A bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle:
Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities.
This is gold for a comedy sketch :)
Look, the point about data centers that everyone misses or ignores is that they're merely a consolidation.
All these machines used to be in Machine Rooms of universities, corporations, government and contractors. The only dedicated "data centers" when I was growing up were Supercomputer Centers and the like.
But all this computing capacity and the network equipment was still installed and running, but it was "hidden" in ordinary office parks, in ordinary office buildings, and it was totally scattered and decentralized. Every corporation and business was running its own machine room and network closet, and they were supplying the power and cooling and all the overhead belonged to them.
So with migration to the cloud, we get consolidation, and all those individual and decentralized "machine rooms" and network closets are being hollowed out, and vacated, and all that equipment is being moved and offloaded to dedicated cloud services, where they can all be concentrated and centalized in... data centers.
And that is the simple reason why data centers are popping up like mushrooms everywhere, and simultaneously all this office space is sitting vacant (it's not merely WFH and remote workers, guys: it's both of these effects simultaneously!)
Of course, we can stipulate that computing power and resource consumption is still growing so the datacenters are gonna be larger and hungrier than their decentralized predecessors, but still, this is evolutionary and not revolutionary, and no NIMBY movement or Luddites or Butlerian Jihad will stop the growth of these juggernauts, because basically now they are necessary for a functioning society, and ordinary people don't even realize how much so they are necessary and indispensable to their ways of living.
How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks.
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
I've never seen a cent go to any service in my local municipality from Meta's taxes & whatever does end up in the city coffers is not big enough to have any real effect b/c those services could just as easily be financed by direct payments instead of some circuitous route of federal, state, & sales taxes from transactions enabled by corporations like Meta.
If I was in SF & working for Google or Meta then maybe you might have a point but I'm not in SF or any major metropolitan area so from my perspective the whole thing is actually a net negative.
Also, people in your community probably own businesses that advertise or sell directly on a Meta platform. That's money affecting many things you interact with online and offline.
Also also, you describe yourself as an ordinary person but say you have no presence on any of the largest social media or messaging platforms. I think that's fairly far out of the ordinary.
You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
> "I'm all right, Jack" is a British expression used to describe people who act only in their own best interests, even if providing assistance to others would take minimal to no effort on their part.
> The phrase is believed to have originated among Royal Navy sailors: when a ladder was slung over the side of a ship, the last sailor to climb on board would say, "I'm all right Jack; pull up the ladder."
> The latter half of the phrase has been used to call out unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others.
it's not a consolidation because all those computers are still in office parks and the like. This is new usage, and it consumes exponentially more resources than all of the previous usage.
Man, I wish I had more downvotes. This is not just about consolidation, it's about massive resource usage in areas where hardly any of the benefits accrue to the locals.
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
People would love to build their own servers (and run AI or other workloads on them) and kids would love to build their first PC, but big tech is buying all the hardware and stuffing it into data centers. You make it sound like they asked for it.
This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently.
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"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"
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Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
This closed loop system needs to be filled and flushed, which is the operation discussed in the article. The bacterium was described as a possible airborne hazard if used for irrigation, it's not a regulated substance though so dump and dilute might be perfectly safe.
Not sure why you got downloaded, but you’re right. Polluting public (and even private!) spaces is philosophically speaking a property rights violation, which is a core libertarian/free market value.
So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works.
So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak.
And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
> why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this
Because companies pay for lobbyist, give donations, and other perks to politicians. Simple as that ... And companies a a-political, they simply give money to both sides, so who is in power has less effect.
While you the normal voter, only matter a few times, and with increased irrelevant as how powerful your vote is.
The fact that companies can now vote in local elections (in some states, you can guess the states colors), tells you how deep the corruption has gone.
Apparently, other people's quality of life and health are of little to no concern in comparison to company profits, after they've paid off the correct politicians.
After all, the executives of the company (the important people) know not to swim in that lake (their swimming pools are clean) nor drink the water (as they can drink Perrier bottled water).
> To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?
Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
Otherwise it's an isolated demand for rigor.
You can tell that something has an ulterior motive when the rule or its enforcement special cases the doing of a generic thing only when it's being done by the people being targeted.
> Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
If by "regulated and studied" you mean there are some laws that people regularly pay no attention to and aren't even aware exist, and some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants, and not even that much in many jurisdictions.
People dont need to pay attention, because when you buy a pool or pool chemistry, it already follows applicable regulations. The companies doing the work also know them.
> some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants
The whole point of random sampling is to ensure you need as miniscule amount of water as possible. These tests checking likely polutants is also not a bad thing.
Are you claiming these pools are massively poluting water? Or are you just angry that potentially large polutants are not allowed to just do what they want?
By definition, externalizing a cost is less expensive than internalizing it; the only recourse for the rest of us is forcing them to properly internalize their costs.
Why would they?
They will do the bare minimum or less if they can get away.
Doing more is harmful. Not only financially but also they risk doing something that someone might seem irresponsible or wrong or whatever.
Also, if they think there is a risk they can also leverage a monetary win by put stacks on some sort of health system. I am not saying they do, but why would they do anything about it if there is no law?
They want people to move away to make land cheaper for more of their stuff anyway
Testing for an extremely
rare bacterium is not the bare minimum. In fact even the water treatment plants rarely do it. They admit in the article we don’t even know whether or not the bacteria originated from the water supplied by the city that entered the pipes in the first place.
DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
Not do what? Not discharge the water with bacterium? But the data center claims that their independent testing shows that they didn’t even discharge the bacterium. It seems that neither the city nor Meta knew where the bacterium came from.
Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.
'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is a blatant public opinion campaign by entities who didn't give a damn about data centers up until 3 years ago.
Not just exploded, but went full on "move fast and break things". Nobody complained about the data centers that have no more impact on the local environment that a warehouse. But in all this rush, they're cutting corners everywhere and putting so much strain on the electric grid. Many also have massive onsite natural gas turbines, some big enough to power a small city, built by the contractor with the lowest bidder, half a mile from people's houses. You can hear and FEEL them from inside a house.
it's incredibly hard to identify microbes like these, this is not a simple task, especially if you're not aware they exist or that they can occur in this way.. if they did, which i'm skeptical of
I kinda think the reaction and reporting on this is already being colored by the objection to the datacenters, as opposed to the other way around. And it's not obvious exactly where the problem came from in the first place: it doesn't look like this is some super-obvious, common and easy to prevent issue that they just decided to cheap out on, nor is it obviously a datacenter-specific issue.
Since the article doesn't make this clear, let me explain.
The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad.
The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered.
Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.
I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped.
So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear.
I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.
As a former microbiologist, this news is important but not too concerning. It’s good that we found detected this and can respond accordingly. It doesn’t mean indicate an immediate, critical issue.
55 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 58.8 ms ] threadHey where’s that person from yesterday who argued with me over the 1m vs 1cm hole in the boat?
Everyone saying stop talking about data center water use is missing the entire point as this article shows.
All these machines used to be in Machine Rooms of universities, corporations, government and contractors. The only dedicated "data centers" when I was growing up were Supercomputer Centers and the like.
But all this computing capacity and the network equipment was still installed and running, but it was "hidden" in ordinary office parks, in ordinary office buildings, and it was totally scattered and decentralized. Every corporation and business was running its own machine room and network closet, and they were supplying the power and cooling and all the overhead belonged to them.
So with migration to the cloud, we get consolidation, and all those individual and decentralized "machine rooms" and network closets are being hollowed out, and vacated, and all that equipment is being moved and offloaded to dedicated cloud services, where they can all be concentrated and centalized in... data centers.
And that is the simple reason why data centers are popping up like mushrooms everywhere, and simultaneously all this office space is sitting vacant (it's not merely WFH and remote workers, guys: it's both of these effects simultaneously!)
Of course, we can stipulate that computing power and resource consumption is still growing so the datacenters are gonna be larger and hungrier than their decentralized predecessors, but still, this is evolutionary and not revolutionary, and no NIMBY movement or Luddites or Butlerian Jihad will stop the growth of these juggernauts, because basically now they are necessary for a functioning society, and ordinary people don't even realize how much so they are necessary and indispensable to their ways of living.
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
¹https://solidproject.org/
From the taxes they provide
If I was in SF & working for Google or Meta then maybe you might have a point but I'm not in SF or any major metropolitan area so from my perspective the whole thing is actually a net negative.
There's a lot of excellent projects here.
Also, people in your community probably own businesses that advertise or sell directly on a Meta platform. That's money affecting many things you interact with online and offline.
Also also, you describe yourself as an ordinary person but say you have no presence on any of the largest social media or messaging platforms. I think that's fairly far out of the ordinary.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
> "I'm all right, Jack" is a British expression used to describe people who act only in their own best interests, even if providing assistance to others would take minimal to no effort on their part.
> The phrase is believed to have originated among Royal Navy sailors: when a ladder was slung over the side of a ship, the last sailor to climb on board would say, "I'm all right Jack; pull up the ladder."
> The latter half of the phrase has been used to call out unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others.
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
AI computing capacity is doubling every seven months. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-chip-production.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/omen-ais-plan-to-optimize-...
I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
--------
"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"
--------
Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works.
So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak.
And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
Because companies pay for lobbyist, give donations, and other perks to politicians. Simple as that ... And companies a a-political, they simply give money to both sides, so who is in power has less effect.
While you the normal voter, only matter a few times, and with increased irrelevant as how powerful your vote is.
The fact that companies can now vote in local elections (in some states, you can guess the states colors), tells you how deep the corruption has gone.
After all, the executives of the company (the important people) know not to swim in that lake (their swimming pools are clean) nor drink the water (as they can drink Perrier bottled water).
Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
Otherwise it's an isolated demand for rigor.
You can tell that something has an ulterior motive when the rule or its enforcement special cases the doing of a generic thing only when it's being done by the people being targeted.
All of those are regulated and studied.
> some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants
The whole point of random sampling is to ensure you need as miniscule amount of water as possible. These tests checking likely polutants is also not a bad thing.
Are you claiming these pools are massively poluting water? Or are you just angry that potentially large polutants are not allowed to just do what they want?
They towed it outside the environment.
Also, if they think there is a risk they can also leverage a monetary win by put stacks on some sort of health system. I am not saying they do, but why would they do anything about it if there is no law?
They want people to move away to make land cheaper for more of their stuff anyway
DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.
Profit over safety all day long
The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad.
The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered.
Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.
I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped.
So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear.
I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.
Maybe but there are citywide chlorine flushes of their water supply. some worse than others
Erin Brockovich tracks this