industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits
honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.
The zoning for Mesa AZ is some of the craziest I've ever seen. The obviously unsustainable car-choked sprawl near NTT PH1 is listed in the growth plan as "sustain" while the industrial area is listed as "evolve". The industrial/commercial strip is between two sprawl neighborhoods. In the general plan the car-oriented cul-de-sac hellscape is noted to be "traditional residential" while the data center area is "regional employment". It appears online that the city of Mesa actively encourages data centers in their "technology corridor"
The big tech outfit and power utility collaboratively fund a non-profit to create a number of no-show $300k/y vice chairmanship jobs, and arrange to have the spouse and/or children of key city and county leaders hired for these positions. The rest is academic.
All I can think of when reading this was Hank Hill yelling at his neighbor: "Dale you giblet-head, we live in Texas, where it's already 110 in the summer. And if it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!" [1]
"The attribution of this warming to data center waste heat is supported by the consistent alignment of the temperature signal with the prevailing wind direction across multiple sites, dates, and meteorological conditions. "
Well, no? That could also mean that the heat island effect of the (statutorily mandated) employee parking lot is causal.
You can look up the NTT PH1 Datacenter from the study on Google Maps. It doesn't have much of a parking lot but due to poor industrial zoning, it's right next to a residential suburb. It's basically a failure of urban planning.
> The mean air temperature on the upwind side of the facility was approximately 42.7 °C, increasing to 43.5 °C in the neighborhood near the eastern boundary of the data center campus on the downwind side. The observed ΔT of approximately 0.8 °C extended roughly 500 m downwind
Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated over, seems like 500-1000m was their search window from their text. The next paragraph discusses how one of the sites they compare to is a relatively lower average temperate than the rest of Phoenix. Not really convinced by this methodology. Seems like doing something in a flat field with an array of temperature sensors would be a much more robust way to look at heating effects over some reasonable distance. Plenty of data centers fit the bill of flat and semi-isolated, curious why they chose these sites to look at
The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
Industry build-out in the USA? It's raising our energy and water costs.
Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese.
Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!
It's much more tangible for your average person than circular financing deals or chip supply constraints. And unfortunately social media is an amplifier for tangible misinformation.
It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.
For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.
This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:
>Why is that?
The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.
So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?
People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons.
That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.
Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers.
All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.
You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.
There's a certain group of people (the kind of people who used to spend a lot of time on twitter and now spend a lot of time on bluesky) that's convinced that their environmental activism is what defeated NFT and are trying to repeat that to defeat AI because it's the same "tech bros we hate".
Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest, which includes LA, and LA's water system includes NorCal consequences, and California water issues include all-country impacts due to the farming there.
If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
> Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest
no, it's a thing because you can put water in terms that even a hair dresser can be convinced to get scared and angry about. No technical knowledge required.
But when datacenter purchases by Meta are buying pre-colorado compact water rights for the DCs, you can tell what you need to know on how the DC builders treat the short term water risk.
Millions of acre-feet of water, far more than all of the data centers use in the United States combined for evaporative cooling, are used to flood irrigate alfalfa crops in California and Arizona to feed cows. 5% of this is exported. It’s orders of magnitude more water.
All of the irrigated golf courses combined use more water than all of the US data centers combined.
if we were seeing a big increase in building new golf courses in those areas, we'd have the same protests
same if increasing alfalfa farming was increasing significantly
it's harder to stop something that already exists (shutting down existing golf courses or alfalfa farms has consequences for the local communities) than to stop something from coming into existence in the first place
The problem, while your data is probably accurate enough conceptually, is that DCs showed up too late to the scene - the water isn't accounted for.
DCs, new golf, new homes, new alfalfa, new ranching - the math isn't there.
Tech people saying ignore the water problems are saying implicitly that AI, despite showing up late in line for access to a resource that's an old, old problem in the western US, is more important than hearth and home considerations fighting for the same dwindling resource.
The average western farmer/rancher, their own judgement and contributions to this problem aside, definitely love coastal tech people sniping their pre-colorado compact water rights via all that goes into getting water rights like that.
Noise and increased electricity costs. I feel like the people balking at anti-datacenter rhetoric are just intentionally missing the most obvious and directly impacting complaints from residents.
Interesting, as we increase our total global power consumption, losses in the form of heat will increase proportionally.
This is more of a zoning problem
"...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"
Using energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas.
But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
Not necessarily; a building satisfied by its own rooftop solar should be roughly heat neutral since that energy was already there. The problem is with the power density these buildings imply, requiring energy movement. Everyone could run Qwen 3.8 27B at home with a solar panel and it'd make no difference. Companies could run their traditional servers on-site at their offices, etc.
> But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment
The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.
The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.
Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.
1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.
I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ...
*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
These days there always seems to be panic regardless. I find it better to look at the merits of individual claims rather than try to group everything together into a binary answer like a possible conspiracy on one thing means nothing else needs to be considered.
Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere.
I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already.
For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list.
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I'm also in favor of making them pay, and in the end I'm expecting/hoping that's what will happen. But either way, when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa. Plus I'm sure some DCs would just pick another spot if forced to compromise; there's always some red county out there willing to do whatever just for a company to build there, that's why a lot of the DCs are being build in LA/AL/MS etc.
It might also be more complicated than you might think though due to the complexities of increasing power supply. Power companies also use prices raises to discourage residential use and conserve the existing supply for larger customers. They can't refuse to service residential but they also can't increase supply yet, so they just raise the prices until residential users "choose" to lower their power consumption.
My old power company told me it would be a temporary increase until supply was increased, but they said that the last time and it never happened. which, speaking of NOVA, was caused by the Loundon County allowing more data centers to be built. They get the money but since the power grid is regional everyone gets the bill :) .
> when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa.
That's assuming they have so few alternatives that opening with that wouldn't cause them to just cross you off their list.
Convincing your competitors to do that while you don't tends to be pretty profitable though, which is one of the reasons that strategy has so many champions.
> So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents.
