Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?
lacewing 1 days ago [-]
The page mentioned in the article seems to focus on "AI Data Centers". Looks like it's a much smaller set of hyperscale stuff, not every telco building with a bunch of racks.
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
blackoil 1 days ago [-]
Erin Brockovich is popular enough that it justifies duplicacy of efforts, amount of visibility her name will brings in much more value than cost of building it.
scarab92 8 hours ago [-]
People opposed to data centres remind me of people opposed to mask wearing.
Both are attempting to dismiss something useful and important, over trivial and manageable issues, mostly for culture war reasons rather than rational reasons.
peddling-brink 4 hours ago [-]
Haha, what?
Data centers are loud, raise energy prices for everyone around them, and use drinking water in tremendous quantities.
This isn’t a culture war, this is a class war.
Edit: you might be a bot. No comments in the last 47 days, then a string of hard-pro data center comments in the last week.
coldtea 23 hours ago [-]
This is about " major AI-focused and hyperscale data centers running AI workloads". Not any random one.
It also accepts user reporting of new developments, breaks them down in several categories (tracking proposed, operational, under construction, etc).
And eventually it can also track more information about them, specific to their cases (amount of water and energy used, pollution reports, etc). E.g. it has information like "1.2 GW AI factory broke ground May 12, 2026 at Eastgate Commerce Center (Little Blue Pkwy & MO-78). 400 acres, up to 10 buildings. ~1,200 construction jobs / ~130 full-time. Multi-billion-dollar investment; $150bn taxable industrial development revenue bonds secured." for some.
nixass 1 days ago [-]
This map is inaccurate, for at least one major FAANG player. General metro area seems to be good but actual physical location is way wrong, not even the campus is right
ranger_danger 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah even the very large DC I worked at 20 years ago still isn't listed, and it's still operating.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
To document the impacts and organize people against the harms.
jeffbee 1 days ago [-]
Giving equal weight to real data centers and 1000sqft telco switches on this map is sort of misleading.
rcpt 1 days ago [-]
Neither have much impact on the local area so equal weight makes sense
robwwilliams 1 days ago [-]
Living downwind of Colossus I and Colossus II in Memphis has orders of magnitude more weight than even a convention large data center. On par with a large cargo airport like MEM (FedEx hub).
jpster 1 days ago [-]
What does “has more weight” mean in this context?
pchristensen 1 days ago [-]
Impact and externalities.
rcpt 15 hours ago [-]
Such as
1vuio0pswjnm7 13 hours ago [-]
DCR is a business. The datacentermap.com website is a way to promote their services
Brockovich is an environmental activist. Her project uses the public as a source of data for the map ("community reports")
DCR does not
cowsandmilk 1 days ago [-]
I mean, why was OpenStreetMap created?
pastage 1 days ago [-]
That is a good question. The existing data center map above is commercial so creating a free version with a clear goal seems to align with why OSM was started. The social aspect of OpenStreetMap was more important than the technical part.
1 days ago [-]
jagged-chisel 1 days ago [-]
It puts a number greater than 4,000 in the middle of the US. Maybe that’s reliable, maybe it’s accurate, but it’s certainly not useful.
seeknotfind 1 days ago [-]
You can click on that to see more detail :)
jagged-chisel 1 days ago [-]
I guess it’s just not designed for mobile. Tapping didn’t reveal anything.
guiambros 1 days ago [-]
It works well on Android. Just zoom in and click the number, and you can breakdown per state. Click on any state number and it breaks down per city.
Pretty functional design.
dkeners 19 hours ago [-]
I had to click the blue number twice to get it to open on iOS, though I was also confused at first.
gnatman 1 days ago [-]
you click on that number to drill down into more and more granular information
sandos 1 days ago [-]
At least 3 amazon AWS locations are missing in Sweden... This just from checking my own town.
EDIT: NO! Wth is this map? I have to click to expand the clusters. Ah well, all is good.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
The Erin Brockovich page itself repeats the canard, on the front page, that these sites endanger ecosystems with their water consumption.
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever xAI is doing with "mobile" generators.
petre 1 days ago [-]
The heat has to go somewhere and that is the environment. 300 MWh is enough energy to boil over 3k metric tons of water. That's 107 medium fuel trucks for perspective.
amscanne 23 hours ago [-]
This seemed high to me.
According to Google, one ton of water takes about 730kWh to boil. So I think you’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s only ~450 metric tons.
(But this assumes that no heat is radiated away in other forms.)
petre 21 hours ago [-]
Google confused you. One needs 730 kWh to fully evaporate 1 ton of water.
Otherwise it's 1.16 Wh/kg (or kWh/ton) to rise the temprature by 1°C. Thus one needs a delta of 80°C, so 93 Wh to boil a kg of 20°C water. That's what my napkin math was based on. I used that metric a lot to calculate heat deltas in storage tanks.
fc417fc802 21 hours ago [-]
I think it's the context that's confusing here. Given the topic the first thought is evaporative cooling but IIUC your intention was to give perspective by comparing to a volume of water raised to the boiling point.
21 hours ago [-]
21 hours ago [-]
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
300 MW hr is approximately nothing to the broader environment. A constant gigawatt load is (off the top of my head, probably off a bit) something like 5 sq km of solar over a 24 hour period on average. Granted some of that light would otherwise be reflected but that gets us in the rough ballpark.
In local terms its a fair bit of heating but zooming out it's a drop in the bucket.
varenc 10 hours ago [-]
This makes it seem like you think all energy consumption leads to water boiling? At the peak of a sunny day in the american southwest, a random square mile receives over 2000 megawatts of power from the sun. In a 24-hour period that same square receives ~16 gigawatt-hours of solar energy. It doesn't all get used to boil water. And as others have said, with a closed loop cooling system, no water is evaporated that isn't also re-condensed.
My 1500W space heater could boil 4.32 gallons of water every hour. But it isn't.
hunterpayne 1 days ago [-]
Luckily AI data centers produce nowhere near that amount of heat. Remember the heat is waste and 300 MWh is the total draw. Some of that energy becomes heat. That ratio is somewhere like 100:1 though. Also, the waste water is only like 10F hotter than the intake. We build GW sized PP all the time and they will leak far more heat (as like on the order of 100x) than a 300 MWh AI data center. Thought there were supposed to be engineers on this site.
dantillberg 1 days ago [-]
> Some of that energy becomes heat.
I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).
Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.
24 hours ago [-]
varenc 10 hours ago [-]
In the macro physics sense, all energy eventually becomes heat somewhere. My 1500W space heater is perfectly efficient and produces 1500W of heat, and my 1500W crypto mining rig does too. Thermodynamically there's no difference. Where would the energy go if not into heat? Even energy that does things like push air or emit radiation, eventually becomes heat somewhere. In the case of a power plant, that somewhere is just very far away with the end user.
Though there might be practical differences though between the excess heat intentionally exhausted, and other heat. Just speaking from a very macro sense.
reilyroadster 22 hours ago [-]
Some? Where else does the energy go?
An electronic circuit drawing 1W of input power will dissipate all of that 1W as heat (assuming it's not outputting light or sound or other physical side effects).
thinking_cactus 22 hours ago [-]
Also powerplants are quite (relatively) efficient in terms of heat-to-energy output, often >50% afair. So a 1GW power plant will generate something like 2GW of heat (or less), not 30GW.
abigail95 1 days ago [-]
Yeah it gets radiated into space
21 hours ago [-]
culi 11 hours ago [-]
Data centers are massive consumers of water. There are closed loop designs that technically use less water but they: A) Make up less than 10% of data centers; B) Cost much more upfront; C) Require massive investment in waste water treatment. These designs still need to "bleed the lines" once a month and get rid of sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, anti-fungals, and PFAS
It is not at all inaccurate to say data center consumption of water is a huge concern. Too many on HN seem to be puppetting industry lines without realizing it. Closed loop systems are still uncommon and come with their own problems.
tptacek 9 hours ago [-]
We know how much water all data centers put together consume, and it's not even close to what we spend on golf courses.
culi 7 hours ago [-]
Yes golf courses use an absurd amount of water. About 2.5b/day. Data centers are about 450m/day so about a fifth of that.
But golf courses are about 2.1 to 2.2 million acres while data centers are between between 340,000 and 840,000.
But I agree with your point. We should be closing both down. They are both water guzzlers and polluting our environment
tptacek 7 hours ago [-]
Wait, are you thinking this through carefully? Because your mitigating issue for golf courses, that they also use way more land, makes them worse, not better.
culi 4 hours ago [-]
Agreed, golf courses and data centers need to be regulated and limited. Though data centers seem to use much more water per acre than golf courses. The number I pulled in the original post was global golf course water consumption not just the US. Golf courses also use 7x more pesticides than agricultural land. On the other hand data centers that try to do "closed loop" systems rely on heavy use of anti-freeze, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives which eventually leads to a toxic sludge that is a massive problem to deal with. Especially since they build up with PFAS as well.
Both are massive environmental problems and the economic externalities have not been accounted for.
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
Again: using more acreage makes golf courses worse.
expedition32 10 hours ago [-]
Yep companies are cheap bastards. Sure you can make environmentally sound data centers. Those are not the ones they want to build.
Trump has been neutering the EPA for a reason.
I don't know if HN is really naive or just pretending.
SilverElfin 1 days ago [-]
Is it a canard? In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing. Even if datacenters are highly efficient, if the water supply is strained, you can pollute people’s supply by drawing wells down too far and things like that.
hparadiz 23 hours ago [-]
This happened to me in the middle of the city of Philadelphia when construction of a new apartment building caused a water main collapse. Took them three days to repair. It wasn't anyone's fault. The pipe was simply very old. My water had soil in it and basically I had to run the water until all the soil was flushed. Could have been a lot worse and thankfully I was renting. A lot of these situations are simple construction issues and old pipes. It's not like a data center is pushing gray water into the system.
When AOC is waving a jar of brown water in congress she's being disengenous. Just like the killed Amazon office in NYC it's just gonna kill jobs.
jml7c5 23 hours ago [-]
>In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing.
Can you cite a source for this? I can't find it anywhere.
