the last line of defense. Don't forgot to throw in Nazis its makes your point so much stronger.
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
It occurs to me that an effective solution to that problem might be to… Treat minorities well? You know, like people equal to you? Societies are made of the people in them; if minorities are treated positively, then you don’t have to fear being in one. Teach your kids to be nice.
If you are not a moronic racist, #1 is a non-issue.
As for #2, Volkswagen is far from going out of business. In any case, trade with China can be adjusted with adequate policy, EU as a trade block can handle it just fine.
As an European, I see the US as an actual existential threat to Europe. China is just a trade partner with some clashing trade interests.
These people never say "great replacement theory", because they know if they do then that firmly puts them in the "flat earther" aisle. So, we need to call it out when we see it. This is just not legitimate ideology, it's a form of white supremacy.
Because its not a theory but a policy at least in Canada and much of western Europe. Flat earther is someone who believes something that has been proven wrong so the flat earthier in this debate is the group who doesn't believe the facts which would be the group you are in.
It didn't happen in Canada, unless you mean the part where we rounded up all the natives and put them on reserves. I'm a white Canadian born and raised in Canada and I am far from being a minority no matter where I go, from the prairies to the GTA. Conservatives keep talking about this like it's a thing, but they do so from their majority white communities. The only places you see large numbers of immigrants is in low paying service jobs and you can thank the exploitive hiring practices of major companies like Tim Hortons - the people there are slaves living under the constant threat of deportation if they disappoint their employer/owner.
It's also worth noting that those white people concerned about becoming ethnic minorities are themselves immigrants. British and French colonists; German, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Irish; Hutterite and Mennonite - all immigrants, many within just the last few generations. For as long as Canada has been a country, it has been made up of many groups of different ethnicities, all immigrants. "White" isn't an ethnicity.
You are a minority in Toronto if you are white and less than 20% if you are British. Edmonton is 53% white and going down fast. Vancouver is down to 45%. GTA 43% white.
If you are in tech or government or banking or any large corp you are a minority.
It's not some chaps from Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Africa that threaten me. My neighbor is Nigerian, dude is chill. Loves football, takes his children to the local playground, etc.
What threatens me is imbeciles that believe in great replacement and 14 words about future for white children. Keep your racism across the pond and try not to breed with siblings.
I both don't believe that the white population is being replaced, and even if it was, I don't care. I am not a racist, my family tree does not resemble a circle.
Issues of migration and fertility rate are related to structural incentives and constraints, level of urbanization, economic development, etc.
I want my country to prosper. It won't prosper by closing itself off to migration. I hope it attracts more researches and highly educated people from around the world, especially now that the US is shunning them.
"I don't believe the white population is being replaced"
It is and its hard to argue population data and policy fact that experts agree on.
"I am not a racist". Who told you that it's racist being concerned your population is being I want my country to prosper? Is it racist that China or India doesn't lets everyone from Africa or South American migrate and become Chinese or Indian? If you don't think they are racist for their choices why would you label your people that way?
"I want my country to prosper" I don't think you understand it won't be your country anymore it will be some other group with their values. This happened to native North Americans. The natives in Europe are white.
You are bundling a lot of ethnicities, many of those who historically had major grievances amongst themselves, in race bullshit very specific to the US.
A "white" label is very meaningless this side of the pond. I have little patience for this shit, the US truly is a sick place if your rhetoric is what it produces.
> It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?
That's just uncritical thinking.
The United States is the single largest bilateral provider of direct military equipment, intelligence, and defense funding to Ukraine (a European country) against Russia.
> Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?
I don’t think the comment above you is suggesting that is a possibility, but rather saying “things are so bad that the only imaginable way to get worse would be <outlandish unimaginable scenario>”. In other words, it seems to be hyperbole.
Perhaps, though my reading between the lines is that they think trust is so low because the US won't help defend Europe and might invade Europe, even though, despite rhetoric, all actions point to the opposite happening.
It is, as the USA has a large population. We can be more nuanced.
By absolute dollars, single country: US > EU institutions > Germany > UK
By absolute dollars, bloc vs. bloc: EU/Europe combined (~$237bn+) now exceeds the US (~$130bn), especially after 2025
By per-capita/GDP burden: tiny front-line states (Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway) far outstrip both the US and the larger Western European economies — the US actually ranks closer to the bottom of the pack on a relative-effort basis, behind Germany, the UK, and virtually all Nordic/Baltic states
Between February 2022 and January 2025, average expenditure per European resident stood at $394; by April 2026 that figure had risen to $618, driven by the total spending by European NATO countries on Ukraine exceeding $237 billion, including $96 billion contributed just since January 2025.
Average European (across NATO's European members) $618 per person (2022-2026)
United States (my estimate: ~$130bn total ÷ ~340m population)≈ $384 per person
There is a lot of that with the population but I don't see it at the leadership level yet. The top politicians are all still desperate to go back to the good old days of euro-atlanticism (and all the cushy positions it gets their friends & family), there's also the problem of all of their capital happily sitting and growing in fortune 500 companies.
I admit I haven't followed the French protests as closely as I should have. Do they shoot protestors in the face with teargas canisters there too? Maybe they do. Do those protestors face the real possibility of medical bankruptcy if they need extensive care? Does France enforce laws that protect striking workers?
You don’t need a numerical advantage to dominate if you have a technological / organizational advantage. The British empire was outnumbered 10 to 1 and still managed to control a large portion of the world for a while.
US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.
>US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.
"Rest of the world"? Europe isn't even a player in the AI race. China might be better placed, but they also lag the US in terms of model development and capital deployed. They've been catching up, but that's not the same as "[American will] be in a similar place to Canada at best". That would require a lot of things to go right for China and/or a lot of things to go wrong for the US.
>Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility.
The first two charts are for GDP, which correlates pretty well with geopolitical power. Moreover if we're going by population, wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?
A "in general" correlates with geopolitical power doesn't necessary mean you can point at a specific case look at their GDP and come to a good conclusion. Especially not if it's as much of a special case as China.
> wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?
which might actually happen. If the US falls further from grace and the situations stays like that for a few decades, or the US and another huge power (e.g. China) fall into some costly conflict then India or a union of African countries have a serious chance to become a world super power.
---
=> But more relevantly this discussion is going into red hering argument direction:
- No one argued that you should go _only_ by population, the argument is, that if a country with a gigantic population shrinks hugely they still have enough people left to wage large scale wars.
- Similar no one (should) argue that GDP is by itself meaningful for such an assessment, it's one imperfect not supper reliable statistical point. Especially given how things move wrt. dark factories (i.e. fully automated => no light one as no human there), AI and similar. Yes, if GDP is supper low or high that says a lot, but a lot is not everything and a average GDP for decade long trends in a word looking to face a major time of change means not much in any direction.
- Similar we are speaking about decade long developments, current military strength ist also just another non fully reliable indicator. E.g. Germany post WW1 had close to actual 0/no military strength, and then there was WW2 just a few years later...
So going by one statistic (GDP) is bad, but going by another (population) gets a pass because... China's "special"? I'm sorry, but that just sounds like a special pleading. I don't like this because it just turns arguments into a fact-free zone where objective facts don't matter and the only thing that does is handwavy vibes from either side. Is China going to be the dominant superpower? The supporters can handwave endlessly about robot armies and the superiority of an authoritarian political system. The detractors can handwave endlessly about the demographic crisis and the fragility of an authoritarian political system.
I'm not sure if I'm mis-reading your comment, but:
The idea that you "need a single extremely powerful country to replace it or the US will stay in its position" just doesn't add up. I'm not fully sure if that is what you meant but I have seen that argument a few times.
_There doesn't need to be a replacement._
For most of the worlds history there wasn't a single leading world supper power, just regional super powers, or supper powers in specific sectors.
And if we speak about who could become a supper power _after the US stops being one and there isn't one for some decades_. Then there are a bunch of candidates.
E.g. China has a population collapse issues, but due to it's cut throat ruthless government and total population number and lead in factory automation might be from all countries with similar problems by margin the most likely to overcome it without power collapse.
E.g. the EU might have many issues (as it's members has many issues) but the general concept has proven hugely successful. And what people forget is EU is the cherry on top of a huge stack of treaties which can be extended to 3rd parties independent of full EU membership. Like e.g. Canada, which doesn't plan to become an EU member, but might join some of this treaties as result of the non stop hostility from the US. Same for military treaties between NATO members which are independent of NATO like e.g. JEF, which would likely be open for letting Canada join. Anyway way to many words. But the end result may be a world supper power which is not one entity but a complex lossy coupled network of countries.
Then there have been some other cross country unions and countries, which want to gain super power relevance but have so far been too irrelevant due to a combination of corruption, bad luck and sabotage by existing powers etc. But if we speak about going for a few decades without any leading super power and maybe prime canidates harming each other (e.g. a US <-> Chineese war) then they do actually have a chance.
>The idea that you "need a single extremely powerful country to replace it or the US will stay in its position" just doesn't add up. I'm not fully sure if that is what you meant but I have seen that argument a few times.
The OP goes further than merely claiming that US will lose its spot as the top power. It claims it won't be a world power at all:
>in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best
For reference, Canada ranks #11 in GDP, below Russia and even Brazil. On military spending it ranks #16, below Poland and Spain. It doesn't have nukes. To suggest US will ever come close to that in 50 years is laughable.
50 years once just a blink in human history is today enough to have 2 major industrial revolutions
nukes are not an argument for anything but main land defense from invasions
Look Russia, it was considered on of the most powerful countries military wise and cleanly in the top 10 economically. Many treated it as a 3rd place behind USA/China. It probably will be neither military nor economically overly relevant in 10 years. Through comparing a war economy with peace economies by most normal usable standards (e.g. GDP) isn't very meaningful. Yes it has nukes, no one will invade it (in a traditional large scale sense out side of some border conflict). But it's economy looks like the kind of war economy which leads to a complete economical collapse once the war ends (i.e. burning core substance) end while it's military could be very experienced now, by treating soldiers as highly disposable its unclear how much that actually is true.