This is actually what happens in most places. It's even what happens in many cases when the data centers are given a discount, because the "amortize fixed costs over more units of generation" thing still happens.
Higher rates are essentially a time lag. You want to add load to the grid today but it will take five years to add that much new generation and in the meantime the only way to make a higher demand curve match up with the existing supply curve is at a temporarily higher price.
You could raise the price of electricity on only the data center by so much that it removes the increase in demand, but what that actually means is not building it there, and then it also isn't there after generation catches up and the local power company would have been able to spread their fixed costs over more units.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
Data centers are asset dense. A large one would have a value of e.g. a billion dollars while the neighboring plot of land has an assessment value of a million dollars. That's why they offer tax incentives -- a tenth of the rate on 1000 times the assessment value is a huge revenue win over the 100% of nothing you get if they build it somewhere else.
Or to put it another way, it allows the towns with a higher mill rate to keep themselves in the running instead of being excluded from the outset.
Because people don't like living next to them. They're loud, they're large and monotonous, they don't provide many jobs after construction, they use a lot electricity and decent amount of water, and the ones that rely on fossil fuels pollute.
That plus all the tech bros have gone out of their way to advertise loudly AI as a replacement for humans. So why would a community of humans want to support that?
They don't pay as much. They get their electricity at industrial bulk rates while we pay the residential rate. Their demands require more power lines to be run, but those costs are spread out and blended with consumers. It's a legal form of stealing.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Noise, pollution, energy costs (which you cover in your comment!) and water usage / contamination. I don't want more of those things. I don't want a bunch of strip malls of golf courses in my community, either.
Both of these are complaints about gas turbines rather than data centers.
Data centers can pretty easily do the opposite by offering to curtail load during energy supply shortfalls, both through region shifting and by temporarily operating backup generators, which allows the grid to add more renewable generation without having intermittency issues, and thereby operate fewer gas turbines.
Obviously you have to actually do it that way, but that's the point -- the focus of noise and pollution concerns should be directed towards how power is being generated.
> water usage / contamination
Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.
> energy costs
Energy costs are supply and demand. The econ 101 explanation is generally pretty accurate for supply -- if there isn't enough supply then prices go up. This is why NIMBYs screw everyone (including themselves). If you can't build more of something then you have to pay more for whatever already exists.
Demand is more complicated. Econ 101 usually applies in the immediate term, higher prices don't increase supply instantaneously so an immediate increase in demand tends to create an immediate increase in price. But after that you can increase supply, and then what happens?
You now have higher volume, more economies of scale, more units to amortize fixed costs over. The ultimate effect of an increase in demand is usually a reduction in the unit price.
Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators are preventing supply from increasing. But then you should be focused on fixing that.
>Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.
Is it more than zero? I need to eat (although I do wish we all paid more for cleaner and more ethical food) but I explicitly don't want data centers.
I think this compares to pesticide to control malaria vs. herbicide to to prevent me from noticing two kinds of grass. Both put poison in the environment, but spraying for malaria has a clear benefit to outweigh its costs. But spraying herbicides so my lawn "looks nice" is really only a downside. What are the benefits to more data centers?
>Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators
If we're just doing ad-hominen we need a name for your group. Do you have any suggestions?
This is like complaining that Fox News offices use water in their restrooms because you don't like their reporting. It's transparently not about that.
> I need to eat
Do you need to eat alfalfa grown in California rather than the midwest?
> What are the benefits to more data centers?
Large loads that can be curtailed during supply shortfalls via region shifting or operation of backup generators allow the grid to use a higher percentage of renewable generation without having intermittency issues.
> If we're just doing ad-hominen we need a name for your group.
NIMBY and regulatory capture are both descriptions of behavior rather than group identities.
>This is like complaining that Fox News offices use water in their restrooms because you don't like their reporting. It's transparently not about that.
If Fox news were trying to put a huge bathroom next to my property I certainly would care, though.
> Do you need to eat alfalfa grown in California rather than the midwest?
The only alfalfa I have right now is made of little pellets that I give to my chickens.
> Large loads that can be curtailed during supply shortfalls via region shifting or operation of backup generators allow the grid to use a higher percentage of renewable generation without having intermittency issues.
I don't see how this is a benefit to building more data centers. This sounds like an explanation of how you might mitigate their impact.
> NIMBY
I'm not interested in this term until you'll happily accept a carpet factory next to you that poisons your water for years. There is TONS of stuff that no sane person would want in their back yards.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
This seems naive. You are missing the point. If you don't offer tax incentives, then you don't get data centers (or other important industrial facilities). The internal United States market competition to attract these projects is intense. If you look at when a major foreign auto manuf wants to build a new plant in the US, there is a line of communities hat-in-hand offering all kinds of tax rebates and cheap loans.
> Loudo[u]n County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I looked up the reason why Loudoun County has so many data centers: (1) favorable zoning laws passed in year 2000 and (2) sales tax break specific to data centers.
Consider that the stance now is banning data centers. That's the context of the discussion.
The county's other option is to simply price data centers. Yes, that means they might not win the data center. If the data center can get better terms elsewhere, they do that. If the town doesn't want to concede on price, then fine.
People seem to be mad that data centers show up with less perceived value to the community than they want, so why would they care if the data center builds elsewhere because they don't agree to their price? The position strictly Pareto dominates the ban stance: at worst, they get no data center (same as ban), at best, they get a bunch of tax money.
Please educate me on how I'm "missing the point" because of how "naive" I am!
> they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up
What recent mass-media panics have been legit?
For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.
It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right?
Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.
*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"
"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.
What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.
A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.
You are right this seems to be misleading in a calculated way. And just because this is a junk paper doesn’t mean the groundwater issues aren’t real. I don’t really know who would be incentivized to publish this because as you say if it’s environmentalists they risk discrediting themselves.
Degrowth has always been a big part of Anglophone culture. This is just the latest part of that. If you see the various parties as those downwardly mobile vs those succeeding you can automatically place people predictably into where they’ll land on various issues.
It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.
Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact
Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done
They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.
But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous
Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors.
Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners.
Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.
Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.
All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.
If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.
I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.
> They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.
Got source for that? Because in 90%+ of cases the power prices dropped because they are baseload.
My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth
We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.
Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so.
(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).
I served two terms on my town's planning commission.
It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.
In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.
Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok
-inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns…
It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.
People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.
Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…
You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.
Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it.
I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.
My thinking is most aligned with yours relative to all the other replies. Short term tulip bulb mania pricing on vidya game hardware is annoying and making me delay purchases. And my concerns for long term are about what all that heavy compute will be used for.
All the grug-brained politics and popular panic hysteria about power and water and heat for AI seems to me to be a transient thing, at least with regards to inference. The power requirements for inference will drop to practically zilch once models get etched onto dedicated hardware and the dynamic state requirments become optimized.
I want to know what the real plans are for all the general purpose compute and memory they are building everywhere. If inference is going to wind up being cheap or free, then that general purpose compute will in the best case be left unused and available for lease like dark fiber was after the over-buildout of the 2000's.
In the worst case, all that compute will be used for probably something awful like surveillance.
>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.
It's both.
As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.
You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.
The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.
It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)
Reminds me of how Shake Shack got rid of all of their peanut butter milkshakes years ago because one single person complained that their child with a peanut allergy couldn't have them.
The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down.
But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.
4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.
> My skeptic meter
Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD
> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.
Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine.
It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts.
If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.
Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.
The Texas grid is largely independent of the national grid. Abbott wants an audit to ensure data center plans comply with the rules. "Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first."
It's not a pro or anti business stance it's just a deal-is-a-deal stance.
As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water.
This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.
That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth.
Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.
What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?
Have you seen pictures of Los Angeles from space? It's a grey speck. I grew up in the smog layer, let me tell you it was disgusting and I'm sure it gave me respiratory disease. But from space, the smog blowing off every day looks like a tiny little fart because the world is huge.
I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one.
> Have you seen pictures of Los Angeles from space? It's a grey speck. I grew up in the smog layer, let me tell you it was disgusting and I'm sure it gave me respiratory disease. But from space, the smog blowing off every day looks like a tiny little fart because the world is huge.
Alright then. So I suppose you think that was "a backyard issue... [and] it [was] politics to hate on [smog]," and so the expensive efforts to mitigate it, like requiring catalytic converters and NOx mitigation should be repealed? Or not enacted in the first place?
> I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one.
I honestly just don't think you understand what's going on, what the issue is, so are just saying all kinds of foolish things. You should probably work on your empathy skills, and put aside your overdeveloped skills of dismissal.
I love how you're working through all this! There are indeed two sides to every coin.
> Alright then. So I suppose you think that was "a backyard issue... [and] it [was] politics to hate on [smog]," and so the expensive efforts to mitigate it, like requiring catalytic converters and NOx mitigation should be repealed? Or not enacted in the first place?
The gotcha here is that I must hate politics that address the destruction of the planet so i am self-destructive. But you seem reluctant to ascribe working brain cells to people you disagree with, so your gotcha is worded to get a dummy to think. I wonder who told you people you disagree with are fools. Maybe those people aren't your friends. Maybe they secretly hate you.
Let's jump to the end of the argument where there's common ground. Of course pollution is real, I called living in smog disgusting, didn't I?
Who has the power to deal with these huge negative externalities? Usually the government with regulation that hopefully doesn't create bigger downstream problems.
Catalytic converters: good, regulation on factory outputs: good. See how we can agree?
*But* political grifters love the fear pr0n, the power of panic. And so we also got the world ending climate emergency stuff. And that was an expensive grift for taxpayers and europeans never got to enjoy air conditioners, but thankfully it seems to be petering out now at least in the US. It is safe to unclench your butthole because the sky isn't falling, and it was never falling.
> empathy skills
Emotional arguments and trusting snakes who hate you are what got you to where you are in the first place mentally. Time to be critical OF EVERYBODY. What is their angle? Are they paid?
> You also mentioned "propaganda campaigns," but think about it: investors are pouring literally trillions of dollars into AI. Who do you think is going to be running the "propaganda campaigns," the people with the trillions or their opponents?
I love this! You are thinking rightly, but you need to complete your thoughts.
This place is CRAWLING with shills for the AI businesses. How do you think Anthropic grew from nothing to trillions so quickly? They have big line items on their financial statements for influence campaigns. It is an attack on us and IT IS WORKING SO WELL.
Elon bought Twitter to run continual AI influence campaigns and for his other businesses and to get a trove of decades of exclusive training data in tweets and DM's.
I didn't get shill mogged in this particular instance because I happened to be speaking in favor of AI data centers. If anything, i got a few shills backing me up, but they were downvoted for weak shillery.
You will probably dig in your heels, and feel i've said hurtful things. Being disagreed with IS hurtful in a way, it hurts to have your ideas picked on.
I just hope you can be more discerning and be more suspicious when panic is delivered into your feed trying to spin you up again for the thousandth time. Let your dopamine receptors finally burn out completely. ;)
> The gotcha here is that I must hate politics that address the destruction of the planet so i am self-destructive. But you seem reluctant to ascribe working brain cells to people you disagree with, so your gotcha is worded to get a dummy to think. I wonder who told you people you disagree with are fools. Maybe those people aren't your friends. Maybe they secretly hate you.
No, the point is the logic of your initial dismissal was asinine: e.g. the problem doesn't look big from space, therefore it must not be a really big deal, (and later, a conspiratorial) therefore the concern about and opposition to the problem must be "non-organic."
Then you went back into space again to talk about smog.
What you need to do come back to Earth, look at things from the ground, sometimes from others' POV. Your space angle isn't deep or insightful, it may seem so on first glance, like the prose of an LLM instructed to say something deep, but it's similarly empty.
> Emotional arguments and trusting snakes who hate you are what got you to where you are in the first place mentally. Time to be critical OF EVERYBODY. What is their angle? Are they paid?