SilverElfin 10 hours ago [-]
The other comment is correct. I meant QTS in Georgia
jml7c5 4 hours ago [-]
I thought that might be what you were referring to. As far as I know the issues there were construction causing turbidity, and water used for construction accidentally going metered. Neither are really relevant to it being a datacenter. Apparently it'll use closed-loop cooling, so it's not going to draw much water in operation either.
There are lots of nonsensical stories like this circulating on social media right now. Water draw for datacenters can't turn tap water brown. That's a supply or piping issue.
howLongHowLong 22 hours ago [-]
https://hellawater.com/why-is-my-water-brown-causes-solution...
Here's one link amongst many a quick Google search that explains how low system pressure from increased demand can cause discolored water. (Check out the section on municipal water supply disruptions) I live in new orleans and entire neighborhoods need to boil water in periods of high demand.
mike_hearn 21 hours ago [-]
Me: "that's a supply or piping issue"
Your page: "This discoloration happens because of rust, dirt, or old pipes in your plumbing. Problems with the city water supply can also cause it."
We're saying the same thing. It's the responsibility of the water system to pump clean water to people. Customers actually using that service can't be blamed for the system's failure to deliver it, as the customers aren't actually making the water brown themselves.
howLongHowLong 14 hours ago [-]
Or the responsibility of the city government not to permit a project which exceeds the capacity of the system to handle
cycomanic 16 hours ago [-]
That's a strawman, nobody is saying that the datacenters are directly turning the water brown. But if adding a single customer (the datacenters) causes the supply not being able to meet the demand and the water turns brown, then yes the datacenters was the cause. Saying it's a supply issue is like if I come to a party at your house and load all the drinks into my car and saying that there's no drinks left is a supply issue
expedition32 21 hours ago [-]
Hyperscalers are a drain on existing infrastructure- which is exactly why the Netherlands banned them.
Companies are in the business of privatizing profits and socialising losses.
culi 11 hours ago [-]
It is absolutely not a canard. The vast majority of data centers use evaporative cooling which is in fact a major consumer of water.
The industry is pushing a line about little to no use of water based on the "existence" of closed loop designs. But even the closed loop designs come with major drawbacks and require investment in waste water treatment infrastructure since they still have to "bleed the lines" monthly to get rid of the sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, PFAS, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives.
ajross 1 days ago [-]
I mean, the wastewater issues can be real in some environments. It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed and mitigated. It's not like these things have the ecological impact of steel foundries or fruit orchards, but they're not parks either.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
I don't see it that way at all, but then I'm a housing activist, and I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers. People just like opposing development. It's very satisfying!
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized by concentrated minority interests in specific spots in the country. The only big picture thing about it is the left-populist sideshow it's created.
cootsnuck 1 days ago [-]
> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.
If that was the case then why are the majority of data center projects getting scrapped?
All of this is inconvenient to big tech's "inevitability" narratives.
ojbyrne 1 days ago [-]
That Gizmodo article says none of the things you characterize it as saying.
Except sorta - "Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, who spoke to Heatmap, expects only about 10% of the projects that are currently underway to ever be completed."
Perhaps that's why he's a "former director" but that doesn't really qualify as an "insider."
cootsnuck 1 days ago [-]
Yea, my bad. "majority getting scrapped” was sloppy wording.
I do think it's a bit ridiculous though to not consider someone a tech insider who was a director for a decade at one of the biggest tech companies in history...
no-name-here 1 days ago [-]
> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.
That seems very untrue - multiple areas have already banned data centers, and senators like Bernie Sanders have proposed stopping data centers nationwide. This is just the next phase of NIMBY-ism. Alternatively, source that the "data centers the industry wants are all going to get built"?
> I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers.
I'm guessing you're referring to rather cherry-picked data? I've seen data center opposition making even the national news, but I don't recall any '4-story apartment buildings' opposition doing so? And senators like Bernie Sanders are proposing halting data centers nationwide - are there any similar proposals to similarly outlaw such housing construction nationwide?
> People just like opposing development.…
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
Agreed.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Of course multiple areas have already banned data centers. So what? The United States is absolutely enormous. Data center buildout --- especially for AI training --- has a much easier problem than housing does. Housing needs to be built near centers of economic activity, which means that every marginal unit of housing is likely to be infill and has to pass muster with relatively dense neighborhoods of people who hate development. Data centers tend to be sited in underutilized industrial tracts. There are lots of those around the country.
I feel like what's obviously happening here is that people have a rooting interest against AI, and highly-publicized pushes against "AI data centers" in specific areas are simply sparking joy for people.
no-name-here 1 days ago [-]
Is the argument that opposition to, and proposed bans of, data centers are only occurring on sites near dense population centers, as opposed to even covering incredibly low density sites? I'd say data center opposition goes beyond housing opposition as state-wide or even national bans have been proposed.
Many people similarly have a 'rooting interest' against public housing, public transit, even new housing in general in their area, and similarly celebrate when housing, transit, etc. get stopped. <shrug>
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
That's exactly what I'm saying. This is an old story; it's just getting airplay because of the "AI" connection.
taybin 1 days ago [-]
Bernie Sanders proposes a lot of things that are never implemented. I’m not sure his support is actually a useful signal of greater support.
bdangubic 1 days ago [-]
it is (unfortunately) quite the opposite, if you see what he supports there is a high likelyhood of that not happening.
hunterpayne 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ronsor 1 days ago [-]
> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable".
A lot of the "sneering" I see from everyone who isn't an investor or an executive is a consequence of resistance to outreach. It's very difficult to discuss subjects with people when many now interpret factual explanations as propaganda and reassurance as manipulation.
By the way, plenty of people feared electricity a great deal (and it wasn't exactly implemented safely when it was new). In the 90s, many people also thought the Internet was a temporary fad, a mere novelty that would fade in some years.
pesus 1 days ago [-]
Maybe the issue is the "reassurance" is identical to propaganda and manipulation. It definitely doesn't help that the companies having to "reassure" people have aligned themselves with so many others that have been pushing propaganda to manipulate others for some time now. Nor does it help that many of the same companies that need to "reassure" people are also actively doing the opposite - see the billboards bragging about not hiring humans, or CEOs bragging about how AI will replace the majority of people and leave them destitute.
There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.
ToValueFunfetti 1 days ago [-]
Reassurance is identical to propaganda and manipulation insofar as all attempt to convey beliefs. Reassurance, here, should be apparently different in that it conveys true information. In the history of mankind, it has never been easier to discern between true and false information.
If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty not to as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to actively pursue policies based on falsehoods. Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
If somebody does want to give up on research and working out the truth, please actually give up and say you don't know. Stop coming to the city council meetings and plastering "millions of gallons" on even the social medias where that's surprising.
wallst07 20 hours ago [-]
How can the average citizen who knows nothing about engineering/technology determine that their electric bill [as the result of a new datacenter in town] won't go up as truthful or falsehood?
pesus 15 hours ago [-]
Condescending responses like these are only reinforcing the original point. People don't want data centers because they don't want AI forced on them.
> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.
hunterpayne 1 days ago [-]
I think the marketing about not hiring humans is mostly what it is. There are also foreign entities actively spreading propaganda. But their claims are so wildly insane they get shot down pretty quickly. So it isn't just about messaging. It is about not being hated. If they hate you, the truth doesn't really matter.
slavik81 22 hours ago [-]
I keep thinking back to that e-card, "once you hate someone, everything they do is offensive."
I don't think tech companies appreciate the extent to which they used to get the benefit of the doubt just because people liked them.
ashdksnndck 1 days ago [-]
> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though.
The industry is actually doing real work on water issues in response to these complaints. Big tech companies are funding projects that will allow them to replenish more water than their datacenters consume. This isn’t actually that hard of a goal for them to meet, because as we know, the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale. Regardless, this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
Anyway, all of this is a distraction compared to the real problem of carbon emissions. It confuses me that environmentalists are getting sidetracked by the water use distraction here when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
doodlebugging 1 days ago [-]
>...the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale.
Water issues are always local issues. There is no national water distribution system or national aquifer.
>this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
This will remain to be seen. So far, if it had worked out that way then there would be less vocal opposition to these data centers. Local perception seems to be that there will be nuisance to dangerous noise levels; heat islands which can cause local disruptions to weather events; closed-door agreements to build this infrastructure instead of open community involvement in the process; and other issues including concerns about excessive water usage especially in areas where there are already troubling water availability trends due to other forms of development.
>when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
Here in NTexas, the availability of and proximity to natural gas compression stations is key to data center siting from the ones that I have monitored. Plans seem to include construction of gas turbine generators to power the new data centers and these generators are sited on parcels very close to existing compressor stations and high-voltage power lines and small or medium local lakes.
mike_hearn 23 hours ago [-]
If it's not rational it's not reasonable. The two words are more or less synonyms, unless you're using the word reasonable to mean something like "not uncommon".
AI does have clear tangible benefits everyone can see and understand! That's why ChatGPT has 800M+ actives! Those people aren't just experimenting anymore, they're getting real value. I myself ask models questions about all kinds of things many times per day, it's entirely replaced search engines for me. It's much more immediately useful than something like aviation which created a lot of noise and risk (objects falling out of the sky!) yet took many decades to become available at a price point ordinary people could afford.
ajross 17 hours ago [-]
> If it's not rational it's not reasonable.
That seems needlessly pedantic, even for HN. I genuinely thought the scare quotes were spelling out the distinction I was making, but for the record:
"Rational" is used in the sense of "derived from logic", or "correctly understood". "Reasonable" is used in the sense (this is very common in legal paradigms, for example) of "an understandable opinion", or "an idea likely to be held by a typical person".
cycomanic 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 2 hours ago [-]
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously... Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says... Assume good faith.
Please don't post shallow dismissals...
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed
Actually it's a completely insane idea that can't be reasonably discussed.
cratermoon 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
I really think advocating against building data centers in Box Elder County Utah kind of gives away the whole game here. The impact logic is so clearly motivated.
Have you ever been there? Or even near there? Like, driven from San Francisco to the East Coast at one point? It's a literal wasteland. It is like being on the moon.