Now look at the US, it has lost the majority of soft power thanks to incompetence (and it was maybe the nation with the most effective soft power). It has alienated most of it's allies, especially it's closest allies. Both from a military and economical POV. It's highly dependent on China, and tries to change that have shown very mid to bad outcomes. On the other hand China is increasingly less dependent on it (and the EU) and increasingly less attackable by sea blockades and other non-hot war counter measures the US had. It's behind on automated production. Countries are increasingly less willing to tolerate US bases on their ground which are essential for it being able to project power. The economy is increasingly dependent on a few pillars, which are strong but can crack anyway. The might claim AI leadership, but practically it looks like the price they payed to get there is one which not only will not pay of but can not pay off, it's just way to high. War is also increasingly going back to ways where even if you have superiority the cost of waging it is still severely high, in such a situation you can't force leadership by military force, if you try it likely will end similar to Germany in WW1. Lastly the internal instability Trump has brought by dismantling checks and balances
and arbitrary gutting of programs which turned out pretty essential for stability is bad enough to argue things like a putsch series or civil war being _realistic possibilities_ (not guaranteed at all, but possible where it wasn't realistically possible before).
If you put everything together the US dropping temporary out of the top 10 of overall most powerful countries is, not very likely but, very much possible.
It does have absurd geographical advantages, and nukes to make sure it keeps them basically for ever (as long as it doesn't splinter which isn't very likely tbh.). So the drop would be most likely be temporary at most.
Still it is possible, it's the price to pay for first squandering all trust/goodwill gained from WW2 over a few decades of greedy, egoistic, egocentric, ethical catastrophic politics. And then going complete "unpredictable, untrustable, instabile, high risk, publicly considering to start war with NATO or at least half of the EU (JEF+some others)" in recent years.
lol… you don’t know anything about the Chinese government if you think they aren’t already preparing for this. And the difference between them and us is that when they prepare for something, they actually prepare for it with real state capacity and planning. You know they are building armies of industrial and humanoid robots for exactly this reason?
Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.
>Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.
Note I'm just linking charts and figures, not their editorials. It's ironic that you accuse "economist hates China with a passion", but the best refutation you can come up with is some handwaving about future robot armies. How do we know you're not just hating US (or loving China) with a passion?
There's so many ways to slice the data, I'm not sure there's an apples-to-apples comparison between US and China. However, it's fair to say both economies face demographic headwinds.
If Canada was a US state it would rank around 4th or 5th in terms of economic size and power. There's a lot of doomerism, but I seriously doubt the US is going to lose its top 4 or 5 economies in the next 50 years.
If you want to go really doomer, then I think it's actually more likely that Canada would become a US state instead of the US economy shrinking to the size of Canada.
Exactly, this is all a symptom of underinvestment in grid capacity, and datacenter companies having to cobble together whatever electricity source they could get their hands on at the last minute.
It's a complete failure of the state in having any kind of foresight.
China, in comparison, has around 2X excess electric production capacity in their grid. That's what made mining Bitcoin, and now ultra-cheap LLM inference, economically viable.
The environment's already lost. We've passed the 1.5ºC deviation mark from the pre-industrial global average, and we're on track to hit 3ºC in a few more decades.
The excess deaths and human misery (both that which is increasingly clearly ongoing, and we have to look forward to) are going to be tragic.
Modern data centers can be designed with near-zero direct water consumption. It isn’t fundamentally necessary to consume huge amounts of water to cool computers. What’s the story with those new data centers? Do they actually choose to do evaporative cooling that people are complaining about or people are complaining about problem that doesn’t exist?
It doesn’t matter what the actual reality is. People think that data centers waste water, and they don’t like that.
The beef from a single hamburger uses far more water than a year of ChatGPT usage. Few try to reduce consumption in favor of more efficient foods by comparison. It’s about perception.
How? In most locations for much of the year you need to reject heat either by evaporating water or using electricity (more water) to run a refrigeration cycle.
It banned foreign (edit) made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]
> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.
The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]
You can still think both policies are bad. But those are different claims.
That’s true. China dominates globally but I found that the US installed European and Japanese models. There is a big supply chain concern and set of reviews happening all across the entire government sector. Energy is a national security concern. [1]
Your other comment got downvoted to death (not by me) so I can't reply to it, so I'm replying here. Sorry the downvoting happened; your comment wasn't incorrect. You're right that inverters with zero connectivity whatsoever are not banned; my comment was overly broad. That said...
The ban covers any inverter with any wireless communication whatsoever. Bluetooth is specifically called out, despite necessarily being local-only and not enabling an internet connection.
I suppose you could make the argument that with Bluetooth, the app that communicates with it has internet access and thus it's the same thing. However:
The ban does not cover a power inverter with no integrated comms, but has a serial port into which is plugged a "sold separately" wifi dongle. Neither does the ban cover an inverter with an ethernet port. It covers solely wireless communication.
> Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.
Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).
That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
AC power needs it's sine wave aligned or it's very bad. If a huge chunk of inverters all start dumping power onto the grid that isn't synced, things break.
The sense of urgency is strange and feels extremely forced. There’s no way this is all so important that all other concerns automatically go out the window so projects can complete construction yesterday.
It really wouldn’t hurt if the developers involved tried even a little bit to be good neighbors and to select sites where they’re not going to be a nuisance and net negative to adjacent communities at minimum.
The blatantly extractive, externalizing mindset of this all reminds me of the attitude that mining companies have taken towards Appalachian states for over a century at this point.
Given local grassroots opposition, the data centers are starting to move into less regulated countries where I would gather building them raises the local standard of living, but presents the new challenge of finding people qualified to run them.
This is just pure histrionics, you have no understanding whatsoever of the scale of data center water consumption, electricity consumption, new capacity coming online, etc.
The question is does DC building bring added costs to local communities. My small town has a backlog of home builders waiting for permits because of constrained municipal water capacity. We are still paying off the bonds for the last capacity we added. Golf courses/etc are already factored into current costs. Additional new use brings significant cost (bonds to build new capacity), funded by increasing expenses on the entire community, not funded by those who financially benefit from the new build outs.
The issue isn't comparative usage to existing hookups, it's new cost burden on the local community where a data center is built. Which is why DC propogandists switched to the golf course measurement, it confuses the original concern, the cost to the community of new DC hookups to municipal water or the very limited amount (of expensive to the community) available hookups that were intended/funded by the community for other purposes.
All US data center water usage is less than the total water used for golf courses or the total water used to grow alfalfa. Less water used in evaporative cooling means more electricity is used for cooling given that the efficiency almost doubles if you add evaporative cooling to a chilled water loop.
It’s bad to pump non-renewable fossil aquifer water in Arizona for evaporative cooling, but using cooling towers in an area that gets 30” or more of precipitation per year is probably not going to hurt anything.
Not much. 0.04% of US water production. For context, that's about 3% of the water consumption of our golf courses, and less than 1% of what we use to water our lawns.
> Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy.
Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)
As a comparison, one acre of alfalfa growing year round in California uses about 5*325000=1,625,000 gallons of water a year for four harvests, 4400 gallons of water per day per acre.
There’s around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California for a total water usage of 1,625,000*1,000,000=1.625×10¹² gallons (or 5 million acre-feet) per year.
365 million gallons of water per year for one data center is 1000 acre feet of water. California’s alfalfa crop uses as much water as 5,000 of these data centers.
1000 acre feet is approximately 40 hectare meters. Or, you know, about 1.2 billion liters.
Over on this side of the ocean, we’ve got freshwater lakes larger than entire European countries. There’s a lake over here, it has an island on it. That island has a lake, which has an island in it. And there’s a lake on that island.
We need units of measurement that represent large things. If you don’t, that’s ok.
Do Alfalfa growers traditionally use limited (and funded at large expense by the local community) municipal water hookups to grow their crops? Are alfalfa growers asking for new water hookup permits to access these resources?
Because DCs are, and that is the concern local communities have. Not random comparative statistics whose purpose seems to be to take valid local community concerns and pretend they're just a joke. How much do alfa growers in California add to my water bill? How much will new municipal water hookups by new data centers impact my water bill? One is a valid concern. One is just a BS attempt to discredit the valid concern. Because that is how this shady industry operates. On BS. On manipulation. And they wonder why they are more and more disliked.
It is a sort of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
The reason these DC use so much water is because it uses less electricity to evaporatively cool than it takes to cool with a heat pump.
You are trading water scarcity for energy scarcity.
In my personal opinion, the right tradeoff is more electricity. Also IMO, these DCs should be required to build out solar + battery + wind offset plants which supply their energy either directly or indirectly by selling to the grid operator at a discounted rate. If you want 40MW of power, you need to deploy 40MW of solar (not peak, but yearly average output) and a 400MWh battery plus all the grid hookups required.
The end result for residence should be lower energy bills, not higher bills.
> Do Alfalfa growers traditionally use limited (and funded at large expense by the local community) municipal water hookups to grow their crops? Are alfalfa growers asking for new water hookup permits to access these resources?
No, you already know they use flood irrigation.
Why is a municipal water system allowing a data center connection that will strain their distribution network? They’re well within their rights to say no, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t holding a gun to their heads.
> Why is a municipal water system allowing a data center connection that will strain their distribution network? They’re well within their rights to say no, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t holding a gun to their heads.
Deep pockets have a way of bypassing practical concerns. [1]
Zuckerberg likely isn't holding a gun to their heads, instead it's more likely he's putting wads of cash in their pockets.
So even when xAI (which is now Tesla? Or SpaceX maybe?) was "operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen the air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country"[0] this didn't place them above this new Amazon not-even-built-yet data center? Are they competing who can destroy the earth the fastest or what's going on?
