What exactly are they trying to accomplish? I doubt they would just abandon the project. They would just redo the concrete which would emit even more emissions.
In the interest of playing Devil's Advocate, even if they're unlikely to abandon an existing project over this, accounting for potential sabotage and the cost/delays of redoing work might change the calculus of future projects?
Right, all they're going to do is rip the concrete out and repour it, causing even more damage to the environment (concrete production and curing is unbelievably C02 intensive)
I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
very minor nit but no CO2 is released during concrete curing. And over time (decades) the calcium hydroxide in concrete reacts with CO2 to pull it out of the air, producing calcium carbonate.
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O
(producing the concrete of course makes a ton of CO2, since its basically the reverse reaction, which is accomplished by generating a lot of heat)
Sabotage works by introducing friction into your opponents activities. Sabotaging one piece of one data center doesn't do much, but the more you do, the more outsized the impact.
Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.
The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.
This is also all the sabotage the saboteurs have volunteered to tell you about. If your opsec has allowed sabotage to happen, it’s prudent to assume there’s other sabotage you don’t know about.
Astonishing reply. It would also be in their interests for Nazis to eat three meals a day, tip their hat to old ladies in the street, and get a good night's rest.
Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.
To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.
That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.
> now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time
You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).
In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.
> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
There are two directions this idea can go:
- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.
- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.
If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:
- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police
- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters
The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.
The rate of somebody actually being caught and handled by police is negligible. The private security still have to watch 24/7 and that's a private cost.
I mean, they're talking to newspapers using their real names. And they're admitting what they've done.
If this was actually about real sabotage and causing real damage, the move would be to do something similar to what they're doing (incur structural damage) but keep quiet about it. Let them continue building out the DC and then watch the floor collapse when it gets loaded with server racks. Chipping out some concrete that's been clearly marked:
> mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint
Is a very minor inconvenience in a construction project of that scale compared to having the building collapse when it's partially filled with servers.
I'm not sure what the actual size of the on-site construction crew is, but one that's going up locally here is budgeted at $1.7B for the initial build-out and up to $12B for the total investment including all of the hardware that'll run inside it. A bunch of cameras, potentially perimeter radars, and a few security guards are really really minor additional costs. The facility they're building here is supposed to be 500,000 sq.ft. The cost of all of the additional security for managing this problem is probably less than a single rack of servers.
Ruining concrete seems to go against extinction rebellion main goal. According to the World Economic Forum the co2 released during ciment production account for 8% of global co2 emissions, datancenter are estimated to contribute between 1 and 2 percent....
Did the Data Center get canceled? If not, then no it is not ruined and instead what's going to happen? Is someone's going to scrape up a whole bunch of that concrete releasing a whole bunch of carbon dioxide and then someone's going to pour down some more concrete which will increase the CO2 in the atmosphere.
That sounds likely to be true. They'll move operations to a temporary building while they build a new one. To some extent their ability to make plans will be disrupted, but the effect those plans would have had on the climate is unknown: the result is just that the oil company behaves in a more stupid and poorly-planned way, while doing some extra construction.
That's for all cement in the entire world, not one data center. This math is not hard. Plastic is roughly 5% of our emissions but you would not point at one straw and say it is worth 5% of all emissions.
You think they did math on this? No, all he did was have a tantrum where they got attention to themselves and patted themselves on the bat for doing something.
They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.
They threw balloons… over a fence, while they like drama, this is unlikely to have had any effect on a cured structural slab. I doubt they even managed to get industrial strength peroxide.
An obvious point, but if Europe wants sovereign onshore AI, they have to get these people under control. It's easy for Microsoft to simply build EU-serving datacenters elsewhere.
I suspect many HN commenters would be surprised to learn just how much the general public are on the side of these activists, condoning if not outright applauding their actions.
I think it's in large part because the public is being fed Chinese propaganda about all the supposed issues. There are real issues, but nowhere near to the scale people seem so think.
Combine with the fact they have zero clue about what AI is capable of*, they think we are pouring billions into technology to write emails.
(They don't have any idea about current models, let alone an intuition about what future models will be capable of)
Companies at this scale only speak existential threat. If you can't pose one, they don't even know you exist. I question whether this made enough of a dent to be noticed, but it's a start.
Companies at every scale speak marginal gains/losses. Microsoft looks at this the same way your local drugstore considers shoplifting. They will look at property damage in the context of potential revenue & margin, possibly accounting for cost of mitigations. If it continues to make sense, they will continue. If it doesn't they will consider raising prices until it does make sense, or relocating to jurisdictions with fewer elites play acting as activist proletariat. Since your local drugstore won't be local if it leaves, it's only options are to close down or raise prices or lock everything up.
Microsoft does tonnes of dumb stuff that decreases its profit. Renaming Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot, for example. As long as it has plenty of profit left, it doesn't really care. It would only care if the amount of lost profit became existential, reaffirming GP.
> There’s an acute water shortage in The Netherlands right now. When I open BlueSky, everyone is talking about water being increasingly wasted on cooling data centres. And for what? To generate more AI shit.
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
On paper you can't do this, but in practice the fines for doing so (if they ever even reach your mailbox after you've bribed the local politicians, which you've done to get your center built in the first place) are just a cost of business. There are plenty of videos of people who live near data centers who now have sputtering water from their sinks, or water that comes out brown and unusable.