1 days ago [-]
cratermoon 1 days ago [-]
I knew someone would come out and say that. To answer your question, I have driven through, multiple times. I suggest starting with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire to raise your awareness.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
I've been there. If you could pick any place in the world to site a data center, Box Elder County would be high on the list.
jwarden 19 hours ago [-]
Edward Abby wrote about southern Utah. Red rock country. Box Elder County is northern Utah. Night and day.
cratermoon 16 hours ago [-]
You missed the point. Ecosystems are not wastelands. Abbey’s descriptions of his Utah are compelling, but he’s still in places the uninformed would call dusty wastelands.
tptacek 13 hours ago [-]
That is an argument against building data centers --- or anything else --- anywhere in the world.
smegma2 1 days ago [-]
What ecosystem is it endangering? Is using the land a problem? Utah has 10.5 million acres of farmland that I would think has some impact on the ecosystem too, should we stop doing that too?
cootsnuck 1 days ago [-]
Heat. 9 GW puts off a staggering amount of heat. In an already arid environment. What's the worst that can happen?
For comparison, that 40,000 acres receives somewhere on the order of 40 GW solar radiation (averaging over night/day and winter/summer). Box Elder County overall receives something like 3600 GW average. There's a lot of power in that sunshine.
I remember I was surprised to learn that the heat released from burning all these fossil fuels doesn't really impact the temperature of the environment all that much. There's always just so much more radiative energy always going in and out all the time, the heat from the combustion is insignificant (or more specifically: it's quickly balanced out by increased radiative output).
DoctorOetker 1 days ago [-]
To generate that 9 GW of electrical energy typically about twice that amount in heat will be generated at the thermal engines converting the fuel chemical energy to electicity. Has anyone studied this 18 GW heat load at the site of electricity generation?
The total head load for consuming electrical energy of 9 GW is thus approximately 3*9 GW = 27 GW = 9 GW at the GPU's and 18 GW at the electricity generation plant.
They mention a gas plant would have to be about 7.5 x 40 acres = 300 acres.
By your calculation its 1 GW / 1000 acres of natural incident solar power; so natural solar power on 300 acres would be just 0.3 GW on the would-be plant.
Instead its dissipating 18 GW (!) 60 x higher!
That is ignoring the 9 GW on the GPU site.
Poor nations desiring developed nation level energy per capita consumption combined with developed nation exploding energy consumption for the AI rat race means humanity ogles consuming energy at such power levels that mere prompt heating approaches similar power levels and densities as GHG radiation forcing did!
In other words, even if we succeeded in phasing out all fossil fuel energy use and replace them with renewables, and even if we somehow extracted all the excess CO2 back out, we will relatively quickly replace the cause of global warming from GHG emissions to prompt heating for generating and dissipating our electric energy use.
2 Exceptions: wind energy and hopefully someday exploiting the temperature difference at ground level versus the tropopause.
Humans have made aerostats (balloons with a tether), humans have made aerostats that went much higher than the tropopause, although only in acceptable weather.
At the tropopause the temperature is about 60 degrees C colder (up to about 100 degrees C in tropical regions).
Imagine a heat loop or huge inflatable levitating heat pipe (using phase transition). The new access at ground level to a cold bath in addition to the environmental warm bath can be used to drive a thermal engine and generate electricity (day and night, winter and summer). It behaves more like baseload energy, and it helps cool the planet: the heat transported from surface level if released at the tropopause level is above about ~70% of the CO2 of the atmosphere, so there it can more quickly escape to the CMB's low temperature bath.
We could be cooling the planet while generating useful electrical energy. The first prototypes should avoid any inhabited areas by a distance at least equal to the structure height (so it doesn't cause damage to population residences). Most humans live "close" to a coast line, so place the first such structures about 15 km into the sea. Another advantage is that the sea water has a high heat capacity, is pumpable, and can provide as a very stable reference thermal hot side bath. I.e. the system shouldn't stall because it has depleted local heat in the environment, you can always pump lukewarm seawater into the device, which can also be used to freeze seawater (desalinating it, see freeze desalination). The frozen seawater can be brought to conventional energy plants to lower their cold side bath temperatures, increasing the efficiency of solar but also gas / fuel / nuclear energy plants.
None of this contradicts the laws of thermodynamics, its an engineering problem: how do we build an inflatable structure that withstands the wind shear forces, dampens structure resonances, identifying the ideal carrier for transporting the heat (a pure substance? a mixture?, ...), a group of specialists should comb through the space of options to get a rough first overview of which directions would be more or less promising than alternatives.
mmmeff 1 days ago [-]
You're right, we should build it in a third world country instead!
cootsnuck 1 days ago [-]
I'd argue we don't need to build a 9 GW data center anywhere. But that's just me.
Gormo 16 hours ago [-]
Why do you presume yourself to be part of the "we" in question? This seems like it's a case of other people using their own resources to do things that don't involve you; what's your stake in it?
And given your correct acknowledgement that it's "just you" expressing subjective normative opinions about things you're not involved in, what valid basis do you have for assessing what anyone who is involved actually needs?
wallst07 20 hours ago [-]
There is very little we do that is "needed" if you break it down to actual necessities (basic needs pyramid).
hparadiz 23 hours ago [-]
This new flavor of NIMBY is pretty funny.
cratermoon 14 hours ago [-]
A major flyway for millions of migratory birds.
cootsnuck 1 days ago [-]
It seems fairly likely that a comically gargantuan data center like Stratos would endanger the surrounding ecosystem, at a minimum.
But I also think there's very little chance that they even get 1 GW up and running anytime soon, and less than 3 GW before the whole thing gets scrapped (just like plenty of the other hyperscale data center projects that keep getting shouted about).
TheOtherHobbes 16 hours ago [-]
No one needs that much AI, even if they did need that much AI there are more efficient and cheaper ways to make it happen, and even if there weren't these boxes will be obsolete within 3-4 years.
The whole thing is baffling.
If I were cynical I'd wonder if they're actually trying to cook the planet.
Or maybe there's some kind of tax grift involved.
Makes no sense at all otherwise.
cootsnuck 16 hours ago [-]
Yea, I wonder the same. Something I've been wanting to read up on is how the land ownership works with these data center deals.
Because developers promising massive projects to scoop up a bunch of land, do little to nothing with it, sit on it for awhile, and then eventually just sell it for a profit...that's not a new thing at all and isn't unique to the tech industry.
I wouldn't be surprised if a not-so-insignificant part of all of this winds up being just banking land that you got zoning, entitlements, and maybe some utility infra stuff setup for.
That may also explain some of the kind of puzzling cloak and dagger behavior with so many of these data center initiatives in local communities. If you truly think you're about to build something that is going to "imminently transform the way we do everything" and become some kind of $X trillion dollar industry, I'd imagine you'd be showing up with better "gifts" to ensure quick frictionless approval. But if they're more so viewing project proposals as speculative investments for control of land that is hopefully desirable to a bunch of tech firms (whether that's now or years from now), then keeping costs low and details vague early on makes more sense.
cratermoon 15 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely likely that this Stratos project is a way to lock up land for future development. From Ogden to Provo there are really only two places to expand. West along I-80 a bit into the Oquirrh Mountains, but that runs into the salt flats and DoD land, or NW along I-84 into - you guessed it - Box Elder county. And for those calling it a wasteland, it’s easy to justify turning it into suburbs much like the suburbs of LA. Provided you can get water rights. Proposing an AI hyperscale data center to scoop up money and water for the entire area is the perfect scheme for a pivot to development.
tptacek 13 hours ago [-]
What does "absolutely likely" mean?
1 days ago [-]
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
Because they do.
cryptoegorophy 1 days ago [-]
If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage in comparison if we measure in per person consumption
etchalon 1 days ago [-]
Cows don't steal people's jobs.
tptacek 13 hours ago [-]
Right, see, again, giving away the game. It's not about the water (if it was, the objection would be easy to dismiss). Everything is downstream of a populist argument against AI progress.
DoctorOetker 1 days ago [-]
The loss of income of people displaced by AI may end up eating less meat to survive.
insane_dreamer 16 hours ago [-]
you quickly went from "AI water consumption isn't a problem", to "it's okay because cows consume water too"
jmye 1 days ago [-]
Is this a serious comment? No one, in an environmental discussion, ignores how much water beef needs. It’s a central part of most vegan/vegetarian commentary.
But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.
no-name-here 1 days ago [-]
1. Beef uses trillions of gallons of water per year, while data centers use billions - data center water use is nowhere remotely as much as beef.
2. Despite beef using far more water, is it getting anywhere remotely as much coverage as data center water use?
3. Senators like Sanders proposed stopping data center construction nationwide - have senators proposed similar nationwide bans for beef?
17 hours ago [-]
hunterpayne 1 days ago [-]
You can go ahead and try to do that. Politically, to say its a DOA bill, is the understatement of the century. Also, water is renewable. This entire discussion is absurd and scientifically illiterate. There is a reason why nobody says, "party of science" anymore.
kennywinker 24 hours ago [-]
> Also, water is renewable.
Tell that to the aquafers we’re emptying that won’t refill for generations.
Water is renewable, but not necessarily in the right place or in timely manner.
Using treated potable water to cool servers is just taxpayers subsidizing server cooling.
1 days ago [-]
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
Beef uses water, but you can eat beef.
Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Can you see the difference?
no-name-here 1 days ago [-]
>> If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage
> Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Almost all other foods don't use trillions of gallons of water like beef does. If someone's goal was to reduce water use, then shouldn't they be making at least as much noise about the non-necessary thing using far more water compared to data center's billions, not trillions, of gallons?
cryptoegorophy 16 hours ago [-]
Point I am making is if we need to tackle the water issue then we need to do it via 80/20 rule, focus on the elephant in the room first. Data centers are a fly in a room with an elephant in this case.
Gormo 16 hours ago [-]
Was anyone proposing to eat AI? Was anyone proposing to do data processing with a pot roast?
Why is the difference in what specific use case the consumers of these products are serving with them one that's relevant to the discussion?
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
No, that logic does not make any sense whatsoever.
BenFranklin100 1 days ago [-]
Not inherently they don’t.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
Sure, but we don’t live in theory, we live in reality. Here in reality, they usually do.
alterom 1 days ago [-]
Inherently, they don't.