It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
> It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Who gives a shit who started it? The ones who continue engaging in it, should clearly be punished as they're working against humanity's best interest of keeping this planet survivable.
If you're one of the largest companies in the world, constantly brag about how environmental friendly you are and how much you care about "sustainability" or what the trendy word is today, and you end up building a data center that sets a record in pollution (either directly or indirectly), you're doing something massively fucked up and are misaligned with the rest of the people on this planet.
> Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
I guess this is what late-stage capitalism gives you ultimately, companies who feel like it's fine doing whatever because competitors are also doing whatever. No one I know have been cheering for anything like that, I suggest if you have people cheering about stuff like that near you, get far away.
So where is the police? They're running turbines they haven't been granted permits to run, if Average Joe did so the police would show up and literally grab the hardware from him, one way or another, or disable it at least. What the fuck are they waiting for?
One would think if there is even a suspicion (even if it hasn't been ruled in court yet) about large-scale harmful toxic emissions, the police and relevant authorities would at least quickly do some samples or what not, to figure out if they need to put an immediate stop to it until the courts ruled either way.
But seemingly it's still ongoing and no harm no foul?
Do you know the difference between civil law and criminal law? The police don’t care if they’re not violating a criminal statute. If you want to test how it works, build a brand new house in a city without pulling any permits.
I do indeed. Do you know that severe violations of civil law sometimes amount of up to criminal law, especially if there is evidence of criminal intent or "knowing" violations of the law but proceeding anyway?
This is the case for lots of things. Negligence can turn into "reckless disregard for human life", breach of contract could amount to fraud, and many other cases.
Indeed, but they do amount to "suspicion" and are worth investigating instead of saying "Lets wait years until the courts decided if it is or isn't actually polluting" and not shutting it down until they've clearly demonstrated it being safe or not.
All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.
It is the paperclip AI scenario:
The AI is cheating humans to produce only one thing - but in reality today, its not paperclibs, but datacenters as "the most important product": So the scenario still holds :-D
It's possible to have more than one existential risk at a time. We even have a third, since nuclear war doesn't seem completely impossible these days. We probably shouldn't ignore any of them.
An all-out global nuclear war (all nuclear nations landing 10% of their warheads in populated areas) would be a disruption comparable to COVID at best.
The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.
400,000 people in Europe are displaced. Pretending that this is a future issue is tremendously disingenuous. Things don't need to be civilisation-ending to cause a degree of harm that is worth focusing on.
On this map I can't see _any_ nuclear under construction in the US yet the rest of the world seems to be building many.
When a man has a hammer everything is a gas turbine. GEV stock has treated me well but I'd much rather nuclear was winning.
It's a catch22 problem because nuclear is much slower to build than a data center so there is no demand from the data centers. And the nuclear plant doesn't know the demand will be there in 5 years once with gas soaking up demand. So the build it and they will come strategy is risky. Building infrastructure is like a muscle that gets stronger with repetitions. The cost will only come down once some are built but nobody wants to build at the current high prices. Govt help is needed to kick start it.
DOE is investing heavily in SMRs right now. There's 4 which have reached criticality so far. Chris Wright the DOE head is a o&g political appointee hack, but the career employees at DOE are working on pushing clean energy forward.
Note that this is about absolute pollution, not relative to power output. Pollution is high, because power output is high. Relatively, for what it's worth, it's just a fairly normal gas plant.
So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.
Aren't coal power plants waaaay more polluting than natural gas? Not just in terms of C02, but also really nasty stuff like particulates, sulphur, and metals?
It's very trendy right now to get mad at datacenters, but I'd much rather energy come from natural gas than from an existing coal power plant. (Obviously, renewables would be better than either.)
The nasty stuff, yes. Regarding greenhouse gases, natural gas has turned out to be about as bad as coal once you account for methane leaks, and the industry has strenuously resisted any decent mitigation for that.
Ok. A serious question.
I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Then why are they using gas turbines? Is it because they can generate more power with a smaller real estate footprint?
Texas specifically has heavily politicized and demonized wind power, in spite of having massive successes with it prior to 2016 and being a leading producer of it. Solar isn't as bad, but is still seen as "leftist." The political landscape in TX is vastly more friendly to natural gas.
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.
They are using gas because it's more reliable during peak usage. Wind generation in Texas isn't optimal throughout the entire state and conditions aren't optimal all the time. They still use wind, but from a pure numbers perspective, gas infra already exists, the gas is there, and gas is more reliable, so wind isn't always the cheapest form of energy. There are also diminishing returns on just adding more wind turbines.
Gas is also incredibly cheap in Texas. Way, way cheaper than you would think. In some parts, it's negative price - you will be paid to use it. We have entirely too much gas, which is actually a problem because ideally we want to discourage its use.
So yes, wind and solar are cheap. Depending on where in Texas you are, gas is cheaper.
Texas is not at all against renewables. Maybe, just maybe, whatever axes the people building data centers are optimizing on rule out solar/wind over factors other than "renewables are for leftists, so fuck that we're gonna burn gas even if it's more expensive."
Did you miss the 1st utility part? It can be quite hard for nonresidential users to retrofit for solar. Not impossible but sometimes not an easy solve.
Avoid it to the tune of being in the top third (for now, they're projected to keep growing), behind only blue states that are known for aggressive rollout and/or climates that are overall more favorable (i.e., Texas gets its fair share of sun but not quite like CA and NV, for example)? Is that your idea of avoiding it because politicians want to own the libs?
I often wonder why conservatives have such a problem with renewable energy.
I can certainly believe that oil and gas pay better bribes, and that this incentivises a certain kind of politician who seem to be over-represented among conservatives in the US. But that doesn't explain the widespread dislike among the conservative end of the general population. Is it just groupthink or Overton Window -nudging using social media? Or is there something more psychological going on? Some kind of disgust reaction?
One would think that self-proclaimed "conservatives" would like to conserve the natural world... Long gone are the days of Teddy Roosevelt that's for sure.
Under current administration, I'm not even sure its possible to build out green energy for this sort of thing at scale - this article[1] was on the front page just yesterday
Because the US has some policies that make those currently more expensive than they should be while. A combination of tariffs, removal of incentives for local producers, etc. has caused prices to be higher than they could be. All of this is because of fossil fuel lobby funded campaigns for exactly this to happen.
The flip side of course is that gas turbines are in short supply and manufacturers are in no hurry to build out production capacity for what is effectively obsolete technology with a very uncertain future. A lot of the projects being announced may never get delivered for the simple reason that there are long waiting lists for these things.
And there is the notion that related investments might end up under water when the few plants that do get built start struggling economically in ten years or so. These are not very attractive long term investments. The short term interest in securing any capacity at all is overriding this. Of the well over a hundred GW of data centers planned until 2035, probably only less than a 30-40% will actually get built; if not less. Michael Liebreich is predicting only about 35GW will be realized. His estimate is that there simply is no more production capacity that can be committed than that.
It will be interesting to see if this Amazon plant actually gets built. For now Amazon can afford to gamble on this and just write it off if it doesn't work out.
If policy changes in a few years, I expect a lot of these projects to get unceremoniously cancelled when it turns out that they are a combination of under water financially and behind on schedule because of component shortages anyway. Also, it only takes a few failed projects for everyone to get cold feet. Premature closures of new gas plants could happen if renewables get cheap enough. Those are already happening in some places.
For a DC it's probably reliability. You need wind to be spread over a large area to even out random changes in power availability. And, obviously, solar power works during the day.
Renewables require storage because they are bursty - sun goes down, wind stops blowing. This is more expensive than just burning as much nat gas as you need.
Presumably, the data center usage could also be bursty, right?
More people will be using AI during the (work)day, than at midnight. Then they could do half solar, half gas.
Also "more expensive" when it comes to solar isn't meaningful until you also consider timeframe. Solar panels pay themselves off in a few years, and after that they basically generate "free" electricity. Gas never becomes cheaper or free, every year it will cost money.
AWS is heavily used worldwide, not just in the US. The same goes for the big AI companies.
Timeframe is accounted for if you look at levelized cost per kWh. The levelized cost of natural gas is 5 to 11 cents/kWh. In the sunniest spots, the levelized cost of solar with enough battery storage to provide 24/7 power is about the same, if you want >90% reliability. The usual four hours of storage is only enough to account for the "duck curve" during the day.
The cost of energy varies widely based on regional factors, geography, existing energy portfolio makeup, etc. Additionally cost is not just the unit price but the price overtime to support a specific SLA.
Texas has very cheap gas; it’s also good for solar. They are very competitive price wise, so it’s kinda depressing they are using gas. But it’s probably a slight price edge plus better reliability.
Zero data on Greenhouse gas CO2-equivalent per kWh. A combined-cycle gas power plant is going to have lower impact per kWh than the 200+ coal plants in the US.
really time for these companies to have to switch to options like Nuclear SMR from providers like Rolls Royce who already have the megawatt solutions ready in the market, which don't release giant volumes of CO2 which we cannot afford.
Divest all your stocks from all this AI data-center race bullshit, invest into renewable projects. Worst case, the orange buffoon will bail you out with taxpayer money to prevent the US grid from being too clean or something. Only money talks in the US.
A lot of new data centres have been announced in Alberta, Canada. Which is a weird location given that Alberta has a derelict power grid that can barely serve the current load, and runs almost entirely on fossil fuels.
Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.
They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...
We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.
Much more the land of oil and gas. Alberta no longer burns coal for electricity.
The dominant political party frames natural gas as "clean", because it isn't a dirty as coal; and Alberta natural gas in particular as "ethical", because not Russia or Saudi.
I think I get your point; that the inverse of corrupt (I call it fake) capitalism is not necessarily communism, or something reactive. It might just be a system that works better, even if we have not named it yet...