I have a friend (engineer) working on a data center in Texas. It is closed loop. What’s interesting is the chillers have so much condensation that they pump it out to sprinklers which water the desert which now has grass growing. So at least water doesn’t seem to be as big of an objection now. Power though? Still a problem.
I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.
It's the same tired pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
It doesn't even have to be monied interests. Media as a whole is getting severely disrupted by AI and they (somewhat understandably) see the technology as being built on top of their content without recompense. As such they will latch on to any topic -- supported or otherwise -- that lets them push a negative narrative.
On the flip side a lot of people's jobs are likely being threatened by the technology, so there is sizeable receptive audience already.
They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests, really. However I'm also pretty sure a lot of players are engaging in submarine warfare as well (https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).
> They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests
Because they are the monied interests.
What they don't want is for the conversation to turn from people blindly rejecting data centers (for any reason) to people saying wait a minute, let's embrace technology/AI but let users benefit from every aspect instead of being capital's bitch every second the day.
I hate all this weird activist stuff. It's pointless. Someone just pays for it and the problem is fixed.
If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.
> In recent years, people from Extinction Rebellion Netherlands have focused heavily on large scale disruptive action of ‘business as usual’.
Everyone talking about how stupid and ineffective this is. The whole point is to interrupt business as usual to draw attention to the stupidity of our continued head in the sand path. The damage (or lack thereof) is largely irrelevant. The fact a regular person is risking jail to try and stop business as usual is the entire point. It starts with one person.
The point people bring up about concrete CO2 use is absurd. To me it screams of refusing to talk about the debate the protestors are having and instead trying to find any minor nit to pick, which then lets you declare that they're imperfect and therefore not even worth discussing.
In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.
Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.
My tinfoil hat says this isn't "spontaneous grassroots activism". Someone made this happen that benefits from this. Maybe a country that wants to mess with the Netherlands. Hell, it could even be a competing tech company.
I hope they look very carefully how this was organized, where the money came from.
90 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] threadI don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.
The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.
Then you should probably ask yourself why your recommended course of action is in the interests of the Nazis?
this is deep stuff dude. you should run for office
Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.
To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.
That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.
You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).
In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.
> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
There are two directions this idea can go:
- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.
- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.
If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:
- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police
- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters
The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.
If this was actually about real sabotage and causing real damage, the move would be to do something similar to what they're doing (incur structural damage) but keep quiet about it. Let them continue building out the DC and then watch the floor collapse when it gets loaded with server racks. Chipping out some concrete that's been clearly marked:
> mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint
Is a very minor inconvenience in a construction project of that scale compared to having the building collapse when it's partially filled with servers.
I'm not sure what the actual size of the on-site construction crew is, but one that's going up locally here is budgeted at $1.7B for the initial build-out and up to $12B for the total investment including all of the hardware that'll run inside it. A bunch of cameras, potentially perimeter radars, and a few security guards are really really minor additional costs. The facility they're building here is supposed to be 500,000 sq.ft. The cost of all of the additional security for managing this problem is probably less than a single rack of servers.
I wonder if they bothered to get high concentration vinegar.
This is a nonsensical, stupid and fruitless symbolic act. Why should someone be crippled, blinded or killed by their foolishness?
They deserve to be treated just as harshly.
Math is not theirs forte!
In 2024, datancenter have consumed 1% of the total worldwide electricity production and are responsible for 0.5% of the co2 emissions.¹
1- https://www.carbonbrief.org/ai-five-charts-that-put-data-cen...
It's far grimmer to realise that people know, they just don't think we have an acceptable answer yet.
I'm not willing to accept any climate action, if it means I can't go on holiday abroad or it makes my life meaningfully more expensive etc.
It's selfish, but we need to solve it in a way that makes people globally richer.
(This is one of the great things about renewables coming down in price)
They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.
Having data centers in your country seems incredibly important, especially to the EU. You'd really hope to see the exact opposite of this behaviour.
lol this is not "worker opposition", these are the antics of over educated downwardly mobile elites.
Combine with the fact they have zero clue about what AI is capable of*, they think we are pouring billions into technology to write emails.
(They don't have any idea about current models, let alone an intuition about what future models will be capable of)
You don’t think much or very hard at all, do you?
Level of effort is a thing.
EDIT: And Cryo32 said the same thing elsewhere, a few minutes ago!
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.
It's the same tired pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
On the flip side a lot of people's jobs are likely being threatened by the technology, so there is sizeable receptive audience already.
They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests, really. However I'm also pretty sure a lot of players are engaging in submarine warfare as well (https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).
Because they are the monied interests.
What they don't want is for the conversation to turn from people blindly rejecting data centers (for any reason) to people saying wait a minute, let's embrace technology/AI but let users benefit from every aspect instead of being capital's bitch every second the day.
If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.
Good, make them. At the very least it shouldn't be cheap to defy the will of the people.
Everyone talking about how stupid and ineffective this is. The whole point is to interrupt business as usual to draw attention to the stupidity of our continued head in the sand path. The damage (or lack thereof) is largely irrelevant. The fact a regular person is risking jail to try and stop business as usual is the entire point. It starts with one person.
In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.
Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.
I hope they look very carefully how this was organized, where the money came from.