The way they are operated, they do.
efnx 1 days ago [-]
It’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?
doodlebugging 1 days ago [-]
I was asking myself the same question about whether there is duplication in the site locations. I believe that there is based on looking at my own area. I see several reports from nearby zip codes but none of them locate the proposed data center at the correct site even though I figured out where it was supposed to end up by doing a minimal level of study of the area. I didn't see a link to the articles that a couple of the site locations referenced so it isn't possible to determine whether three people saw and reported the same article without providing a link or whether there is are fact three different data center locations proposed or in the works.
I believe clusters of dots with no reference links probably are duplicates in many cases. The ones that are ground-truth are the ones where site names and owners are listed or where a supporting article is linked.
Companies that aren’t publicly traded, is another way to say that.
AuthAuth 1 days ago [-]
This datacenter stuff is such populist brainrot.
ralph84 1 days ago [-]
Big Tech isn't exactly doing a great job of marketing them. Saying they're for AI while doing mass layoffs attributed to AI isn't a winning message.
mike_hearn 23 hours ago [-]
That's like saying Big Industry didn't do a good job of marketing factories in the industrial revolution. Datacenters aren't meant to be directly marketed. The benefits accrues to those who purchase the resulting services, and the marketing is for those services.
Gormo 16 hours ago [-]
Why does the construction of buildings to run business operations of any kind need to be "marketed" in the first place, absent manipulative media campaigns trying to manufacture a controversy around them?
culi 11 hours ago [-]
Because the public is affected? If they were to run a highway through the middle of San Fransisco, a lot of people would also be affected. Like in Eastern Oregon a data center used agricultural water for evaporative cooling. The remaining water that was pumped out has nitrate levels over 5x the legal limit. Enough to cause cancer and miscarriages in nearby homes.
Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
edit: or is "Telecommunications" the old school landlines and such, and this is just the effect of the Internet
defrost 1 days ago [-]
"Telecommunications" would have to, by any reasonable standard, include Telephonic Communications and the vast switching networks for voice.
Clearly that's a domain that has been automating at the very least since the human operated plug and board switching centres with human operators that answered phones and hand routed calls left the network centres.
pesus 1 days ago [-]
You'll need to compare how many job postings there are as well to get the full picture, especially for junior roles. That's one of the most contentious effects and has an outsized impact on society.
rcpt 1 days ago [-]
Not much layoffs and they're probably due to the Trump #1 tax hikes on engineering anyway. But you can't say that without getting tariffed. Saying you're using AI is a much safer bet
davkan 1 days ago [-]
People don’t want to live next to a factory either. At least those make things and employ people in the community though.
1 days ago [-]
umeshunni 1 days ago [-]
There's a class of people who'll run with it - the same people who were protesting 5G towers 5 years ago.
davkan 1 days ago [-]
What? The people against datacenter construction are absolutely not the same as the people freaking out about 5g towers. The latter share circle on the venn diagram with horse paste connoisseurs.
Gormo 16 hours ago [-]
People objecting to buildings existing on account of the possibility that other people might do things they don't like inside them are in the same category as horse paste connoisseurs, in my opinion.
davkan 15 hours ago [-]
That’s a a ludicrous comparison. Not liking what people do in a building is the same as believing in baseless conspiracy theories? Regardless that’s not even why people are rejecting them.
People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise. And with almost zero upside for the community. The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
Gormo 15 hours ago [-]
> Not liking what people do in a building is the same as believing in baseless conspiracy theories?
Yes. Obsessing over what people you have no relationship with are doing in their own facilities based on loose-associative, emotion-laden reasoning that leads you to believe that they are somehow harming you is 100% the conspiracy-theory mindset.
> People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise.
No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.
Any opposition to data centers that's statistically greater than the baseline opposition to any economic development (which perennially comes from certain quarters) can be reasonably attributed to worry about AI technology particularly.
> The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
The fact that they're owned by unlikable charlatans is also a driver of motivated reasoning and conspiracy theories.
davkan 15 hours ago [-]
> No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.
Do you not recognize that half of the things you listed are ESSENTIAL for a community? The rest at least provide employment. Datacenters bring nothing for the community besides a handful of jobs not nearly commensurate with the downsides.
Gormo 14 hours ago [-]
The point you're trying to make here seems to depend on an underlying premise that for people to use their property in certain ways, it's not enough that they comply with the various rules intended to minimize negative externalities, but that they must also somehow create positive externalities for others in proximity.
That premise isn't one that's generally adhered to as either a moral or legal principle, especially in the US, where we tend to have a strong preference for protecting property rights, and only justify restrictions on the basis of preventing harm to others, not some obligation to create benefit for them.
But aside from that, you seem to be conceding the point -- that opposition to new data centers is coming from concerns about AI itself, and not concerns related merely to the constriction of new commercial infrastructure.
davkan 13 hours ago [-]
No, my point is that is how most people evaluate these things. How does this massive infrastructure project benefit me and my community. And the math with datacenters is very clearly that they don't. You may think that they have no right to restrict building on private property but that is simply not the case. Municipalities usually do have the right to restrict usage of private property based on their laws. This premise plays out literally everywhere. Not always positively, re NIMBYs.
The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI. AI is in the zeitgeist. And also datacenter construction is increasing as a direct result of AI. I fully agree that the reason datacenter memes are on instagram right now is because of AI.
But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative. AI does have some small part because, as much as you may dislike it, sentiment about the purpose of a project does have an effect on a community's willingness to give a green light. But it's far from the defining issue at a local level where the actual resistance is. Communities were rallying against datacenter construction well before AI entered the conversation.
Gormo 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think most people see things this way. That itself is likely an exaggerated perception, and NIMBYism isn't quite as much of a controlling factor as is often believed. These projects usually do get built, but when NIMBYs do succeed, it's because they manage to demonstrate how the project runs afoul of rules that are there to prevent negative externalities. Again, there are no rules mandating positive ones, and even if that mindset motivates some people, it is not and never has been actionable in its own right.
> The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI.
Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
> But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative.
No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.
davkan 10 hours ago [-]
> Again, there are no rules mandating positive ones, and even if that mindset motivates some people, it is not and never has been actionable in its own right.
I never said there was??
> No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.e
I did not. I said the online AI fervor brings eyeballs to local datacenter projects and once people are aware of these projects they are against them because of the negative impacts to their community not simply because they are against AI if they even are. In fact many people in Utah are pro AI but against the construction of Stratos simply because it is _bad_for_their_community_.
> Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
You can say power consumption and resultant increase in costs for residents isn't an "externality", I don't really care. If my power bill goes up by $5 a month then a datacenter is bad for me and my community and I don't want it on my grid. You can say I don't have the right to stop construction and they have the free ability to build what they want and buy any power they want from the power company, I don't care. I have to power to use my government to stop the construction of something through whatever means are available to it or me.
The reality we live in is that these datacenter projects require buy-in from the states and municipalities. These projects almost universally require discretionary approval from governing bodies to some degree. That may be regarding tax incentives necessary for profitability or zoning or a myriad of other red tapes. Many of those governments are responsive to the people and the people _do_not_want_ datacenters in their community.
You can say they only don't want it because of AI fearmongering mindrot, I don't agree. I think it's because once people are aware of the projects and understand the facts they recognize datacenters are only to the detriment their community and I don't care to argue that further with you on their motivations. Regardless of their motives they are free to use their government to block datacenter construction by any legal means.
aaron695 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
october8140 1 days ago [-]
I take it you don't live next to a data center.
jldugger 1 days ago [-]
Most of the datacenters in my city are concentrated near the warehouse zoned area by the expressway, railroad and interstate leading to the airport. Basically nobody lives there, and those that do are probably much better off now that the diesel trains no longer running.
pesus 1 days ago [-]
It does seem most of the pro-AI people aren't actually affected by any of the negative aspects of it. It's a lot easier to be in favor of something that doesn't actually affect you or anyone you care about.
rcpt 1 days ago [-]
Most everybody isn't affected by data center build outs.
Tanoc 1 days ago [-]
It appears to be not so much about the datacenters themselves as it is limiting the growth capabilities for the LLMs. From their understanding fewer datacenters means more congestion which means less possibility LLMs can be shoved into more places where the public thinks they are intrusive. Which seems to be everywhere.
rcpt 15 hours ago [-]
Can't put new technology back in the box.
We don't build the chips or even the machines that build the machines that build the chips. We don't own all the rare earths and our ability to generate electricity isn't anything special.
The data centers are getting built. Up to us if it's in Utah or overseas.
cratermoon 4 hours ago [-]
Everyone pays for the negative externalities of these outsized water- and electricity-sucking, noise- and heat-generating monuments to greed and charlatanism.
pesus 1 days ago [-]
Maybe not, but the people near them sure are. And the majority of people are definitely impacted by the downstream effects.
rcpt 15 hours ago [-]
They really aren't.
pesus 15 hours ago [-]
Very well thought out argument, I'm sure spamming it some more will really convince people. You're telling me people aren't affected by AI in any way whatsoever? That's a very bold and obviously untrue claim. No wonder people don't trust AI sycophants, you can't even keep your story straight.
rcpt 11 hours ago [-]
The water usage is floating point error compared to ethanol and the electricity prices near the centers are some of the cheapest you can get. In terms of the physical world this is maybe the lowest impact industry in history.
georgemcbay 1 days ago [-]
Some people have empathy for those who are, even if they are not.
I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it.
And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.