1. Honestly, that reads like a hallucination. It either literally is one or you assume too much.
2. You're giving vibes like you lack anchors and are trending towards paranoia.
> ...and feel i've said hurtful things. Being disagreed with IS hurtful in a way, it hurts to have your ideas picked on.
heh
> I just hope you can be more discerning and be more suspicious when panic is delivered into your feed trying to spin you up again for the thousandth time. Let your dopamine receptors finally burn out completely. ;)
See point 1 above. But if you're trying to convince me to shut up, you've failed.
See? You think people who disagree with you are stupid! When you run a simulation of what what is going on in others' heads, do you envision a sucking void? You ascribe no nuance to me at all.
In fact, what if your entire belief system on climate is based on moneyed interest greed and pernicious lies? Is that possible? How many more decades will you wait for the sky to fall until you question?
The mind boggling size of the earth reminds me that we are a type 0 civilization that burns stuff for power. Smog for me was not in space, I lived on a hillside and looked straight out into the smog layer and suffered personally for it.
To be against pollution is just logical, to think we're capable of destroying the biosphere with our current pollution levels is hubristic. You are capable of hubris, I know big shock!
>> No, the point is the logic of your initial dismissal was asinine
> See? You think people who disagree with you are stupid!
No. What I wrote was your "argument" was asinine. Read it again.
However, the pattern of your reactions to what I've written are leading me to form certain opinions of you personally, but I don't generalize those to the class of "people who disagree with [me]."
You're going off the rails. I suspect you're not actually engaging with what I'm writing, but a character you've created in your head.
It's amazing how much discourse is just people pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
Asinine means "utterly silly or stupid" and "ass-like".
You can't separate criticizing the person making an argument from criticism of the argument when using a charged put down like 'asinine'.
I have made reasoned arguments, nowhere near asinine tier. If you want to appeal to authority/experts or cite lefty prop, okay I guess. Otherwise, I've heard it all and done the research. I've lived too long and watched decades of doomer predictions fail. It's exhausting! Be tired with me, collapse! :)
Finally, I never want you to shut up, I just want the grift you prefer (or at least tolerate) to end. The best I can offer you is political exile to the wasteland of failed ideas forever. ;)
I didn't flag you @palmotea, I prefer to keep the conversation going. I am sympathetic to your frustration, but your words have meaning, whether you are conscious of them or not and those meanings are as far as I can go to meet your mind.
One of the last definitions of empathy is to possess a supernatural mind reading ability to understand what others are thinking. I must admit to my inability to read your mind in person or over the internets.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.
Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters.
Being within a few hundred meters of a building that's consuming tens to hundreds of megawatts will do that, yes.
You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.
At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.
It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.
Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.
There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.
Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.
Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.
It's new, noticeable, memorable, and the companies involved (tech) are uniquely unlikable. Incumbents that use more resources in ways that create unwanted externalities are better about doing things more stealthily, and look rather boring. Also they've been there the entire time, so easier to accept.
From my research, data centers and - more importantly - the electricity required to run data centers, are consuming a lot of water. On a local level, the water use can even be significant.
There is a lot of conflicting information out there, partly because the resources / environmental consequences of the current rollouts are incredibly multi-dimensional, and most articles only focus on a subset of them - and there seems to be rapid innovation happening in some of the infrastructure that can void an article from a year ago.
The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals.
I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.
It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.
I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs 800 staff. They probably bribe the right people every year to keep it going.
Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.
Step 1: Convince the public (voters) that Data Centers are the evil boogeyman
Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies).
General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations!
Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around.
Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage.
Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure.
Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason?
“Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!”
Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players.
Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”.
i2p = dead
Hyphanet = dead
TOR = dead
[insert self hosted service] = dead
I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.
I try to be a fun person. But, no it wasn't satire. I find this latest satanic panic to be so cringe. If you crave religion, I suggest you find a bible and get to know Jesus because the post-modernist stuff blows.
I think I know what you mean, but that is a side effect of how eyeballs are collected with all the doomsday stuff, but lets be real here, what's the point of more data centers only for LLMs? I work with cloud stuff and you cannot, and I mean it, cannot believe how much compute is wasted on the tiniest of things just because.
I value your experience! I agree with you the insane buildout does not make sense. The rapidly approaching optimizations in the inference space will eliminate 99% of the current compute requirements. So what do they really need all the general compute for??
I work with cloud everyday and am disgusted by the waste - not cracking 5% utilization on huge clusters. It feels like globocorpo money laundering to me.
Every once in awhile you get to see good utilization in cloud with distribution and amazing scaling and failover with big data and it all seems worthwhile. :)
China is certainly thrilled with how this manufactured moral panic is playing out in the US. AI is going to be the most important technology in the world before long.
The water use panic is so ridiculous. The sheep pushing it do so while sipping almond milk lattes. One almond milk latte uses the same water as tens of thousands of chat gpt requests.
~80–90 liters for one typical almond milk latte vs. ~0.3–15 mL for one ChatGPT request.
Using a mid-range AI figure of ~5 mL: one latte ≈ 16,000–18,000 ChatGPT requests.
Using OpenAI’s ~0.32 mL figure: one latte ≈ 250,000+ requests.
Even with a higher AI estimate of 50 mL: still roughly 1,600–1,800 requests per latte.
It feels like there's some legit bad practices that some folks have been hit with and legit complaints.
But yes online there's a populist panic about it that seems disconnected and completely driving itself without basis in reality... Locally there's folks terribly angry about fairly small data centers and they don't realize how many are around them and they never notice.
Some in my area I would love to live near because on the property they have big green space and wetlands surrounding them.
We built maybe two of the older less dense ones every year in most states, and that was driven by SaaS and cloud storage. The expected rate these AI datacenters would be built at if we just let these people go unopposed would be one every single week for the next four years. Something the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter that uses the equivalent electricity of fifty to sixty four person households and depending on if it's open or closed loop cooled could use the equivalent of thirty households' worth of water.
That doesn't sound like a panic, that sounds like people wanting some consideration and moderation of infrastructure that's extremely disruptive and tied to a technology that's causing more damage than it's helping currently.