Downvote me all you want. China is doing something right. Nuclear, renewables, whatever the mix, they're not parking gas turbines next to a data center and calling it a power strategy. That US tech companies reached for that first tells you everything. Speed over consequences, every time. And shut up about that China still fires a lot of coal. They are phasing it out... the right way.
You know, we don't actually have to do this. The people could block the gates and prevent the delivery of the turbines. The local fire department could fail their inspection and prevent the gas from being turned on. The UPS could "mysteriously" go up in smoke during it's commissioning.
None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.
All this at the very low cost of: your job.
You can't have an unbreachable blockade 24/7 in front of there, very soon they'd send police to disperse. Fire dept has to justify the failing, if everything up to code and the inspector make it fail it will delay for at most a week and the guy will lose his credibility. The guys delivering and installing the UPS are just trying to make a living too, destroying the thing will get them fired while only delaying a little the time getting another delivered. You are replaceable.
Why is HN so absolutely terrible at understanding the scale of pollution, water consumption, etc? It is quite minuscule in real terms, but everyone here is losing their mind. Ridiculous.
Bitcoin received a lot of backslash due to its power usage and ecological footprint. It's obvious that HN users don't have the same criticisms towards AI data centers. Maybe someone with a short position will coordinate that communication soon..
It’s worth noting that the ideological drive to create more energy-neutral crypto schemes resulted in trillions of dollars in fraud and no value created. Same as it always is with climate extremism. Always a cash grab.
What is climate extremism? Because it doesn't seem like the world is actually doing much to combat climate change as we see more fires and more extreme weather while still clinging to the old fossil fuel economy as long as possible.
Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.
Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.
What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
Look to Australia if you want to see how these energy policies work out in the long run.
Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy.
They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled grid. All the economics pointing to renewables being the way forward were proven correct.
Everyone gets their back scratched. If you’re a consumer and you invested, you have a massively discounted personal power station that generates you money. If you operate the grid, your transmission costs and peak transmission costs went down. General consumer prices went down because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs. Everyone in won.
Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story. Don’t let rhetoric become your reality.
It's absurd how the propaganda against green energy on certain political spectrums essentially turned into, "It's all money/cash grab for green energy companies!"
As if the established industry has no incentive in the opposite direction? Everyone is going to act in their best interests in this system, that's how it's designed, the whole point of government is to mediate the system in the best interests of the whole.
> Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story.
If only.
Chevron’s Gorgon project will be ongoing for decades and making money hand over fist flogging LNG out of Australia to overseas customers.
It'll be a massive source of previously sequestered CO2 and claimed to be "the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet* .. with the minor catch of (re-) stashing away a very very tiny portion of the CO2 released. Something, something, not let it out in the first place?
Still, could be worse, at least they're not planning on fracking the Kimberley.
Oh, wait: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9IkUUgaww
> General consumer prices went down
What now?
Where in Australia have consumer prices gone down?
> because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs
I don’t understand what you’re trying to day here.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-26/power-prices-fall-in-...
> Power prices to fall for most customers, with bigger drops for businesses
> What is driving [lower prices] is a reduction in the cost of producing electricity. We've seen a lot more batteries and solar systems come into the electricity market in the last 12 months. They've been making the market much less volatile," Ms Savage said.
> "We've not needed as much gas and hydro generation in the evening peaks, and that's what's really cut that cost of wholesale generation."
The overall American economy is going to pay the price in the long term. And current foreign policy is reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner, which will make things even worse.
Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
I feel it is hard to grasp for an American how much perception of US shifted in eu. This is just anedoctal of course, but a famous Italian singer famous for having written a song about American and sexual liberation decades ago, wrote an updated version. The former is "America", the latter is "America INC." You can guess which one depicts America in a bad light.
I wouldn't have expected a famous singer to make such a song, given that America was always portrayed in italian pop music with a positive image, and negative views were relegated to mostly political groups or singers with political themes
Why do you think Americans don't grasp it? There are really two groups here:
- MAGA who doesn't care what Europe thinks - not-MAGA who are just as shocked and disappointed as everyone else on the planet
Simply put, I think Americans don't grasp it because even for us Europeans it is sometimes surprising how repentine and fast the shift has been in the regular Joe's brain - I'm not saying that Americans are stupid bla bla thing -, I'm saying that it is normal not be as up to date with some phenomena as people living where that phenomena happens.
Also, at least the Italian government is still dancing the tip tap regarding a position on America, not taking any definitive stance or doing anything significantly different than before, which is a big rift wrt what people want. Only exception for defense expenses
I find Europe's obsession with America fatally pathological. If I were a European with a family (so a stake on the future) my worries would be like:
1. Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
2. What's it going to be like when Europe is so squeezed by China that the likes of Volkswagen are going out of business (happening now.)
I would find these two things literally existential. But I think these are hard questions to tackle or even ponder it's easier to shit on America instead as a feel-good distraction.
The US has been the foundation of European security since the beginning of NATO. Now Europe has good reason to think that American security guarantees are no longer reliable, and the US president keeps threatening to invade a European country, while Russia fights a war of aggression nearby. If I were European then I guess I'd find this rather more worrying than brown people moving in, or the struggles of car companies.
> If I were European then I guess I'd find this rather more worrying than brown people moving in
What does "brown people" mean? It seems like such a superficially racist characterization.
In Europe it means Muslims and in North America is means South American. In China it means Indians.
I assumed that was what the commenter above was talking about, but perhaps I'm wrong. From the little I know about it, most of the immigrants that right-wing Europeans complain about are from places to the south.
In case my understatement made things unclear, it's not the sort of thing I worry about at all.
> most of the immigrants.... are from places to the south.
and hence "brown"? What does that terminology even mean?
Are you not aware of the protective effects of melanin from higher levels of UV?
> Are you not aware of the protective effects of melanin from higher levels of UV?
You're missing the point.
You asked what I meant and I told you.
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
Are you sure they are not more concerned about 'Will my kids be able to get a good job, own a house and generally be at least as prosperous as me, if not more?'
But they won't get good jobs or own a house because they will be second class citizens. Your generation made poor choices and they will suffer.
You know what the best way is to ensure that your children don't become second-class citizens because they're an ethnic minority?
Treat the ethnic minorities well today.
Lay the foundation for an inclusive, multicultural society now, rather than falling for the same old bullshit about immigrants stealing yer jerbs and using that as an excuse for rampant racism that will reverberate down the line.
That's item 2.
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?
> > Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
> What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?
European countries take great care in maintaining and strengthening their traditions and cultural heritage. That would be at risk. Now, whether or not that actually matters or not is debatable, but Europeans DO seem to care to keep their cultures and traditions alive.
This fear of "the others" that don't look like us or dare to have their own culture coming and "stealing" your cake has been used as a cheap distraction tactic for ages. It backfired for Germany, it's gonna backfire for the US.
I really like this metaphor:
A politician, a voter, and an immigrant are at a BBQ. There's 100 sausages on the grill. The politician goes up, takes 99 sausages, turns to the voter and says "quick, that immigrant is gonna steal your sausage".
It's truly frustrating how effective it is to distract the general population by just inciting fear like that.
I lived all over the place after growing up in the Catholic German country side. I think the places most afraid from cultural dilution are the ones that needed it the most.
It's also so funny how folks in the US keep forgetting that they literally used to be immigrants of all sorts of origins and what made them so successful is leveraging the diverse perspectives. Most of this whole AI boom is based on work from people that came to the US from less privileged places all working together for something greater than them.
Totally agree.
What do you think about all the money and energy that European countries spend on propping up their traditions and cultural heritage VS just letting it evolve "naturally" as demographics shift?
What are all these presently dominant cultures that are so fragile that the mere presence of others represents an existential threat? Sounds like an excuse for xenophobia more than a sincere concern.
you can't fault people for being confused. just because some people in the US have latched on 'cultural integrity' as their new favorite racist dogwhistle doesn't mean that it makes sense at all to anyone else.
its really funny. some people are fighting a fictional war that the 'other side' isn't really engaged in, and they're losing.
the other funny thing is that if you asked someone what the largest threat to their cultural identity is, a lot of them wouldn't answer immigrants - they would be more concerned about the cancerous US style anodyne consumer culture and media as being the most corrosive
I think there are very few countries that can claim to have a good setup for an ethnic minority. Singapore, US, Israel, western Europe. Most of the world - being an ethnic minority sucks. As western Europe changes the ethnic western Europeans may not enjoy their treatment.
I would rather have my entire body waxed that be an ethnic minority for a month in the countries you listed (minus Singapore)
What are the counties not on my list where it's better to be an ethnic minority?
canada and norway for sure but you probably don’t want to be ethnic minority anywhere unfortunately
What's an example of an ethnic minority that's better off in Canada vs US
He knows how white Americans treat minorities
Only if you're some kind of lunatic, propaganda-believing racist.
When facts can't be dismissed or debated we move to labelling and insults. We on the last line of defense. Don't forgot to throw in Nazis its makes your point so much stronger.
When were European countries set up as ethnostates for the OP to be even slightly in the realm of facts?
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
It occurs to me that an effective solution to that problem might be to… Treat minorities well? You know, like people equal to you? Societies are made of the people in them; if minorities are treated positively, then you don’t have to fear being in one. Teach your kids to be nice.
I live in Europe, and I have a family.
If you are not a moronic racist, #1 is a non-issue.
As for #2, Volkswagen is far from going out of business. In any case, trade with China can be adjusted with adequate policy, EU as a trade block can handle it just fine.
As an European, I see the US as an actual existential threat to Europe. China is just a trade partner with some clashing trade interests.
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation
I didn’t expect having to read great replacement bullshit on Hacker News. JFC do some napkin math, it’s utter nonsense.