15 hours ago [-]
47282847 21 hours ago [-]
I often see empathy being mentioned in places where I can totally see the self-preservation link: if other people are negatively affected, it will sooner or later also affect me personally negatively. I am totally fine with seeing empathy and compassion as tools for self-preservation, without assigning any morality to it. Unless I kill you and all of your tribe and anyone else who cares about you, not caring about your needs will backfire on me. It simply makes rational sense to see what you need and make you happy so I can stay happy too.
whamlastxmas 15 hours ago [-]
What negative impact is that? For context there are only five houses within half a mile of xAI's data center, the building for which has been there for decades, and any homes in the area have been living by the existing giant natural gas power plant next door to the data center for 20+ years. It's really not introducing anything that hasn't been there forever
expedition32 21 hours ago [-]
Except the people living next to them but they don't count because reasons.
rcpt 15 hours ago [-]
No they aren't.
umeshunni 1 days ago [-]
Very similar to the pro-illegal immigration crowd
Gormo 16 hours ago [-]
How would you know? I mean, I'm surrounded by lots of buildings, but I'm not usually aware of what's going on in ones I don't go inside of. There are lots of warehouse-sized buildings all over, and whether those buildings contain racks full of servers or something else entirely isn't something I'd immediately discern.
aschla 1 days ago [-]
That's a zoning issue the local residents should take up with their town/city.
runtime_terror 1 days ago [-]
But isn't the parent post implying objections to datacenters is just "populist brainrot"?
hunterpayne 1 days ago [-]
The stated reasons are "populist brainrot". They aren't scientific or based on reality at all. What has happened is the AI folks have made themselves very very disliked. Saying you are going to take everyone's jobs will do that. So whatever they try to do, people will oppose it. It doesn't matter if the reasons are based in reality or not.
runtime_terror 15 hours ago [-]
Sure, lots of people parrot the water wasting and it's often not true, but it came out of truth.
There are communities that are on water restrictions where datacenters have no such restrictions (and pay less).
It's also true after some datacenters opened the local aquifers were polluted.
Then there are legit concerns about noise, air quality from LNG generators, etc
Plenty of very legitimate reasons to dislike them, and each community likely has a different set of concerns.
aschla 1 days ago [-]
The average person's inattention to nuance could be labeled as "populist brainrot" in this case, and the cases of poor zoning could be used as examples of the issues with datacenters that the average person does not evaluate with the proper attention to nuance.
runtime_terror 15 hours ago [-]
Sure, the water use is often a simplified argument against these data centers, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons but they are in fact more nuances and context dependent based on the specific location.
cratermoon 4 hours ago [-]
When they aren't located out in remote areas,
data centers,
like most undesirable industry,
get located near communities of poor minorities.
phendrenad2 1 days ago [-]
I live near a datacenter, well, technically, there's a farm on one side and an abandoned factory on the other side. Tell me, is living in one or the other optimal to be able to participate in this discussion without being dismissed?
kleton 1 days ago [-]
It's amazing how Karen Hao's (Empire of AI) confusion of cubic meters with liters of water for datacenters continues to get amplified, even after this error was publicly revealed.
twoodfin 13 hours ago [-]
Welcome to the memetic discourse!
Something like 20 years on we’re still hearing that “most” bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, even though that study (authored in part by Elizabeth Warren of all things!) was methodological nonsense.
How isn't this the actual link in the post? Have to go through all these loops and hoops and the post doesn't even link to the source from what I can tell.
falsaberN1 1 days ago [-]
People have gotten so intense with the anti-AI sentiment that I hope this doesn't end up guiding people to places where they can exercise violence "for a just cause".
noosphr 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Aurornis 1 days ago [-]
That’s not violence. The word “violence” doesn’t mean anything you don’t like.
I don’t understand why some people want to call everything violence. Watering down the meaning of a word doesn’t help anything.
noosphr 1 days ago [-]
Killing you slowly is very much violence.
Aurornis 16 hours ago [-]
That is also not violence.
I think you should look up the dictionary definition of violence, because none of your usages of the word match the definition.
noosphr 16 hours ago [-]
Violence is defined by the World Health Organization in the WRVH as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation”.
Which definition are you using?
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
TIL that the air I breath is committing violence against me.
pesus 1 days ago [-]
If it's being poisoned, the people poisoning it sure are.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
Jobs, progress, cheap tokens, growth
noosphr 1 days ago [-]
And yet we don't let people dump lead in the drinking water any more.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
Replacing good jobs with subscriptions that funnel money to the oligarchs
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, only think about your job that’s gonna go away anyways. Zero global perspective or long-term thinking.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
The future is inevitable, says people working tirelessly to make a specific future happen.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
It’s better than your suggested future where Asia shoots off into orbit because we give up the race so you can have your dev job for a few more months.
kennywinker 24 hours ago [-]
What’s the difference, either fantasy scenario - yours or your straw-man of mine - ends with no jobs and us fighting over the scraps the oligarch class toss us.
AndrewKemendo 17 hours ago [-]
You two are close to having a class solidarity moment
My guess though is one of you is a more temporarily embarrassed millionaire than the other so it won’t happen
etchalon 1 days ago [-]
Companies have gotten increasingly comfortable doing deeply unpopular things because they know, so long as the right people make money from it, the worse thing that will happen to them is some people being mean to them on Bluesky.
thiagoperes 1 days ago [-]
It's poetically beautiful that the tool was very very clearly built mostly if not entirely using AI
WatchDog 1 days ago [-]
It might be, I'm not sure.
The code is interesting though, it's not minified, it's very readable, and nicely indented with lots of comments.
The curated data center list is just some inline JSON.
The javascript uses var instead of let or const, I'm not sure if this is just style choice, or there is some code post processing.
It doesn't use react, AI seems to almost always opt for react for front end design, unless told otherwise.
eleventen 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
WatchDog 1 days ago [-]
I think it's absurd to pretend like you can know how a stranger thinks.
If I had to predict either way, I would guess that it is significantly AI generated, but that isn't the same thing as being sure.
Almost every link submitted to HN has a comment about the content being AI generated, many of which are not, I would rather talk about the "tells" rather than make confident assertions that I can't prove.
ghayes 1 days ago [-]
For example, https://mydetector.ai/ai-code-detector/ says 90% likely AI. Not that I trust the tools, but there are telltales to me in this function from the site:
Certain ergonomics are hard to miss since a human who writes heavy FP would opt for a `(r) => r.date` lambda, where the computer has no problem writing out inline `function(r)`-style declarations. Similarly, the HTML mapping function could go either way, but mixing in large sets of text with hard constants would be really uncommon for humans to write.
JavaScript is always a mess, but it's a _different_ mess between humans and AI, and this function `loadCommunityReports` really reads AI-first to me.
eCa 1 days ago [-]
I’ve only seen this snippet (on phone so no source access), but var + no fat arrow could also indicate someone who learned js a long time ago and use as what they’re used to.
tstrimple 23 hours ago [-]
People who provide nothing but comments like “this is ai!” actually contribute far less than AI responses somehow.
thefourthchime 1 days ago [-]
A lot of the copy also looks like AI.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
shantnutiwari 21 hours ago [-]
"The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. "
Not this shit again. Someone writes in clean English, people on HN are like iT muST bE Ai caUSe NoONe wouLD wrITe lIKE tHAt
runtime_terror 1 days ago [-]
I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"?
Like I get it looks a lot like apps built with AI but weren't LLMs trained on real website and a metric ton of website templates?
Is it possible they used a template or other UI library?
Gormo 15 hours ago [-]
> I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"?
It's just vibes. There really are no reliable, simple criteria to determine if something was made with AI, and that shouldn't be surprising, since the whole point of LLMs is to mimic humans' work.
shantnutiwari 21 hours ago [-]
"I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"?"
I wrote a whole post about it. Tldr: "I dont like this shit so it must be AI". BENEATH. EVERY. FUCKING. POST.
For code, I haven't read as much slop so I'm not as sure but one big tell is an unusual number of basic & unnecessary comments. And if it's version controlled, hilariously long commit messages with multiple sections.
Gormo 15 hours ago [-]
Almost everything on that list seems invalid, at least as a simple checklist criteria. All of the tropes involved are ubiquitous in ordinary semi-formal writing, which is why the LLMs are using them in the first place.
It's more reasonable to suggest that a mismatch in tone or register between the style of writing and the venue it's being published in could be an indicator of AI, and it's possible that people misidentifying these tropes as being AI indicators per se may themselves be suffering from a filter-bubble effect, e.g. someone who doesn't typically read long-form writing might only be encountering conventions of long-form writing in AI-generated content, and misattributing them to AI in itself.
That itself isn't such a great criteria on some sites where you have different userbases who interact with the site in different ways. For example, Reddit has a large "old guard" userbase that treats it like a traditional message board, with longer-form and more in-depth discussion, along with a lot of more recent users who treat it like Twitter, and expect everything to be short and informal. Users in the latter group misidentify posts by those in the former group as AI more and more frequently.
IshKebab 14 hours ago [-]
The list isn't invalid. Those tropes existed before AI but they weren't used incessantly like AI does.
Gormo 14 hours ago [-]
What mechanism do you suppose would cause LLMs to use writing tropes at a significantly greater rate than than is found in their training data?
IshKebab 11 hours ago [-]
I have no idea, but the fact is they do!
Probably something to do with the way they do RLHF?
jmye 1 days ago [-]
The most boring comment on the whole internet now - just blindly calling every single thing slop and pretending that has any vague value whatsoever.
All noise, no signal.
mike_hearn 23 hours ago [-]
It obviously has signal if the website is all about attacking AI. It shows hypocrisy and a lack of attention to detail that undermines their credibility.
shantnutiwari 21 hours ago [-]
"The most boring comment on the whole internet now just blindly calling every single thing slop and pretending that has any vague value whatsoever."
I 100% agree. And I notice you are being downvoted by the LLM Witch Hunt Committee.
ViktorRay 1 days ago [-]
I saw a comment from another site that a lot of the data center locations on this map aren’t accurate. Is there any truth to that?
bob1029 1 days ago [-]
I was thinking some of the community ones are bogus and then I started looking closer at a few of the hotspots. There is what appears to be a compelling site for a datacenter right in the middle of a cluster of these reports:
I looked around North Dakota and there are several that say community reported. Pretty sure those either don't exist or aren't significant in size if they do exist.
> WILLISTON, N.D. – Gov. Doug Burgum today announced the construction of one of the largest data centers in the world near Williston as North Dakota continues to emerge as a hub for high-performance computing, including cryptocurrency mining.
> The Atlas Power Data Center being built by FX Solutions Inc. is part of a $1.9 billion, multiyear project that will require more than 100 workers during the two-year construction period and create more than 30 permanent jobs, according to Richard Tabish, president of Missoula, Mont.-based FX Solutions. Atlas Power, an operator of high-density facilities serving cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing utilizing alternative power generation, will own and operate the data center following its completion.