Why do you assume that building data centers is critical to begin with? You seem to start with an assumption you haven’t even questioned? Just 5 years ago very few Americans thought massive data center buildout was key to the economy.
Your comment about the size of the earth is confounding. How is that relevant? Raising temps 4 degrees locally is a serious issue. Yes it will be worse if it scales but it doesn’t have to in order for us to care.
The tech companies could be building green data centers. Using renewable energy they are paying to add to the grid ( ie building the solar plant along with the data centers) and then flowing half the power they make back to the grid to lower prices. They could similarly work with water, purifying non drinking sources and adding to supply overall.
Costs would balloon but the negative impacts would go and getting a data center would mean jobs, lower prices for energy, less carbon and clean water.
Doing it the way we are - based on subsidies and pollution - is a choice.
5 years ago was 2021. Covid was causing a lot of thoughts about the economy that I think, people who were thinking about it did actually include data centers in, given that shelter in place meant that Internet usage was up. As far as whether I think data centers are justified, the climate accords have failed to stop industrialization, so the only way forwards is through - meaning if data centers are how we get to fusion and advanced geothermal and solar and wind power because of the sheer power demands, so be it. I wish we could just get off coal and oil in the first place, but me wishing things has no effect on reality.
As far as what tech companies could be doing to be green, Google's investment into Fervo Energy gives them energy that runs 24/7 with no reliance on the weather or the sun. They've got an initial plant going, all that's left is to replicate it and find cheaper ways to do it.
Regardless of the datacenter issues being true or not, I think any friction that can be applied on "AI" is good. Not to mention people pushing "AI" not really bothering with facts either.
This is necessary to bring "AI" possessed people back to reality from their feverish dream world, so we can get rid of all the negative externalities of the "AI" push & finally find out what this new tech is actually genuinely useful for.
During peak sunlight conditions, a standard black asphalt surface will readily absorb solar radiation, sending its surface temperature to 150°F–190°F .
A clean white roof reflects up to 80% of sunlight, and topping out at around 95°F–115°F. (https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roo...)
With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks?
Even at today's demand Anthropic and OpenAI often return 'model overloaded' errors.
Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this:
>I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years
Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy.
Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world.
If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice.
The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.
If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts.
I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.
When you label people who disagree with you ideological extremists, you're part of the problem. They're properly labeled "people who believe things that I don't believe" and they deserve a counterargument rather than a curt dismissal or demand for silencing. If you have the courage of your own beliefs, it should be trivial to offer one.
It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answer, it's good AI slop.
Agreed, also with the people claiming foreign influence or fake accounts. I like AI, I use it a lot for work. I do not think people opposed to data centers are under foreign influence. It's pretty obvious why someone wouldn't want a huge building in their neighborhood. It's also pretty obvious to me that we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates in places like Phoenix Arizona! There can be discussion for sure, but to accuse people (who are quite frankly taking a pretty obvious and easy to understand position) of being "foreign agents" or "extremists", is just wrong. If anyone is the extremists, it's us, the heavy AI users.
if you've ever read Plato's dialogues or are familiar with the court politics of the eunuchs during, well, any Chinese dynasty, you might be convinced that even those that sit squarely in the seat of power and have the best access to food, education, and disposable time in their era are all still just a bunch of ideologues prone to bickering, constantly arguing from feelings and having little echo chambers, and so on
has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations
A lot of those aren't really online problems. People will always be discussing from feelings, bickering, so on. Go to any town hall meeting or debate club and you can see the same. Take a look at politicians and their discussions too, yeah?
If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.
We need some gatekeeping. We need automated fact checking. We need moderation based on someone's domain expertise and not how well their argument appeals to readers. User moderation is fundamentally broken and maybe only worked for a while due to the participants tending towards a particular background. Also, in the age of AI it's questionable if community forums can even continue to exist.
Luckily, modern cooling techniques like heat pumps are much more efficient than resistive heating, 300% to 500% efficiency is easily attainable. You can keep the inside of a data center nice and chilly at room temperature even in the middle of a heat wave.
Then there is also the heat island effect. Concrete boxes will heat up an area more than dirt or wood, even if those boxes are completely empty inside. If you build them near where people live, people are gonna notice. Houses have gardens, industrial complexes such as data centers and factories don't.
Also, the effect is more concentrated downwind, so the heat effect is not some kind of uniform distribution in all directions.
That's surprising to me. You think a gigawatt of heat cannot be felt 500 meters downwind? How near before you experience the temperature rise in the article, if not that?
I’m confused. Rejecting one GW of heat to the building exterior with heat exchangers is going to heat up the area around the heat exchangers.
If you had a hypothetical 1 GW generator and used a hypothetical 1 GW loadbank with 1 GW of resistive heating and a fan that was outdoors, the air temperature would rise.
Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem.
The industrial resource utilization is being done to serve the consumer.
Pinning carbon emissions on a steel mill (which sells to airplane manufacturers who take people on vacation flights) is logically incoherent and motivated reasoning.
198 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadhonestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
https://selectmesa.com/business-environment/incentives-progr...
The big tech outfit and power utility collaboratively fund a non-profit to create a number of no-show $300k/y vice chairmanship jobs, and arrange to have the spouse and/or children of key city and county leaders hired for these positions. The rest is academic.
I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now.
For me, noise would be my first concern
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0620288/characters/nm0362548/?i...
Well, no? That could also mean that the heat island effect of the (statutorily mandated) employee parking lot is causal.
Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated over, seems like 500-1000m was their search window from their text. The next paragraph discusses how one of the sites they compare to is a relatively lower average temperate than the rest of Phoenix. Not really convinced by this methodology. Seems like doing something in a flat field with an array of temperature sensors would be a much more robust way to look at heating effects over some reasonable distance. Plenty of data centers fit the bill of flat and semi-isolated, curious why they chose these sites to look at
If you catch me on fire my average temperature rise doesn't go up very much, but I have the barest of hints that it might have an impact.
I understand that the study only showed that this was the maximum observed difference downwind of one data center during one run.