These people never say "great replacement theory", because they know if they do then that firmly puts them in the "flat earther" aisle. So, we need to call it out when we see it. This is just not legitimate ideology, it's a form of white supremacy.
Because its not a theory but a policy at least in Canada and much of western Europe. Flat earther is someone who believes something that has been proven wrong so the flat earthier in this debate is the group who doesn't believe the facts which would be the group you are in.
I was going to argue but seemingly the math does work out
It's pervasive. Especially when it is people from the US commenting on the EU.
Its because it happened in Canada and currently happening in the US. The warnings are real.
It didn't happen in Canada, unless you mean the part where we rounded up all the natives and put them on reserves. I'm a white Canadian born and raised in Canada and I am far from being a minority no matter where I go, from the prairies to the GTA. Conservatives keep talking about this like it's a thing, but they do so from their majority white communities. The only places you see large numbers of immigrants is in low paying service jobs and you can thank the exploitive hiring practices of major companies like Tim Hortons - the people there are slaves living under the constant threat of deportation if they disappoint their employer/owner.
It's also worth noting that those white people concerned about becoming ethnic minorities are themselves immigrants. British and French colonists; German, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Irish; Hutterite and Mennonite - all immigrants, many within just the last few generations. For as long as Canada has been a country, it has been made up of many groups of different ethnicities, all immigrants. "White" isn't an ethnicity.
You are a minority in Toronto if you are white and less than 20% if you are British. Edmonton is 53% white and going down fast. Vancouver is down to 45%. GTA 43% white.
If you are in tech or government or banking or any large corp you are a minority.
Things have changed.
Good answer.
Too bad the people that should get the message are barely literate.
It's not some chaps from Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Africa that threaten me. My neighbor is Nigerian, dude is chill. Loves football, takes his children to the local playground, etc.
What threatens me is imbeciles that believe in great replacement and 14 words about future for white children. Keep your racism across the pond and try not to breed with siblings.
Just to clarify, you don't believe that the white population will be replaced in your country or you welcome it?
I both don't believe that the white population is being replaced, and even if it was, I don't care. I am not a racist, my family tree does not resemble a circle.
Issues of migration and fertility rate are related to structural incentives and constraints, level of urbanization, economic development, etc.
I want my country to prosper. It won't prosper by closing itself off to migration. I hope it attracts more researches and highly educated people from around the world, especially now that the US is shunning them.
"I don't believe the white population is being replaced"
It is and its hard to argue population data and policy fact that experts agree on.
"I am not a racist". Who told you that it's racist being concerned your population is being I want my country to prosper? Is it racist that China or India doesn't lets everyone from Africa or South American migrate and become Chinese or Indian? If you don't think they are racist for their choices why would you label your people that way?
"I want my country to prosper" I don't think you understand it won't be your country anymore it will be some other group with their values. This happened to native North Americans. The natives in Europe are white.
> The natives in Europe are white.
You are bundling a lot of ethnicities, many of those who historically had major grievances amongst themselves, in race bullshit very specific to the US.
A "white" label is very meaningless this side of the pond. I have little patience for this shit, the US truly is a sick place if your rhetoric is what it produces.
It’s MAGA ideology and commenters mentioning it are just revealing their red hats. Any Europeans regurgitating that _foreign_ ideology are pathetic.
That hat lives rent free in so many people’s minds. The hat says “Make America Great Again”, btw. A good hat!
> It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?
That's just uncritical thinking.
The United States is the single largest bilateral provider of direct military equipment, intelligence, and defense funding to Ukraine (a European country) against Russia.
> Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?
I don’t think the comment above you is suggesting that is a possibility, but rather saying “things are so bad that the only imaginable way to get worse would be <outlandish unimaginable scenario>”. In other words, it seems to be hyperbole.
Perhaps, though my reading between the lines is that they think trust is so low because the US won't help defend Europe and might invade Europe, even though, despite rhetoric, all actions point to the opposite happening.
It is, as the USA has a large population. We can be more nuanced.
By absolute dollars, single country: US > EU institutions > Germany > UK
By absolute dollars, bloc vs. bloc: EU/Europe combined (~$237bn+) now exceeds the US (~$130bn), especially after 2025
By per-capita/GDP burden: tiny front-line states (Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway) far outstrip both the US and the larger Western European economies — the US actually ranks closer to the bottom of the pack on a relative-effort basis, behind Germany, the UK, and virtually all Nordic/Baltic states
Between February 2022 and January 2025, average expenditure per European resident stood at $394; by April 2026 that figure had risen to $618, driven by the total spending by European NATO countries on Ukraine exceeding $237 billion, including $96 billion contributed just since January 2025.
Average European (across NATO's European members) $618 per person (2022-2026)
United States (my estimate: ~$130bn total ÷ ~340m population)≈ $384 per person
There is a lot of that with the population but I don't see it at the leadership level yet. The top politicians are all still desperate to go back to the good old days of euro-atlanticism (and all the cushy positions it gets their friends & family), there's also the problem of all of their capital happily sitting and growing in fortune 500 companies.
That is an indisputably rough list, and I'm sorry that's your conclusion.
It's tough being here and feeling powerless to stop it. Beyond voting, campaign donations, judicious choice of employment, etc.
Anyhow, you're welcome back should you change your mind. In my book, anyway.
> feeling powerless to stop it
You guys are the meekest sheep to ever been led astray by a howling, undisguised wolf.
What more does this regime have to do to warrant massive, historic, disruptive, non-peaceful protests in the USA?
Have you seen protests in France? Bringing the country to a halt is the least you have to do in order for us to ever have faith in the USA again.
Until then, nothing any US citizen can say online will do anything to restore trust. If you're not rioting, you're complicit. It's as simple as that.
I admit I haven't followed the French protests as closely as I should have. Do they shoot protestors in the face with teargas canisters there too? Maybe they do. Do those protestors face the real possibility of medical bankruptcy if they need extensive care? Does France enforce laws that protect striking workers?
Where do you live? Does everyone have an AR-15 in their closet? You do not seem to grasp the reality of our situation.
Well yeah, it's basically locked in now that in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.
>in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.
What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China?
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...
You don’t need a numerical advantage to dominate if you have a technological / organizational advantage. The British empire was outnumbered 10 to 1 and still managed to control a large portion of the world for a while.
US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.
>US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.
"Rest of the world"? Europe isn't even a player in the AI race. China might be better placed, but they also lag the US in terms of model development and capital deployed. They've been catching up, but that's not the same as "[American will] be in a similar place to Canada at best". That would require a lot of things to go right for China and/or a lot of things to go wrong for the US.
> What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China?
Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility.
More appropriate to point out their (our) lack of domestic chip production and outsourcing of critical technologies.
>Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility.
The first two charts are for GDP, which correlates pretty well with geopolitical power. Moreover if we're going by population, wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?
GDP is subtle broken in many ways
A "in general" correlates with geopolitical power doesn't necessary mean you can point at a specific case look at their GDP and come to a good conclusion. Especially not if it's as much of a special case as China.
> wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?
which might actually happen. If the US falls further from grace and the situations stays like that for a few decades, or the US and another huge power (e.g. China) fall into some costly conflict then India or a union of African countries have a serious chance to become a world super power.
---
=> But more relevantly this discussion is going into red hering argument direction:
- No one argued that you should go _only_ by population, the argument is, that if a country with a gigantic population shrinks hugely they still have enough people left to wage large scale wars.
- Similar no one (should) argue that GDP is by itself meaningful for such an assessment, it's one imperfect not supper reliable statistical point. Especially given how things move wrt. dark factories (i.e. fully automated => no light one as no human there), AI and similar. Yes, if GDP is supper low or high that says a lot, but a lot is not everything and a average GDP for decade long trends in a word looking to face a major time of change means not much in any direction.
- Similar we are speaking about decade long developments, current military strength ist also just another non fully reliable indicator. E.g. Germany post WW1 had close to actual 0/no military strength, and then there was WW2 just a few years later...
So going by one statistic (GDP) is bad, but going by another (population) gets a pass because... China's "special"? I'm sorry, but that just sounds like a special pleading. I don't like this because it just turns arguments into a fact-free zone where objective facts don't matter and the only thing that does is handwavy vibes from either side. Is China going to be the dominant superpower? The supporters can handwave endlessly about robot armies and the superiority of an authoritarian political system. The detractors can handwave endlessly about the demographic crisis and the fragility of an authoritarian political system.
> wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?
Conventionally, a continent isn't a superpower. A country is.
> What's going to replace it?
I'm not sure if I'm mis-reading your comment, but:
The idea that you "need a single extremely powerful country to replace it or the US will stay in its position" just doesn't add up. I'm not fully sure if that is what you meant but I have seen that argument a few times.
_There doesn't need to be a replacement._
For most of the worlds history there wasn't a single leading world supper power, just regional super powers, or supper powers in specific sectors.
And if we speak about who could become a supper power _after the US stops being one and there isn't one for some decades_. Then there are a bunch of candidates.
E.g. China has a population collapse issues, but due to it's cut throat ruthless government and total population number and lead in factory automation might be from all countries with similar problems by margin the most likely to overcome it without power collapse.
E.g. the EU might have many issues (as it's members has many issues) but the general concept has proven hugely successful. And what people forget is EU is the cherry on top of a huge stack of treaties which can be extended to 3rd parties independent of full EU membership. Like e.g. Canada, which doesn't plan to become an EU member, but might join some of this treaties as result of the non stop hostility from the US. Same for military treaties between NATO members which are independent of NATO like e.g. JEF, which would likely be open for letting Canada join. Anyway way to many words. But the end result may be a world supper power which is not one entity but a complex lossy coupled network of countries.
Then there have been some other cross country unions and countries, which want to gain super power relevance but have so far been too irrelevant due to a combination of corruption, bad luck and sabotage by existing powers etc. But if we speak about going for a few decades without any leading super power and maybe prime canidates harming each other (e.g. a US <-> Chineese war) then they do actually have a chance.