> ...
> The first phase of the project will consist of 16 buildings, each 350 feet long by 30 feet wide, to house tens of thousands of servers that will conduct high-performance computing using 240 megawatts of electricity. Phases 2 and 3 call for expanding to 500 megawatts and then 700 megawatts, adding additional buildings and servers.
> WILLISTON, N.D. (KFGO) – Residents west of Williston were hopeful for a few hours on Tuesday, June 20, after the Williams County Commission voted unanimously to instruct the local power co-op to shut off electricity in a portion of a local cryptocurrency mine. But Corey Seidel said he knew the effort had failed by nightfall, when the servers were still operating at their usual levels.
1 days ago [-]
ronnier 1 days ago [-]
There’s lots of anti ai and anti tech coming from hn and in general lately. I guess this is start of the hit list.
jason_oster 21 hours ago [-]
Reference Cipolla's basic laws of human stupidity. The commenters are genuinely unaware of how they are harming others and themselves.
ioadk 1 days ago [-]
I started a project similar to this early this year [1] when I got frustrated with the lack of decent free resources documenting data centre build out. The plan was to focus on AI build out specifically, the ones costing billions and the recipients of all the Nvidia chips rather than the boring 'normal' datacenters.
I also wanted to add useful and accurate tools on things like local noise, water or grid impact. In addition to actually monitoring progress via satellite imagery and building a basic graph model for filling in missing attributes.
The reason why I stopped was that I significantly underestimated the effort required to complete such a project to the standards that I wanted to. As you can probably tell the site itself is AI assisted but all of the information was collected by hand which just takes time that I no longer had (~30 mins per site). The only way this would have made sense was as research project or something which sadly didn't line up.
What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
tjmc 1 days ago [-]
Data center mech eng here - from our perspective it's higher rack densities typically due to GPUs. It's certainly possible to have high densities due to CPUs as well but I've seen a significant spike in rack densities in the last couple of years which has caused a switch from air cooling to liquid to chip.
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled condensers which leads to large amounts of water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled condensers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data center waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
mike_hearn 23 hours ago [-]
It is a nightmare for sparkies! See Meta's creative solution:
The distinction is scale. "AI Datacenters" are a new level of scale with new levels of power consumption and heat generation. Sure you could run regular compute and w/e in them but it's not practical to build these mega sites for regular compute. GPU Compute / AI workloads require network/interconnect bandwidth and latencies where distance matters so you're forced to solve problems you wouldn't otherwise have to. Those problems are mostly solved with money.
pishpash 1 days ago [-]
Different I/O, power and cooling requirements for majority GPU workloads?
didgetmaster 1 days ago [-]
GPUs have been in high demand since cryptocurrency became a thing? Are you saying that something built for AI can't be used for other workloads?
DrewADesign 1 days ago [-]
This strikes me as a combination of semantics and false equivalence. You might as well argue that a new crowd of people illegally dirt-biking in a public park isn’t a meaningful change because people with baby strollers are have also technically been violating the “no vehicles” sign for years.
esseph 1 days ago [-]
Not nearly with this density and power.
The power an "AI data center uses" in a single rack used to be, or is still in many cases, the power draw of an entire room or even floor.
Going from a few megawatts to ~10GW.
pishpash 1 days ago [-]
Did crypto workload ever take over an entire data center?
> Riot Platforms has initiated a large-scale, 1 gigawatt development to expand its Bitcoin mining and hosting capabilities in Navarro County, Texas with its new Corsicana Facility.
> Development of the Corsicana Facility has begun with an initial 400 megawatts of capacity on a 265-acre site. The substation was energized in April 2024 and mining operations have begun.
> In 2008, the city of Rockdale lost about 80 percent of its workforce following the closure of the Alcoa steel plant. Today, the old Alcoa plant is occupied by Riot Blockchain’s Whinstone facility, believed to be the largest single Bitcoin mining operation in North America. As an industry that relies on high levels of electricity, the company was drawn to the facility due to its existing power infrastructure, including valuable high-voltage transmission lines and large substations.
rcpt 1 days ago [-]
Bitcoin Mining is 138–205 TWh annually. Surely that's more than a few data centers.
weaksauce 1 days ago [-]
what's funny is the website looks AI generated though that's just the style of the time i guess.
atonse 1 days ago [-]
No I actually do think this is AI generated. I came here to say the same.
Brokovich might not know it. But her web people certainly used AI to build this site. From the Emojis, cards, to the single colored left border.
weaksauce 1 days ago [-]
the more I look at it the more I think this is AI yeah. sigh. I'm tired boss.
bastawhiz 1 days ago [-]
I came here to say this. I'm highly confident the site was built with Claude. I asked Claude how it was built and Claude was confident it was built with Claude. Kind of ironic, honestly.
Papazsazsa 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Aurornis 1 days ago [-]
> I also think Americans have the right to decide what happens in their neighborhoods.
I agree with this.
At the same time, all of the data center proposals in my state are in remote locations nowhere near any residences. They’re still the target of protests.
didgetmaster 1 days ago [-]
Just because a data center is way outside your neighborhood; doesn't mean it can't have a direct impact on you personally. Electrical and water resources used can affect your utility bills.
But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.
zhivota 1 days ago [-]
I don't know that local control is an unalloyed good. The interstate highway system would never have been built if we followed this as a principle, for example. For another example, Californian voters consistently vote for state level increases in housing, yet locally consistently vote against increasing housing in their community.
At some point national and state level goals must supercede local control if progress is to ever be made.
Papazsazsa 1 days ago [-]
The Federal-Aid Highway Act was built with local consent in most places, and modified by local control where consent failed.
Also there's no evidence that more data centers = "progress".
hokkos 1 days ago [-]
And its own map is obviously vibe coded (each Key Concerns box raises when hovered).
andyreagan 15 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why but my reaction to this is pretty negative.
This page must be hosted from a data center as well...they could add a star to the map for their own hosting?
How much electricity does their site use, etc? I've seen counters like this before, I think, about the electricity a site uses based on the weight of the page, etc.
valbaca 15 hours ago [-]
"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent"
"...you said on an iPhone. Heh. Gotcha."
andyreagan 6 hours ago [-]
Fair enough, not a rational response on my part
scarab92 15 hours ago [-]
I don’t care about the hypocrisy as much as the entire anti-datacenter Luddite movement being based on anti-intellectualism to begin with.
Datacenters provide very high utility with very low per capita externalities. There’s really no reason to care this much about them.
andyreagan 6 hours ago [-]
Perhaps comparing the anti-datacenter sentiment with the Luddite movement is being unfair to the Luddites (the more I read about the actual movement).
sio8ohPi 1 days ago [-]
It's very weird that what was once a site about technology and entrepreneurship has come to hate both.
xnx 1 days ago [-]
Do real people genuinely care about this more than CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) (for example)?
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
I can eat animals off a feedlot. I can’t eat anything that comes out of an ai data center.
Why are you ok with spending $100 on groceries but not $100 on poison?
nickpp 16 hours ago [-]
Software running modern farming runs in datacenters. For example, AI checking images from drones monitoring health of crops, then directing drones with treatment.
Software ate the world, now the world eats software.
kennywinker 15 hours ago [-]
Nah. Not buying it. Nobody needs ai checking or drone-based pesticide dispersal. Sure maybe those tech are used here and there, but not widespread enough to say that I am eating stuff that only exists because of datacenters that haven’t been built yet. In top of that you can run all the image processing you need on a $500 consumer GPU, and afaik crop dusting drones are human operated for the most part
1 days ago [-]
866-RON-0-FEZ 1 days ago [-]
I love these new modern-day AI-hating Luddites.
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
esikich 1 days ago [-]
They do. All of my friends are non-tech and I've given up trying to explain any of this. The average person just does not understand how "the internet" gets into their phones, what makes a website tick, how their iPictures get backed up, etc. It's all magic. If they haven't had a lifetime of at least a passing interest/curiosity in tech, all of my explanations sound like bullshit. Watch their eyes glaze over as you try to explain how Netflix uses CDNs or how their catering website is a VM in AWS. It's just too fucking abstract coming from 0 tech knowledge, which is where the average person is. It's really sad how rabid people have gotten over this.
When I was a kid in the 80s I was excited at the progress of PCs and thought how cool will it be when everyone can compute! We will be so empowered! It seems the exact opposite happened and no one knows or appreciates how any of it works. "I just want to consume digital content, use it in all aspects of my life, and also fuck data centers! I want this awesome digital life but I don't want those jobs in my state!"
I feel bad because a data center was just rammed through in a city near me and I thought "good, the people protesting this shit don't know what they're talking about anyway." There's a lot of current issues where I honestly think the public has no business chiming in on because they don't have the expertise to have an opinion on it anyway, which feels gross to me, but here we are.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
Keep kind lud’s name out your damn mouth. Failure to understand history, doomed to repeat.
> I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025
They of course call them “hyperscalers” because they’re the same size as all the other things. /s
protocolture 21 hours ago [-]
God I hope this idiocy stays within the United States. I have heard some rumblings about a protest against a local equinix expansion. I just cant tolerate living on a planet with this level of instant, reactive stupidity to the latest trendy thing to hate.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 1 days ago [-]
it's a mind boggling delusion to believe that fighting data centers will defeat proliferation of AI. they'll just be built in Romania instead, or maybe even in Russia after the war - electricity and water are borderline free there.
there is almost no reason to build them in the US even without this luddite bullshit.
Papazsazsa 1 days ago [-]
I love this. Yeah there's some FUD out there about water usage and whatnot, but using the internet to spread actual awareness about local concerns is a fine demonstration of free speech at work.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
delichon 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law predates AI.
Papazsazsa 1 days ago [-]
Sturgeon's Law measures ratio, not volume :\
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
Is there a map of munitions plants and spy centers and other facilities whose sole purpose is to active oppress, harm and outright kill people?
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
False equivalencies, you can be against ai and imperialism and ads. Go make those maps if you think they’re problems, otherwise you’re just shutting someone down for caring about something that impacts them but you don’t care about
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
It's odd that we don't see this kind of ra.. resistance against much worse evils that have been objectively fucking everyone up for far far longer.
pesus 1 days ago [-]
Can you be more specific? There has been opposition against most things.