(article says 2.2 [C/K], btw)
there are now record setting gas turbine sales instead of solar/nuclear
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8ziQCWK1w
and for what?
so we can have totally useless "AI" customer service agents where you still have to demand to talk to a human to properly get a problem solved
Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese.
Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!
For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.
This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:
>Why is that?
The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.
So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?
That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.
All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.
You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.
If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
no, it's a thing because you can put water in terms that even a hair dresser can be convinced to get scared and angry about. No technical knowledge required.
All of the irrigated golf courses combined use more water than all of the US data centers combined.
same if increasing alfalfa farming was increasing significantly
it's harder to stop something that already exists (shutting down existing golf courses or alfalfa farms has consequences for the local communities) than to stop something from coming into existence in the first place
DCs, new golf, new homes, new alfalfa, new ranching - the math isn't there.
Tech people saying ignore the water problems are saying implicitly that AI, despite showing up late in line for access to a resource that's an old, old problem in the western US, is more important than hearth and home considerations fighting for the same dwindling resource.
The average western farmer/rancher, their own judgement and contributions to this problem aside, definitely love coastal tech people sniping their pre-colorado compact water rights via all that goes into getting water rights like that.
This is more of a zoning problem
"...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"
But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.
The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.
Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.
1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.
*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere.
I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already.
For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
Everyone would be singing their praises.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
https://www.wemu.org/wemu-news/2026-07-18/saline-township-re...
It might also be more complicated than you might think though due to the complexities of increasing power supply. Power companies also use prices raises to discourage residential use and conserve the existing supply for larger customers. They can't refuse to service residential but they also can't increase supply yet, so they just raise the prices until residential users "choose" to lower their power consumption.
My old power company told me it would be a temporary increase until supply was increased, but they said that the last time and it never happened. which, speaking of NOVA, was caused by the Loundon County allowing more data centers to be built. They get the money but since the power grid is regional everyone gets the bill :) .
That's assuming they have so few alternatives that opening with that wouldn't cause them to just cross you off their list.
Convincing your competitors to do that while you don't tends to be pretty profitable though, which is one of the reasons that strategy has so many champions.
This is actually what happens in most places. It's even what happens in many cases when the data centers are given a discount, because the "amortize fixed costs over more units of generation" thing still happens.
Higher rates are essentially a time lag. You want to add load to the grid today but it will take five years to add that much new generation and in the meantime the only way to make a higher demand curve match up with the existing supply curve is at a temporarily higher price.
You could raise the price of electricity on only the data center by so much that it removes the increase in demand, but what that actually means is not building it there, and then it also isn't there after generation catches up and the local power company would have been able to spread their fixed costs over more units.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
Data centers are asset dense. A large one would have a value of e.g. a billion dollars while the neighboring plot of land has an assessment value of a million dollars. That's why they offer tax incentives -- a tenth of the rate on 1000 times the assessment value is a huge revenue win over the 100% of nothing you get if they build it somewhere else.
Or to put it another way, it allows the towns with a higher mill rate to keep themselves in the running instead of being excluded from the outset.
That plus all the tech bros have gone out of their way to advertise loudly AI as a replacement for humans. So why would a community of humans want to support that?
Noise, pollution, energy costs (which you cover in your comment!) and water usage / contamination. I don't want more of those things. I don't want a bunch of strip malls of golf courses in my community, either.
Both of these are complaints about gas turbines rather than data centers.
Data centers can pretty easily do the opposite by offering to curtail load during energy supply shortfalls, both through region shifting and by temporarily operating backup generators, which allows the grid to add more renewable generation without having intermittency issues, and thereby operate fewer gas turbines.
Obviously you have to actually do it that way, but that's the point -- the focus of noise and pollution concerns should be directed towards how power is being generated.
> water usage / contamination
Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.
> energy costs
Energy costs are supply and demand. The econ 101 explanation is generally pretty accurate for supply -- if there isn't enough supply then prices go up. This is why NIMBYs screw everyone (including themselves). If you can't build more of something then you have to pay more for whatever already exists.
Demand is more complicated. Econ 101 usually applies in the immediate term, higher prices don't increase supply instantaneously so an immediate increase in demand tends to create an immediate increase in price. But after that you can increase supply, and then what happens?
You now have higher volume, more economies of scale, more units to amortize fixed costs over. The ultimate effect of an increase in demand is usually a reduction in the unit price.
Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators are preventing supply from increasing. But then you should be focused on fixing that.
Is it more than zero? I need to eat (although I do wish we all paid more for cleaner and more ethical food) but I explicitly don't want data centers.
I think this compares to pesticide to control malaria vs. herbicide to to prevent me from noticing two kinds of grass. Both put poison in the environment, but spraying for malaria has a clear benefit to outweigh its costs. But spraying herbicides so my lawn "looks nice" is really only a downside. What are the benefits to more data centers?
>Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators
If we're just doing ad-hominen we need a name for your group. Do you have any suggestions?
This is like complaining that Fox News offices use water in their restrooms because you don't like their reporting. It's transparently not about that.
> I need to eat
Do you need to eat alfalfa grown in California rather than the midwest?
> What are the benefits to more data centers?
Large loads that can be curtailed during supply shortfalls via region shifting or operation of backup generators allow the grid to use a higher percentage of renewable generation without having intermittency issues.
> If we're just doing ad-hominen we need a name for your group.
NIMBY and regulatory capture are both descriptions of behavior rather than group identities.
If Fox news were trying to put a huge bathroom next to my property I certainly would care, though.
> Do you need to eat alfalfa grown in California rather than the midwest?
The only alfalfa I have right now is made of little pellets that I give to my chickens.
> Large loads that can be curtailed during supply shortfalls via region shifting or operation of backup generators allow the grid to use a higher percentage of renewable generation without having intermittency issues.
I don't see how this is a benefit to building more data centers. This sounds like an explanation of how you might mitigate their impact.
> NIMBY
I'm not interested in this term until you'll happily accept a carpet factory next to you that poisons your water for years. There is TONS of stuff that no sane person would want in their back yards.