>The idea that you "need a single extremely powerful country to replace it or the US will stay in its position" just doesn't add up. I'm not fully sure if that is what you meant but I have seen that argument a few times.
The OP goes further than merely claiming that US will lose its spot as the top power. It claims it won't be a world power at all:
>in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best
For reference, Canada ranks #11 in GDP, below Russia and even Brazil. On military spending it ranks #16, below Poland and Spain. It doesn't have nukes. To suggest US will ever come close to that in 50 years is laughable.
> claims it won't be a world power at all:
which is very much possible
50 years once just a blink in human history is today enough to have 2 major industrial revolutions
nukes are not an argument for anything but main land defense from invasions
Look Russia, it was considered on of the most powerful countries military wise and cleanly in the top 10 economically. Many treated it as a 3rd place behind USA/China. It probably will be neither military nor economically overly relevant in 10 years. Through comparing a war economy with peace economies by most normal usable standards (e.g. GDP) isn't very meaningful. Yes it has nukes, no one will invade it (in a traditional large scale sense out side of some border conflict). But it's economy looks like the kind of war economy which leads to a complete economical collapse once the war ends (i.e. burning core substance) end while it's military could be very experienced now, by treating soldiers as highly disposable its unclear how much that actually is true.
Now look at the US, it has lost the majority of soft power thanks to incompetence (and it was maybe the nation with the most effective soft power). It has alienated most of it's allies, especially it's closest allies. Both from a military and economical POV. It's highly dependent on China, and tries to change that have shown very mid to bad outcomes. On the other hand China is increasingly less dependent on it (and the EU) and increasingly less attackable by sea blockades and other non-hot war counter measures the US had. It's behind on automated production. Countries are increasingly less willing to tolerate US bases on their ground which are essential for it being able to project power. The economy is increasingly dependent on a few pillars, which are strong but can crack anyway. The might claim AI leadership, but practically it looks like the price they payed to get there is one which not only will not pay of but can not pay off, it's just way to high. War is also increasingly going back to ways where even if you have superiority the cost of waging it is still severely high, in such a situation you can't force leadership by military force, if you try it likely will end similar to Germany in WW1. Lastly the internal instability Trump has brought by dismantling checks and balances and arbitrary gutting of programs which turned out pretty essential for stability is bad enough to argue things like a putsch series or civil war being _realistic possibilities_ (not guaranteed at all, but possible where it wasn't realistically possible before).
If you put everything together the US dropping temporary out of the top 10 of overall most powerful countries is, not very likely but, very much possible.
It does have absurd geographical advantages, and nukes to make sure it keeps them basically for ever (as long as it doesn't splinter which isn't very likely tbh.). So the drop would be most likely be temporary at most.
Still it is possible, it's the price to pay for first squandering all trust/goodwill gained from WW2 over a few decades of greedy, egoistic, egocentric, ethical catastrophic politics. And then going complete "unpredictable, untrustable, instabile, high risk, publicly considering to start war with NATO or at least half of the EU (JEF+some others)" in recent years.
lol… you don’t know anything about the Chinese government if you think they aren’t already preparing for this. And the difference between them and us is that when they prepare for something, they actually prepare for it with real state capacity and planning. You know they are building armies of industrial and humanoid robots for exactly this reason?
Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.
>Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.
Note I'm just linking charts and figures, not their editorials. It's ironic that you accuse "economist hates China with a passion", but the best refutation you can come up with is some handwaving about future robot armies. How do we know you're not just hating US (or loving China) with a passion?
Isn't the US also approaching a peak?
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-POPULATION/AGING/gdpzao...
There's so many ways to slice the data, I'm not sure there's an apples-to-apples comparison between US and China. However, it's fair to say both economies face demographic headwinds.
> It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.
If Canada was a US state it would rank around 4th or 5th in terms of economic size and power. There's a lot of doomerism, but I seriously doubt the US is going to lose its top 4 or 5 economies in the next 50 years.
If you want to go really doomer, then I think it's actually more likely that Canada would become a US state instead of the US economy shrinking to the size of Canada.
But this is all nonsense talk anyway.
Exactly, this is all a symptom of underinvestment in grid capacity, and datacenter companies having to cobble together whatever electricity source they could get their hands on at the last minute.
It's a complete failure of the state in having any kind of foresight.
China, in comparison, has around 2X excess electric production capacity in their grid. That's what made mining Bitcoin, and now ultra-cheap LLM inference, economically viable.
The environment's already lost. We've passed the 1.5ºC deviation mark from the pre-industrial global average, and we're on track to hit 3ºC in a few more decades.
The excess deaths and human misery (both that which is increasingly clearly ongoing, and we have to look forward to) are going to be tragic.
Yes, but there's still a range of possible outcomes, depending on what we do next.
You'll forgive me for harbouring some pessimism about current world leaders' climate strategy.
I didn't say we'd choose wisely. But since there is still a range of possibilities, I'm not giving up on the whole thing.
Modern data centers can be designed with near-zero direct water consumption. It isn’t fundamentally necessary to consume huge amounts of water to cool computers. What’s the story with those new data centers? Do they actually choose to do evaporative cooling that people are complaining about or people are complaining about problem that doesn’t exist?
It doesn’t matter what the actual reality is. People think that data centers waste water, and they don’t like that.
The beef from a single hamburger uses far more water than a year of ChatGPT usage. Few try to reduce consumption in favor of more efficient foods by comparison. It’s about perception.
How? In most locations for much of the year you need to reject heat either by evaporating water or using electricity (more water) to run a refrigeration cycle.
This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms. It also made solar inverters illegal last week.
> It also made solar inverters illegal last week.
That’s overstating it. A couple clarifications.
It banned foreign (edit) made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]
1. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power...
> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.
The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]
You can still think both policies are bad. But those are different claims.
2. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/rwe-says-reached-12...
It banned all foreign made solar inverters i.e. all solar inverters.
"connected power inverters produced in foreign countries"
I think home devices that phone somebody-elses-home are a cancer anyway.
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-423682A1.pdf
That’s true. China dominates globally but I found that the US installed European and Japanese models. There is a big supply chain concern and set of reviews happening all across the entire government sector. Energy is a national security concern. [1]
1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaics-supp...
Your other comment got downvoted to death (not by me) so I can't reply to it, so I'm replying here. Sorry the downvoting happened; your comment wasn't incorrect. You're right that inverters with zero connectivity whatsoever are not banned; my comment was overly broad. That said...
The ban covers any inverter with any wireless communication whatsoever. Bluetooth is specifically called out, despite necessarily being local-only and not enabling an internet connection.
I suppose you could make the argument that with Bluetooth, the app that communicates with it has internet access and thus it's the same thing. However:
The ban does not cover a power inverter with no integrated comms, but has a serial port into which is plugged a "sold separately" wifi dongle. Neither does the ban cover an inverter with an ethernet port. It covers solely wireless communication.
It's bad policy.
If one is trying to attack the threat you claim, one might ban all internet capable inverters.
To ban all, even fully offline ones, means the threat you describe is an excuse.
Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
> Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.
Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).
That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
AC power needs it's sine wave aligned or it's very bad. If a huge chunk of inverters all start dumping power onto the grid that isn't synced, things break.
Do people really believe this stuff? Wow
A country is but the sum of its people - and this american people have gotten what they voted for.
Nice opportunity for the rest of the world, though.
The sense of urgency is strange and feels extremely forced. There’s no way this is all so important that all other concerns automatically go out the window so projects can complete construction yesterday.
It really wouldn’t hurt if the developers involved tried even a little bit to be good neighbors and to select sites where they’re not going to be a nuisance and net negative to adjacent communities at minimum.
The blatantly extractive, externalizing mindset of this all reminds me of the attitude that mining companies have taken towards Appalachian states for over a century at this point.
Given local grassroots opposition, the data centers are starting to move into less regulated countries where I would gather building them raises the local standard of living, but presents the new challenge of finding people qualified to run them.
The entire planet will lose as ecosystems die out, food and water supplies run low, refugee crises and global conflicts ramp up.
But hey, line go up!
Don't worry; republicans are way ahead of that refugee crises by generation fervent far right ethnic nationalism globally, independently of course.
This is just pure histrionics, you have no understanding whatsoever of the scale of data center water consumption, electricity consumption, new capacity coming online, etc.
How much water does a DC use?
The question is does DC building bring added costs to local communities. My small town has a backlog of home builders waiting for permits because of constrained municipal water capacity. We are still paying off the bonds for the last capacity we added. Golf courses/etc are already factored into current costs. Additional new use brings significant cost (bonds to build new capacity), funded by increasing expenses on the entire community, not funded by those who financially benefit from the new build outs.
The issue isn't comparative usage to existing hookups, it's new cost burden on the local community where a data center is built. Which is why DC propogandists switched to the golf course measurement, it confuses the original concern, the cost to the community of new DC hookups to municipal water or the very limited amount (of expensive to the community) available hookups that were intended/funded by the community for other purposes.
Given the political will, that problem is straightforward to address with the permitting.
All US data center water usage is less than the total water used for golf courses or the total water used to grow alfalfa. Less water used in evaporative cooling means more electricity is used for cooling given that the efficiency almost doubles if you add evaporative cooling to a chilled water loop.
It’s bad to pump non-renewable fossil aquifer water in Arizona for evaporative cooling, but using cooling towers in an area that gets 30” or more of precipitation per year is probably not going to hurt anything.
Not much. 0.04% of US water production. For context, that's about 3% of the water consumption of our golf courses, and less than 1% of what we use to water our lawns.
Get off my lawn.
> Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy.
Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)
Depends on the cooling system, but around 1 to 9L per kwh. [1]
A lot, but not all, of these datacenters are using evaporative cooling, which is what kicks their water usage so high.