AI is also the new thing currently being forced on basically every person and upending society. It shouldn't be surprising it's on the forefront of people's minds or that they might want to try to prevent it.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
objectively, this is a new thing. And new things mean you have a chance to stop them before they’re normal
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
Opposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
No one is stopping them from building out their own renewables and if they were doing that while also _fully_ accounting for water usage and any other externalities I don't think there would be much (if any) opposition to them. But that's really expensive so they (by and large) aren't doing that so there's opposition. Seems normal and expected to me.
Gormo 15 hours ago [-]
If water usage is an externality, there's some other and more fundamental problem going on, since under normal circumstances, users of infrastructure are expected to pay for what they are consuming. Opposing data centers themselves, rather than whatever is going on that's artificially turning them into uncompensated externalities, makes little sense.
hunterpayne 1 days ago [-]
Then it will be nuclear or natural gas then. Probably natural gas. We price it as a waste product in the US anyway. Should be nuclear but the same type of ill-informed people will be protesting the NPP too.
bowmore 1 days ago [-]
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kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
> We need as many data centers as possible
Why?
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing. Jobs aren’t a left-right thing.
bowmore 1 days ago [-]
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luxuryballs 1 days ago [-]
I don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
Nobody is complaining about the acreage used. The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. If they were just purchasing 100 acre lots of land and letting it sit vacant I don't think anyone would really care for the most part.
Gormo 15 hours ago [-]
> The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community.
That seems a bit bizarre, since people opening new facilities are usually responsible for paying for their inputs with their own funds -- if merely increasing demand for power or water is itself generating externalities, that implies that there's a much more fundamental economic problem that needs to be resolved.
luxuryballs 13 hours ago [-]
the one gripe I do have is with the power companies in one state building new infrastructure for a neighboring state to pipe power out for data centers but then raises rates on the locals to fund it, something def needs to be done about that
Gormo 12 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I don't know whether that's a significant problem, though, or if it's being overblown in the media, given that most states already have oversight mechanisms for utility pricing from monopoly service providers.
Where I live, for example, consumer rate increases above a certain level have to be validated by the state's Public Service Commission.
ETH_start 1 days ago [-]
AI compute is a major emerging export industry that the U.S. could become the global leader in. Strong First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control also make the U.S. uniquely well-suited for AI, unlike, let's say, manufacturing, where authoritarian states seem to have an advantage.
btbuildem 1 days ago [-]
> First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control
In what fairytale land does this describe the US today?
brightball 1 days ago [-]
Describes the US since founding. It’s the Constitution.
ETH_start 1 days ago [-]
The U.S. has much stronger free speech protections than any peer. Have you seen the speech (chat) control laws being instituted in Europe in the last few years?
mannanj 1 days ago [-]
is there one to store bunker locations?
Markoff 1 days ago [-]
TIL Erin Brockovich is still alive and only 65 (born 1960), she got famous pretty young in 1993 (33yo)
"...investigating data centers is quickly becoming its own beat"
ie it is in the economic interest of the writers to tap into (and foment) the FUD around "data centers."
ai_critic 1 days ago [-]
c'mon now it's not nice to say mean things about ed zitron like that
ares623 1 days ago [-]
They should just make the entirety of Silicon Valley as a mega data center.
regularization 1 days ago [-]
That data centers are burning fossil fuels and burning up the earth is not FUD.
engineer_22 1 days ago [-]
the money being talked about is so large that eventually the lobbyists will get their checks and the politicians will pass laws forbidding local scrutiny of data centers
Much of the money is funny and doesn’t actually exist (yet).
1 days ago [-]
ada1981 1 days ago [-]
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doctorpangloss 1 days ago [-]
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grunkolsky 23 hours ago [-]
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Escapade5160 1 days ago [-]
Ben Jordan did a fantastic piece on how harmful data centers are to the people living near them.
wuyunhuo 1 days ago [-]
AI is good, but the impact of data centers on the environment cannot be ignored. Over a longer time scale, AI is just one wave, while the environment will take much longer to recover.
doctorpangloss 1 days ago [-]
It seems pretty insincere of a complaint, when in those communities, 100x more land and water is used for farming, just because farming is a heritage, no?
Morromist 1 days ago [-]
AI is useful for programmers and a few other groups of people to do their jobs faster.
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.
doctorpangloss 1 days ago [-]
automation is pervasive in farming. it's already an AI business. it will be a generative AI business in many ways too. farming, lots of kinds of farming, especially the most profitable kinds, is unpopular too. to me, this popularity contest thing, that boils down to, "everything visible that people do for money is invalid, except for the thing i do," is not a good way to lead.
Morromist 1 days ago [-]
I'm hearing from you: "People shouldn't have the right to determine how their country is run - I should - because I'm a technology-man, so I'm better than them."
hunterpayne 1 days ago [-]
You have never set foot on a farm.
NikolaNovak 1 days ago [-]
* if that's a sarcastic / troll comment, congratulations, you got me but good :-)
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
I purchase surplus xeons on ebay, grind them into powder, and mix them into my milkshakes. If you aren't going that route then the real question here is what you're supplementing with to get the necessary computational boost. I'm aware of the complaints that surplus gear has a lower overall nutritional value but you'll see that it's highly cost effective if you can just be bothered to do the math.
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
Ah yes. If you don’t buy during the surge you’ll have to pay the price later when costs have come down. Makes sense.
doctorpangloss 1 days ago [-]
look, you're having a conversation on a website hosted by a datacenter, right? it's kind of a reductionist point of view. i don't think it's a very interesting question that you're asking, it's bad faith.
there's lots of ways food production is malevolent. the animal cruelty, the worker abuse, not just its environmental impacts.
i don't know. my point is that, this kind of stylistic aesthetic vibes stuff about datacenters is kind of bullshit. i'm not the only one who is saying this. are people in the places with cheap electricity near urban centers that are appealing to datacenters and seeking to ban them also going to ban bad farming operations from their communities? that's a LOT of farming operations! i can come up with some way that almost all farming operations are malevolent. no. they're not going to do that. i don't think they should.
you can have a national policy for this kind of stuff, because the consumers and producers are in different places and our way of geography self-determination is kind of stupid. if it's a market failure because of how the borders are arranged - which happens a lot with environmental stuff especially! - don't let these little bitty communities decide.
https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/
Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
Both are attempting to dismiss something useful and important, over trivial and manageable issues, mostly for culture war reasons rather than rational reasons.
Data centers are loud, raise energy prices for everyone around them, and use drinking water in tremendous quantities.
This isn’t a culture war, this is a class war.
Edit: you might be a bot. No comments in the last 47 days, then a string of hard-pro data center comments in the last week.
It also accepts user reporting of new developments, breaks them down in several categories (tracking proposed, operational, under construction, etc).
And eventually it can also track more information about them, specific to their cases (amount of water and energy used, pollution reports, etc). E.g. it has information like "1.2 GW AI factory broke ground May 12, 2026 at Eastgate Commerce Center (Little Blue Pkwy & MO-78). 400 acres, up to 10 buildings. ~1,200 construction jobs / ~130 full-time. Multi-billion-dollar investment; $150bn taxable industrial development revenue bonds secured." for some.
Brockovich is an environmental activist. Her project uses the public as a source of data for the map ("community reports")
DCR does not
Pretty functional design.
EDIT: NO! Wth is this map? I have to click to expand the clusters. Ah well, all is good.
According to Google, one ton of water takes about 730kWh to boil. So I think you’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s only ~450 metric tons.
(But this assumes that no heat is radiated away in other forms.)
Otherwise it's 1.16 Wh/kg (or kWh/ton) to rise the temprature by 1°C. Thus one needs a delta of 80°C, so 93 Wh to boil a kg of 20°C water. That's what my napkin math was based on. I used that metric a lot to calculate heat deltas in storage tanks.
In local terms its a fair bit of heating but zooming out it's a drop in the bucket.
My 1500W space heater could boil 4.32 gallons of water every hour. But it isn't.
I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).
Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.
Though there might be practical differences though between the excess heat intentionally exhausted, and other heat. Just speaking from a very macro sense.
An electronic circuit drawing 1W of input power will dissipate all of that 1W as heat (assuming it's not outputting light or sound or other physical side effects).
It is not at all inaccurate to say data center consumption of water is a huge concern. Too many on HN seem to be puppetting industry lines without realizing it. Closed loop systems are still uncommon and come with their own problems.
But golf courses are about 2.1 to 2.2 million acres while data centers are between between 340,000 and 840,000.
But I agree with your point. We should be closing both down. They are both water guzzlers and polluting our environment
Both are massive environmental problems and the economic externalities have not been accounted for.
Trump has been neutering the EPA for a reason.
I don't know if HN is really naive or just pretending.
When AOC is waving a jar of brown water in congress she's being disengenous. Just like the killed Amazon office in NYC it's just gonna kill jobs.
Can you cite a source for this? I can't find it anywhere.
It does seem like a canard.
https://dustinrhone.substack.com/p/on-fayetteville-georgia
Your page: "This discoloration happens because of rust, dirt, or old pipes in your plumbing. Problems with the city water supply can also cause it."
We're saying the same thing. It's the responsibility of the water system to pump clean water to people. Customers actually using that service can't be blamed for the system's failure to deliver it, as the customers aren't actually making the water brown themselves.
Companies are in the business of privatizing profits and socialising losses.
The industry is pushing a line about little to no use of water based on the "existence" of closed loop designs. But even the closed loop designs come with major drawbacks and require investment in waste water treatment infrastructure since they still have to "bleed the lines" monthly to get rid of the sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, PFAS, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized by concentrated minority interests in specific spots in the country. The only big picture thing about it is the left-populist sideshow it's created.
If that was the case then why are the majority of data center projects getting scrapped?
https://gizmodo.com/data-center-project-cancellations-quadru...
Why are insiders saying they only expect about 10% of data center projects to ever be completed?
Why is 2026 already shaping up to have less than half of planned data centers break ground on construction?
Local community opposition is a big driver but so is permitting and infra procurement.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/why-...