Well maybe if you were in community with the people protesting them you'd understand their perspective.
The county's other option is to simply price data centers. Yes, that means they might not win the data center. If the data center can get better terms elsewhere, they do that. If the town doesn't want to concede on price, then fine.
People seem to be mad that data centers show up with less perceived value to the community than they want, so why would they care if the data center builds elsewhere because they don't agree to their price? The position strictly Pareto dominates the ban stance: at worst, they get no data center (same as ban), at best, they get a bunch of tax money.
Please educate me on how I'm "missing the point" because of how "naive" I am!
It's far cheaper to buy local politicians.
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
https://www.loudoun.gov/faq.aspx?TID=241
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.
What recent mass-media panics have been legit?
For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.
Compare the scale of datacenter construction in the past decades vs the pace post 2022.
Also the general computing datacenters of the past are vastly different in societal utility vs the GPU only AI datacenters, which do just one thing
They use order of magnitudes more resources.
Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.
*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"
"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.
What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.
A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.
It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.
Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact
Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done
They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.
But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous
Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.
Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.
All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.
If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.
I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.
Got source for that? Because in 90%+ of cases the power prices dropped because they are baseload.
This is the trumped up rhetoric you speak of.
We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.
(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).
It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.
In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.
It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.
People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.
Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…
I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.
All the grug-brained politics and popular panic hysteria about power and water and heat for AI seems to me to be a transient thing, at least with regards to inference. The power requirements for inference will drop to practically zilch once models get etched onto dedicated hardware and the dynamic state requirments become optimized.
I want to know what the real plans are for all the general purpose compute and memory they are building everywhere. If inference is going to wind up being cheap or free, then that general purpose compute will in the best case be left unused and available for lease like dark fiber was after the over-buildout of the 2000's.
In the worst case, all that compute will be used for probably something awful like surveillance.
It's both.
As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.
You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.
The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.
It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)
But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.
That is using FUD to avoid accountability. In this case is the last one "doubt". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.
> My skeptic meter
Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD
Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.
Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine.
It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts.
If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.
It's not a pro or anti business stance it's just a deal-is-a-deal stance.
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comp...
This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.
That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.
Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.
What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?
I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one.
Alright then. So I suppose you think that was "a backyard issue... [and] it [was] politics to hate on [smog]," and so the expensive efforts to mitigate it, like requiring catalytic converters and NOx mitigation should be repealed? Or not enacted in the first place?
> I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one.
I honestly just don't think you understand what's going on, what the issue is, so are just saying all kinds of foolish things. You should probably work on your empathy skills, and put aside your overdeveloped skills of dismissal.
> Alright then. So I suppose you think that was "a backyard issue... [and] it [was] politics to hate on [smog]," and so the expensive efforts to mitigate it, like requiring catalytic converters and NOx mitigation should be repealed? Or not enacted in the first place?
The gotcha here is that I must hate politics that address the destruction of the planet so i am self-destructive. But you seem reluctant to ascribe working brain cells to people you disagree with, so your gotcha is worded to get a dummy to think. I wonder who told you people you disagree with are fools. Maybe those people aren't your friends. Maybe they secretly hate you.
Let's jump to the end of the argument where there's common ground. Of course pollution is real, I called living in smog disgusting, didn't I?
Who has the power to deal with these huge negative externalities? Usually the government with regulation that hopefully doesn't create bigger downstream problems.
Catalytic converters: good, regulation on factory outputs: good. See how we can agree?
*But* political grifters love the fear pr0n, the power of panic. And so we also got the world ending climate emergency stuff. And that was an expensive grift for taxpayers and europeans never got to enjoy air conditioners, but thankfully it seems to be petering out now at least in the US. It is safe to unclench your butthole because the sky isn't falling, and it was never falling.
> empathy skills
Emotional arguments and trusting snakes who hate you are what got you to where you are in the first place mentally. Time to be critical OF EVERYBODY. What is their angle? Are they paid?
> You also mentioned "propaganda campaigns," but think about it: investors are pouring literally trillions of dollars into AI. Who do you think is going to be running the "propaganda campaigns," the people with the trillions or their opponents?
I love this! You are thinking rightly, but you need to complete your thoughts.
This place is CRAWLING with shills for the AI businesses. How do you think Anthropic grew from nothing to trillions so quickly? They have big line items on their financial statements for influence campaigns. It is an attack on us and IT IS WORKING SO WELL.
Elon bought Twitter to run continual AI influence campaigns and for his other businesses and to get a trove of decades of exclusive training data in tweets and DM's.
I didn't get shill mogged in this particular instance because I happened to be speaking in favor of AI data centers. If anything, i got a few shills backing me up, but they were downvoted for weak shillery.
You will probably dig in your heels, and feel i've said hurtful things. Being disagreed with IS hurtful in a way, it hurts to have your ideas picked on.
I just hope you can be more discerning and be more suspicious when panic is delivered into your feed trying to spin you up again for the thousandth time. Let your dopamine receptors finally burn out completely. ;)
No, the point is the logic of your initial dismissal was asinine: e.g. the problem doesn't look big from space, therefore it must not be a really big deal, (and later, a conspiratorial) therefore the concern about and opposition to the problem must be "non-organic."
Then you went back into space again to talk about smog.
What you need to do come back to Earth, look at things from the ground, sometimes from others' POV. Your space angle isn't deep or insightful, it may seem so on first glance, like the prose of an LLM instructed to say something deep, but it's similarly empty.
> Emotional arguments and trusting snakes who hate you are what got you to where you are in the first place mentally. Time to be critical OF EVERYBODY. What is their angle? Are they paid?
1. Honestly, that reads like a hallucination. It either literally is one or you assume too much.
2. You're giving vibes like you lack anchors and are trending towards paranoia.
> ...and feel i've said hurtful things. Being disagreed with IS hurtful in a way, it hurts to have your ideas picked on.
heh
> I just hope you can be more discerning and be more suspicious when panic is delivered into your feed trying to spin you up again for the thousandth time. Let your dopamine receptors finally burn out completely. ;)
See point 1 above. But if you're trying to convince me to shut up, you've failed.