So a 40MW datacenter will consume around 4 million liters of water per day if it is evaporatively cooled.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
As a comparison, one acre of alfalfa growing year round in California uses about 5*325000=1,625,000 gallons of water a year for four harvests, 4400 gallons of water per day per acre.
There’s around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California for a total water usage of 1,625,000*1,000,000=1.625×10¹² gallons (or 5 million acre-feet) per year.
365 million gallons of water per year for one data center is 1000 acre feet of water. California’s alfalfa crop uses as much water as 5,000 of these data centers.
That the only nation which sent man on the moon uses acre-feet as a unit of volume blows my mind
Oh sure, I can help.
1000 acre feet is approximately 40 hectare meters. Or, you know, about 1.2 billion liters.
Over on this side of the ocean, we’ve got freshwater lakes larger than entire European countries. There’s a lake over here, it has an island on it. That island has a lake, which has an island in it. And there’s a lake on that island.
We need units of measurement that represent large things. If you don’t, that’s ok.
1.2 billion litres = 1200 megalitres = 1.2 gigalitres
Works well in places that need to represent things large and small. Europe, Canada, Australia, and pretty much everywhere else.
But enjoy your cubic furlongs and tablespoons.
Do Alfalfa growers traditionally use limited (and funded at large expense by the local community) municipal water hookups to grow their crops? Are alfalfa growers asking for new water hookup permits to access these resources?
Because DCs are, and that is the concern local communities have. Not random comparative statistics whose purpose seems to be to take valid local community concerns and pretend they're just a joke. How much do alfa growers in California add to my water bill? How much will new municipal water hookups by new data centers impact my water bill? One is a valid concern. One is just a BS attempt to discredit the valid concern. Because that is how this shady industry operates. On BS. On manipulation. And they wonder why they are more and more disliked.
It is a sort of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
The reason these DC use so much water is because it uses less electricity to evaporatively cool than it takes to cool with a heat pump.
You are trading water scarcity for energy scarcity.
In my personal opinion, the right tradeoff is more electricity. Also IMO, these DCs should be required to build out solar + battery + wind offset plants which supply their energy either directly or indirectly by selling to the grid operator at a discounted rate. If you want 40MW of power, you need to deploy 40MW of solar (not peak, but yearly average output) and a 400MWh battery plus all the grid hookups required.
The end result for residence should be lower energy bills, not higher bills.
> Do Alfalfa growers traditionally use limited (and funded at large expense by the local community) municipal water hookups to grow their crops? Are alfalfa growers asking for new water hookup permits to access these resources?
No, you already know they use flood irrigation.
Why is a municipal water system allowing a data center connection that will strain their distribution network? They’re well within their rights to say no, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t holding a gun to their heads.
> Why is a municipal water system allowing a data center connection that will strain their distribution network? They’re well within their rights to say no, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t holding a gun to their heads.
Deep pockets have a way of bypassing practical concerns. [1]
Zuckerberg likely isn't holding a gun to their heads, instead it's more likely he's putting wads of cash in their pockets.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/08/texas-corpus-christi...
Assuming that it's surprisingly little and without pollution concerns, then an acceptable and enforceable policy should be a very simple request, no?
Yes I agree.
So even when xAI (which is now Tesla? Or SpaceX maybe?) was "operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen the air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country"[0] this didn't place them above this new Amazon not-even-built-yet data center? Are they competing who can destroy the earth the fastest or what's going on?
- [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-ov...
It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
> It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Who gives a shit who started it? The ones who continue engaging in it, should clearly be punished as they're working against humanity's best interest of keeping this planet survivable.
If you're one of the largest companies in the world, constantly brag about how environmental friendly you are and how much you care about "sustainability" or what the trendy word is today, and you end up building a data center that sets a record in pollution (either directly or indirectly), you're doing something massively fucked up and are misaligned with the rest of the people on this planet.
> Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
I guess this is what late-stage capitalism gives you ultimately, companies who feel like it's fine doing whatever because competitors are also doing whatever. No one I know have been cheering for anything like that, I suggest if you have people cheering about stuff like that near you, get far away.
Pretty sure it’s “is”, they were operating gas turbines for power and continue to do so
So where is the police? They're running turbines they haven't been granted permits to run, if Average Joe did so the police would show up and literally grab the hardware from him, one way or another, or disable it at least. What the fuck are they waiting for?
Where are you getting the information that it's unauthorized (or needs to be authorized)?
> Where are you getting the information that it's unauthorized (or needs to be authorized)?
https://www.selc.org/press-release/naacp-asks-court-for-emer... and the previous link I referenced.
One would think if there is even a suspicion (even if it hasn't been ruled in court yet) about large-scale harmful toxic emissions, the police and relevant authorities would at least quickly do some samples or what not, to figure out if they need to put an immediate stop to it until the courts ruled either way.
But seemingly it's still ongoing and no harm no foul?
Do you know the difference between civil law and criminal law? The police don’t care if they’re not violating a criminal statute. If you want to test how it works, build a brand new house in a city without pulling any permits.
I do indeed. Do you know that severe violations of civil law sometimes amount of up to criminal law, especially if there is evidence of criminal intent or "knowing" violations of the law but proceeding anyway?
This is the case for lots of things. Negligence can turn into "reckless disregard for human life", breach of contract could amount to fraud, and many other cases.
The NAACP claims don't amount to facts.
Indeed, but they do amount to "suspicion" and are worth investigating instead of saying "Lets wait years until the courts decided if it is or isn't actually polluting" and not shutting it down until they've clearly demonstrated it being safe or not.
All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.
It is the paperclip AI scenario: The AI is cheating humans to produce only one thing - but in reality today, its not paperclibs, but datacenters as "the most important product": So the scenario still holds :-D
It's possible to have more than one existential risk at a time. We even have a third, since nuclear war doesn't seem completely impossible these days. We probably shouldn't ignore any of them.
Nuclear war is hardly an existential risk.
An all-out global nuclear war (all nuclear nations landing 10% of their warheads in populated areas) would be a disruption comparable to COVID at best.
Mass extinction event already happened though. Most known species became extinct because of humans.
The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.
400,000 people in Europe are displaced. Pretending that this is a future issue is tremendously disingenuous. Things don't need to be civilisation-ending to cause a degree of harm that is worth focusing on.
The OP is literally talking about “mass extinction”, it’s not a real concern that climate change will cause mass extinction in the next 5 years.
It should absolutely be focused on anyway. I don’t know how you got the other impression. The US gov paying to stop windmills and solar is insane.
On this map I can't see _any_ nuclear under construction in the US yet the rest of the world seems to be building many. When a man has a hammer everything is a gas turbine. GEV stock has treated me well but I'd much rather nuclear was winning.
It's a catch22 problem because nuclear is much slower to build than a data center so there is no demand from the data centers. And the nuclear plant doesn't know the demand will be there in 5 years once with gas soaking up demand. So the build it and they will come strategy is risky. Building infrastructure is like a muscle that gets stronger with repetitions. The cost will only come down once some are built but nobody wants to build at the current high prices. Govt help is needed to kick start it.
DOE is investing heavily in SMRs right now. There's 4 which have reached criticality so far. Chris Wright the DOE head is a o&g political appointee hack, but the career employees at DOE are working on pushing clean energy forward.
https://nric.inl.gov/news/
Note that this is about absolute pollution, not relative to power output. Pollution is high, because power output is high. Relatively, for what it's worth, it's just a fairly normal gas plant.
So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.
Luckily the Trump administration has just paid over a billion dollars for the second time to stop a renewable energy project...
Mostly because coal is more expensive and slower to build
Most polluting power plant so far
This race to the bottom will have plenty more to give us in the coming years.
Aren't coal power plants waaaay more polluting than natural gas? Not just in terms of C02, but also really nasty stuff like particulates, sulphur, and metals?
It's very trendy right now to get mad at datacenters, but I'd much rather energy come from natural gas than from an existing coal power plant. (Obviously, renewables would be better than either.)
Different. Burn enough natural gas in enough gas turbines, and significant quantities of formaldehyde and NOx will be created.
The nasty stuff, yes. Regarding greenhouse gases, natural gas has turned out to be about as bad as coal once you account for methane leaks, and the industry has strenuously resisted any decent mitigation for that.
Ok. A serious question. I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Then why are they using gas turbines? Is it because they can generate more power with a smaller real estate footprint?
Texas specifically has heavily politicized and demonized wind power, in spite of having massive successes with it prior to 2016 and being a leading producer of it. Solar isn't as bad, but is still seen as "leftist." The political landscape in TX is vastly more friendly to natural gas.
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.
They are using gas because it's more reliable during peak usage. Wind generation in Texas isn't optimal throughout the entire state and conditions aren't optimal all the time. They still use wind, but from a pure numbers perspective, gas infra already exists, the gas is there, and gas is more reliable, so wind isn't always the cheapest form of energy. There are also diminishing returns on just adding more wind turbines.
Gas is also incredibly cheap in Texas. Way, way cheaper than you would think. In some parts, it's negative price - you will be paid to use it. We have entirely too much gas, which is actually a problem because ideally we want to discourage its use.
So yes, wind and solar are cheap. Depending on where in Texas you are, gas is cheaper.
Texas leads the nation in solar installed and solar planned.
How do you reconcile that with your theory?
I think you might want to download new anti-Texas talking points. Texas is number two in the nation in solar power: https://seia.org/media/16020/texas.pdf/
Texas is not at all against renewables. Maybe, just maybe, whatever axes the people building data centers are optimizing on rule out solar/wind over factors other than "renewables are for leftists, so fuck that we're gonna burn gas even if it's more expensive."
> I think you might want to download new anti-Texas talking points.
No need—the current ones are uploaded directly into my mailbox regularly by Randy Weber, my district rep.