See? You think people who disagree with you are stupid! When you run a simulation of what what is going on in others' heads, do you envision a sucking void? You ascribe no nuance to me at all.
In fact, what if your entire belief system on climate is based on moneyed interest greed and pernicious lies? Is that possible? How many more decades will you wait for the sky to fall until you question?
The mind boggling size of the earth reminds me that we are a type 0 civilization that burns stuff for power. Smog for me was not in space, I lived on a hillside and looked straight out into the smog layer and suffered personally for it.
To be against pollution is just logical, to think we're capable of destroying the biosphere with our current pollution levels is hubristic. You are capable of hubris, I know big shock!
> See? You think people who disagree with you are stupid!
No. What I wrote was your "argument" was asinine. Read it again.
However, the pattern of your reactions to what I've written are leading me to form certain opinions of you personally, but I don't generalize those to the class of "people who disagree with [me]."
You're going off the rails. I suspect you're not actually engaging with what I'm writing, but a character you've created in your head.
Asinine means "utterly silly or stupid" and "ass-like".
You can't separate criticizing the person making an argument from criticism of the argument when using a charged put down like 'asinine'.
I have made reasoned arguments, nowhere near asinine tier. If you want to appeal to authority/experts or cite lefty prop, okay I guess. Otherwise, I've heard it all and done the research. I've lived too long and watched decades of doomer predictions fail. It's exhausting! Be tired with me, collapse! :)
Finally, I never want you to shut up, I just want the grift you prefer (or at least tolerate) to end. The best I can offer you is political exile to the wasteland of failed ideas forever. ;)
One of the last definitions of empathy is to possess a supernatural mind reading ability to understand what others are thinking. I must admit to my inability to read your mind in person or over the internets.
I imagine China bought the accounts or pay $20 for a post.
Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.
Being within a few hundred meters of a building that's consuming tens to hundreds of megawatts will do that, yes.You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.
At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.
It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.
Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.
Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.
Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.
The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals.
I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.
Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.
Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies).
General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations!
Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around.
Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage.
Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure.
Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason?
“Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!”
Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players.
Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”.
i2p = dead Hyphanet = dead TOR = dead [insert self hosted service] = dead
I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.
I work with cloud everyday and am disgusted by the waste - not cracking 5% utilization on huge clusters. It feels like globocorpo money laundering to me.
Every once in awhile you get to see good utilization in cloud with distribution and amazing scaling and failover with big data and it all seems worthwhile. :)
The water use panic is so ridiculous. The sheep pushing it do so while sipping almond milk lattes. One almond milk latte uses the same water as tens of thousands of chat gpt requests.
~80–90 liters for one typical almond milk latte vs. ~0.3–15 mL for one ChatGPT request. Using a mid-range AI figure of ~5 mL: one latte ≈ 16,000–18,000 ChatGPT requests. Using OpenAI’s ~0.32 mL figure: one latte ≈ 250,000+ requests. Even with a higher AI estimate of 50 mL: still roughly 1,600–1,800 requests per latte.
But yes online there's a populist panic about it that seems disconnected and completely driving itself without basis in reality... Locally there's folks terribly angry about fairly small data centers and they don't realize how many are around them and they never notice.
Some in my area I would love to live near because on the property they have big green space and wetlands surrounding them.
That doesn't sound like a panic, that sounds like people wanting some consideration and moderation of infrastructure that's extremely disruptive and tied to a technology that's causing more damage than it's helping currently.
Your comment about the size of the earth is confounding. How is that relevant? Raising temps 4 degrees locally is a serious issue. Yes it will be worse if it scales but it doesn’t have to in order for us to care.
The tech companies could be building green data centers. Using renewable energy they are paying to add to the grid ( ie building the solar plant along with the data centers) and then flowing half the power they make back to the grid to lower prices. They could similarly work with water, purifying non drinking sources and adding to supply overall.
Costs would balloon but the negative impacts would go and getting a data center would mean jobs, lower prices for energy, less carbon and clean water.
Doing it the way we are - based on subsidies and pollution - is a choice.
As far as what tech companies could be doing to be green, Google's investment into Fervo Energy gives them energy that runs 24/7 with no reliance on the weather or the sun. They've got an initial plant going, all that's left is to replicate it and find cheaper ways to do it.
This is necessary to bring "AI" possessed people back to reality from their feverish dream world, so we can get rid of all the negative externalities of the "AI" push & finally find out what this new tech is actually genuinely useful for.
https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in...
https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic...
Fuck that.
Let 'em burn.
that's a pretty stark difference
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
if they had voted differently we'd see more positive action
The benefit to effort ratio seems fishy to me.
Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this:
>I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years
Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy.
Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world.
If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice.
The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.
> "... air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C ..."
Seems more likely that the heating is climate change driven primarily. But, 140k cars 24/7 is a lot of cars, so???
I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.
come on now, HN is just a step above reddit. some of these discussions are pretty solid.
It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answer, it's good AI slop.
Jesus.
has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations
If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.
I think it's good that there are topics that elicit emotional responses. It does make the discussion a bit difficult, gotta admit that.
This site has as much of an ideological slant as any other site, this isn't a unique oasis in a sea of partisan echo chambers.
Then there is also the heat island effect. Concrete boxes will heat up an area more than dirt or wood, even if those boxes are completely empty inside. If you build them near where people live, people are gonna notice. Houses have gardens, industrial complexes such as data centers and factories don't.
Also, the effect is more concentrated downwind, so the heat effect is not some kind of uniform distribution in all directions.
If you had a hypothetical 1 GW generator and used a hypothetical 1 GW loadbank with 1 GW of resistive heating and a fan that was outdoors, the air temperature would rise.
Data centers can do a thing positively and yet have negative impacts that should be discussed. It's not that hard.
If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
Pinning carbon emissions on a steel mill (which sells to airplane manufacturers who take people on vacation flights) is logically incoherent and motivated reasoning.