15th for non-residential? Sounds like people overwhelmingly put it on their roofs, and politicians avoid it.
Did you miss the 1st utility part? It can be quite hard for nonresidential users to retrofit for solar. Not impossible but sometimes not an easy solve.
Avoid it to the tune of being in the top third (for now, they're projected to keep growing), behind only blue states that are known for aggressive rollout and/or climates that are overall more favorable (i.e., Texas gets its fair share of sun but not quite like CA and NV, for example)? Is that your idea of avoiding it because politicians want to own the libs?
I often wonder why conservatives have such a problem with renewable energy.
I can certainly believe that oil and gas pay better bribes, and that this incentivises a certain kind of politician who seem to be over-represented among conservatives in the US. But that doesn't explain the widespread dislike among the conservative end of the general population. Is it just groupthink or Overton Window -nudging using social media? Or is there something more psychological going on? Some kind of disgust reaction?
One would think that self-proclaimed "conservatives" would like to conserve the natural world... Long gone are the days of Teddy Roosevelt that's for sure.
Under current administration, I'm not even sure its possible to build out green energy for this sort of thing at scale - this article[1] was on the front page just yesterday
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314
It's because the permits are easier to get. It's very hard to get people to organize to make renewable energy permitting easier.
In some cases, aren’t the permits not even being sought?
Eg https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
Because the US has some policies that make those currently more expensive than they should be while. A combination of tariffs, removal of incentives for local producers, etc. has caused prices to be higher than they could be. All of this is because of fossil fuel lobby funded campaigns for exactly this to happen.
The flip side of course is that gas turbines are in short supply and manufacturers are in no hurry to build out production capacity for what is effectively obsolete technology with a very uncertain future. A lot of the projects being announced may never get delivered for the simple reason that there are long waiting lists for these things.
And there is the notion that related investments might end up under water when the few plants that do get built start struggling economically in ten years or so. These are not very attractive long term investments. The short term interest in securing any capacity at all is overriding this. Of the well over a hundred GW of data centers planned until 2035, probably only less than a 30-40% will actually get built; if not less. Michael Liebreich is predicting only about 35GW will be realized. His estimate is that there simply is no more production capacity that can be committed than that.
It will be interesting to see if this Amazon plant actually gets built. For now Amazon can afford to gamble on this and just write it off if it doesn't work out.
If policy changes in a few years, I expect a lot of these projects to get unceremoniously cancelled when it turns out that they are a combination of under water financially and behind on schedule because of component shortages anyway. Also, it only takes a few failed projects for everyone to get cold feet. Premature closures of new gas plants could happen if renewables get cheap enough. Those are already happening in some places.
For a DC it's probably reliability. You need wind to be spread over a large area to even out random changes in power availability. And, obviously, solar power works during the day.
Renewables require storage because they are bursty - sun goes down, wind stops blowing. This is more expensive than just burning as much nat gas as you need.
Presumably, the data center usage could also be bursty, right?
More people will be using AI during the (work)day, than at midnight. Then they could do half solar, half gas.
Also "more expensive" when it comes to solar isn't meaningful until you also consider timeframe. Solar panels pay themselves off in a few years, and after that they basically generate "free" electricity. Gas never becomes cheaper or free, every year it will cost money.
AWS is heavily used worldwide, not just in the US. The same goes for the big AI companies.
Timeframe is accounted for if you look at levelized cost per kWh. The levelized cost of natural gas is 5 to 11 cents/kWh. In the sunniest spots, the levelized cost of solar with enough battery storage to provide 24/7 power is about the same, if you want >90% reliability. The usual four hours of storage is only enough to account for the "duck curve" during the day.
https://www.pv-tech.org/solar-pv-and-storage-cost-declines-d...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Solar and batteries keep getting cheaper so hopefully they will be clear winners soon, at least in sunny areas.
How is it more expensive? Any links? Once built out yeah there is maintainance but no need to drill baby drill anymore.
The cost of energy varies widely based on regional factors, geography, existing energy portfolio makeup, etc. Additionally cost is not just the unit price but the price overtime to support a specific SLA.
Texas has very cheap gas; it’s also good for solar. They are very competitive price wise, so it’s kinda depressing they are using gas. But it’s probably a slight price edge plus better reliability.
gas turbines are not intermittent
> I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity
presumably they put zero value on stable production or count subsidies as income
You need a ton of land for solar and no renewable is as reliable as fossil fuels.
HN, where inconvenient truths get you downvoted
Who could have predicted that Microsoft building their own nuclear reactor would be the lesser evil.
Until they apply what that did to Github's uptime
Nuclear reactors are a notoriously clean and safe method of electricity generation.
Zero data on Greenhouse gas CO2-equivalent per kWh. A combined-cycle gas power plant is going to have lower impact per kWh than the 200+ coal plants in the US.
A recent discussion
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686
I am sure if these guys worked on it they could have better PR. It is like AI is the modern version of the oil industry.
1786171869 | Amazon behind private gas plant for new data centers | https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/amazon-behind-mass... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219445
1786121329 | Scoop: Amazon Is Behind One of the Largest Planned Gas Power Plants in the US | https://www.distilled.earth/p/scoop-amazon-is-behind-one-of-...
1786014051 | AWS eyes potential data center development at 4.5GW natural gas plant in Pennsylvania | https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-eyes-potentia...
1786181141 | 'Better ways to use gas': Amazon finances massive US plant for data centres | https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
1786202472 | Amazon plans massive Texas AI campus and an enormous gas power plant | https://www.chron.com/news/article/amazon-texas-data-center-...
1784098800 | Amazon to install hundreds of gas-fired generators at Bucks County data center site | https://whyy.org/articles/amazon-data-center-bucks-county-pa...
1786140583 | Amazon Is Building America's Biggest Fossil Fuel Plant to Power AI | https://heatmap.news/energy/amazon-gw-ranch
1786173935 | Amazon Backs 7.65-GW Gas Plant in Texas to Power New AI Data Center Campus | https://constructionreviewonline.com/amazon-backs-7-65-gw-ga...
1786131006 | Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Entire Country | https://newrepublic.com/post/214111/amazon-data-center-bigge...
1784358000 | Pennsylvania set to approve 283 new generators at Amazon data center despite objections | https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/amazon-data-center-bu...
1780556400 | What the rise of natural gas-powered data centers means for emission-reduction pledges | https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2026/06/04/data-centers-a...
really time for these companies to have to switch to options like Nuclear SMR from providers like Rolls Royce who already have the megawatt solutions ready in the market, which don't release giant volumes of CO2 which we cannot afford.
Divest all your stocks from all this AI data-center race bullshit, invest into renewable projects. Worst case, the orange buffoon will bail you out with taxpayer money to prevent the US grid from being too clean or something. Only money talks in the US.
Now no one talks about global warming and climate change.
A lot of new data centres have been announced in Alberta, Canada. Which is a weird location given that Alberta has a derelict power grid that can barely serve the current load, and runs almost entirely on fossil fuels.
Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.
https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/alberta-approved-a-932-me...
They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...
We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.
Oh, Alberta. That makes sense. Land of pissed off coal miners, isn't it?
Much more the land of oil and gas. Alberta no longer burns coal for electricity.
The dominant political party frames natural gas as "clean", because it isn't a dirty as coal; and Alberta natural gas in particular as "ethical", because not Russia or Saudi.
It is insane how we're accelerating the climate catastrophe in an ideology-driven race to be king of the ashes.
Capitalism is a death cult, AI capitalism doubly so.
Communism dried up the third largest lake in the world just for irrigation (while starving tens of millions in the meantime).
The irrigation plan was in response to the famine, and it worked, it was the last famine in the soviet union.
also the soviet union was totalitarian, not communist
We only have two options.
No one mentioned communism?
The person you’re replying to did, when he pointed out that a communist regime wasted a ton of water.
I think I get your point; that the inverse of corrupt (I call it fake) capitalism is not necessarily communism, or something reactive. It might just be a system that works better, even if we have not named it yet...
Downvote me all you want. China is doing something right. Nuclear, renewables, whatever the mix, they're not parking gas turbines next to a data center and calling it a power strategy. That US tech companies reached for that first tells you everything. Speed over consequences, every time. And shut up about that China still fires a lot of coal. They are phasing it out... the right way.
If we reach AGI at some point, it will wonder why we are so dumb
If we ever reach it, it will tell us "you destroyed any chance of survival in your quest to get to me first, dipshits."
You know, we don't actually have to do this. The people could block the gates and prevent the delivery of the turbines. The local fire department could fail their inspection and prevent the gas from being turned on. The UPS could "mysteriously" go up in smoke during it's commissioning.
None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.
All this at the very low cost of: your job. You can't have an unbreachable blockade 24/7 in front of there, very soon they'd send police to disperse. Fire dept has to justify the failing, if everything up to code and the inspector make it fail it will delay for at most a week and the guy will lose his credibility. The guys delivering and installing the UPS are just trying to make a living too, destroying the thing will get them fired while only delaying a little the time getting another delivered. You are replaceable.
Do you think the rest of your life will be of very high quality in any scenario?
Why is HN so absolutely terrible at understanding the scale of pollution, water consumption, etc? It is quite minuscule in real terms, but everyone here is losing their mind. Ridiculous.
Bitcoin received a lot of backslash due to its power usage and ecological footprint. It's obvious that HN users don't have the same criticisms towards AI data centers. Maybe someone with a short position will coordinate that communication soon..
Bitcoin was just purely wasting power for a token only used for crime and speculation.
It’s worth noting that the ideological drive to create more energy-neutral crypto schemes resulted in trillions of dollars in fraud and no value created. Same as it always is with climate extremism. Always a cash grab.
What is climate extremism? Because it doesn't seem like the world is actually doing much to combat climate change as we see more fires and more extreme weather while still clinging to the old fossil fuel economy as long as possible.