All of this is inconvenient to big tech's "inevitability" narratives.
Except sorta - "Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, who spoke to Heatmap, expects only about 10% of the projects that are currently underway to ever be completed."
Perhaps that's why he's a "former director" but that doesn't really qualify as an "insider."
More accurate to say would be that a big chunk of the AI data center pipeline looks delayed/speculative. 16GW is slated for 2026, but only 5GW is actually under construction. https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outloo...
I do think it's a bit ridiculous though to not consider someone a tech insider who was a director for a decade at one of the biggest tech companies in history...
That seems very untrue - multiple areas have already banned data centers, and senators like Bernie Sanders have proposed stopping data centers nationwide. This is just the next phase of NIMBY-ism. Alternatively, source that the "data centers the industry wants are all going to get built"?
> I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers.
I'm guessing you're referring to rather cherry-picked data? I've seen data center opposition making even the national news, but I don't recall any '4-story apartment buildings' opposition doing so? And senators like Bernie Sanders are proposing halting data centers nationwide - are there any similar proposals to similarly outlaw such housing construction nationwide?
> People just like opposing development.… When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
Agreed.
I feel like what's obviously happening here is that people have a rooting interest against AI, and highly-publicized pushes against "AI data centers" in specific areas are simply sparking joy for people.
Many people similarly have a 'rooting interest' against public housing, public transit, even new housing in general in their area, and similarly celebrate when housing, transit, etc. get stopped. <shrug>
A lot of the "sneering" I see from everyone who isn't an investor or an executive is a consequence of resistance to outreach. It's very difficult to discuss subjects with people when many now interpret factual explanations as propaganda and reassurance as manipulation.
By the way, plenty of people feared electricity a great deal (and it wasn't exactly implemented safely when it was new). In the 90s, many people also thought the Internet was a temporary fad, a mere novelty that would fade in some years.
There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.
If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty not to as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to actively pursue policies based on falsehoods. Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
If somebody does want to give up on research and working out the truth, please actually give up and say you don't know. Stop coming to the city council meetings and plastering "millions of gallons" on even the social medias where that's surprising.
> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.
I don't think tech companies appreciate the extent to which they used to get the benefit of the doubt just because people liked them.
The industry is actually doing real work on water issues in response to these complaints. Big tech companies are funding projects that will allow them to replenish more water than their datacenters consume. This isn’t actually that hard of a goal for them to meet, because as we know, the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale. Regardless, this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
Anyway, all of this is a distraction compared to the real problem of carbon emissions. It confuses me that environmentalists are getting sidetracked by the water use distraction here when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
Water issues are always local issues. There is no national water distribution system or national aquifer.
>this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
This will remain to be seen. So far, if it had worked out that way then there would be less vocal opposition to these data centers. Local perception seems to be that there will be nuisance to dangerous noise levels; heat islands which can cause local disruptions to weather events; closed-door agreements to build this infrastructure instead of open community involvement in the process; and other issues including concerns about excessive water usage especially in areas where there are already troubling water availability trends due to other forms of development.
>when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
Here in NTexas, the availability of and proximity to natural gas compression stations is key to data center siting from the ones that I have monitored. Plans seem to include construction of gas turbine generators to power the new data centers and these generators are sited on parcels very close to existing compressor stations and high-voltage power lines and small or medium local lakes.
AI does have clear tangible benefits everyone can see and understand! That's why ChatGPT has 800M+ actives! Those people aren't just experimenting anymore, they're getting real value. I myself ask models questions about all kinds of things many times per day, it's entirely replaced search engines for me. It's much more immediately useful than something like aviation which created a lot of noise and risk (objects falling out of the sky!) yet took many decades to become available at a price point ordinary people could afford.
That seems needlessly pedantic, even for HN. I genuinely thought the scare quotes were spelling out the distinction I was making, but for the record:
"Rational" is used in the sense of "derived from logic", or "correctly understood". "Reasonable" is used in the sense (this is very common in legal paradigms, for example) of "an understandable opinion", or "an idea likely to be held by a typical person".
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says... Assume good faith.
Please don't post shallow dismissals...
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Actually it's a completely insane idea that can't be reasonably discussed.
Have you ever been there? Or even near there? Like, driven from San Francisco to the East Coast at one point? It's a literal wasteland. It is like being on the moon.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...
For comparison, that 40,000 acres receives somewhere on the order of 40 GW solar radiation (averaging over night/day and winter/summer). Box Elder County overall receives something like 3600 GW average. There's a lot of power in that sunshine.
I remember I was surprised to learn that the heat released from burning all these fossil fuels doesn't really impact the temperature of the environment all that much. There's always just so much more radiative energy always going in and out all the time, the heat from the combustion is insignificant (or more specifically: it's quickly balanced out by increased radiative output).
The total head load for consuming electrical energy of 9 GW is thus approximately 3*9 GW = 27 GW = 9 GW at the GPU's and 18 GW at the electricity generation plant.
They mention a gas plant would have to be about 7.5 x 40 acres = 300 acres.
By your calculation its 1 GW / 1000 acres of natural incident solar power; so natural solar power on 300 acres would be just 0.3 GW on the would-be plant.
Instead its dissipating 18 GW (!) 60 x higher!
That is ignoring the 9 GW on the GPU site.
Poor nations desiring developed nation level energy per capita consumption combined with developed nation exploding energy consumption for the AI rat race means humanity ogles consuming energy at such power levels that mere prompt heating approaches similar power levels and densities as GHG radiation forcing did!
In other words, even if we succeeded in phasing out all fossil fuel energy use and replace them with renewables, and even if we somehow extracted all the excess CO2 back out, we will relatively quickly replace the cause of global warming from GHG emissions to prompt heating for generating and dissipating our electric energy use.
2 Exceptions: wind energy and hopefully someday exploiting the temperature difference at ground level versus the tropopause.
Humans have made aerostats (balloons with a tether), humans have made aerostats that went much higher than the tropopause, although only in acceptable weather.
At the tropopause the temperature is about 60 degrees C colder (up to about 100 degrees C in tropical regions).
Imagine a heat loop or huge inflatable levitating heat pipe (using phase transition). The new access at ground level to a cold bath in addition to the environmental warm bath can be used to drive a thermal engine and generate electricity (day and night, winter and summer). It behaves more like baseload energy, and it helps cool the planet: the heat transported from surface level if released at the tropopause level is above about ~70% of the CO2 of the atmosphere, so there it can more quickly escape to the CMB's low temperature bath.
We could be cooling the planet while generating useful electrical energy. The first prototypes should avoid any inhabited areas by a distance at least equal to the structure height (so it doesn't cause damage to population residences). Most humans live "close" to a coast line, so place the first such structures about 15 km into the sea. Another advantage is that the sea water has a high heat capacity, is pumpable, and can provide as a very stable reference thermal hot side bath. I.e. the system shouldn't stall because it has depleted local heat in the environment, you can always pump lukewarm seawater into the device, which can also be used to freeze seawater (desalinating it, see freeze desalination). The frozen seawater can be brought to conventional energy plants to lower their cold side bath temperatures, increasing the efficiency of solar but also gas / fuel / nuclear energy plants.
None of this contradicts the laws of thermodynamics, its an engineering problem: how do we build an inflatable structure that withstands the wind shear forces, dampens structure resonances, identifying the ideal carrier for transporting the heat (a pure substance? a mixture?, ...), a group of specialists should comb through the space of options to get a rough first overview of which directions would be more or less promising than alternatives.
And given your correct acknowledgement that it's "just you" expressing subjective normative opinions about things you're not involved in, what valid basis do you have for assessing what anyone who is involved actually needs?
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...
But I also think there's very little chance that they even get 1 GW up and running anytime soon, and less than 3 GW before the whole thing gets scrapped (just like plenty of the other hyperscale data center projects that keep getting shouted about).
The whole thing is baffling.
If I were cynical I'd wonder if they're actually trying to cook the planet.
Or maybe there's some kind of tax grift involved.
Makes no sense at all otherwise.
Because developers promising massive projects to scoop up a bunch of land, do little to nothing with it, sit on it for awhile, and then eventually just sell it for a profit...that's not a new thing at all and isn't unique to the tech industry.
I wouldn't be surprised if a not-so-insignificant part of all of this winds up being just banking land that you got zoning, entitlements, and maybe some utility infra stuff setup for.
That may also explain some of the kind of puzzling cloak and dagger behavior with so many of these data center initiatives in local communities. If you truly think you're about to build something that is going to "imminently transform the way we do everything" and become some kind of $X trillion dollar industry, I'd imagine you'd be showing up with better "gifts" to ensure quick frictionless approval. But if they're more so viewing project proposals as speculative investments for control of land that is hopefully desirable to a bunch of tech firms (whether that's now or years from now), then keeping costs low and details vague early on makes more sense.
But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.
2. Despite beef using far more water, is it getting anywhere remotely as much coverage as data center water use?
3. Senators like Sanders proposed stopping data center construction nationwide - have senators proposed similar nationwide bans for beef?
Tell that to the aquafers we’re emptying that won’t refill for generations.
Water is renewable, but not necessarily in the right place or in timely manner.
Using treated potable water to cool servers is just taxpayers subsidizing server cooling.
Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Can you see the difference?
> Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Almost all other foods don't use trillions of gallons of water like beef does. If someone's goal was to reduce water use, then shouldn't they be making at least as much noise about the non-necessary thing using far more water compared to data center's billions, not trillions, of gallons?
Why is the difference in what specific use case the consumers of these products are serving with them one that's relevant to the discussion?
The way they are operated, they do.
I believe clusters of dots with no reference links probably are duplicates in many cases. The ones that are ground-truth are the ones where site names and owners are listed or where a supporting article is linked.
For reference: https://www.datacenterjournal.com/data-centers/oregon/portla...
Just one random Google result:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
- https://idahoconservation.org/blog/the-dark-side-of-data-cen...
- https://www.akcp.com/index.php/2025/09/02/truth-about-data-w...
And also they come with huge tax breaks.
But at the macro level, it is not really a big number so far. From ~2.48 million in 2023 to ~2.37million now. Or a 5% drop in employment in 3 years.
Fred: All Employees, Computer Systems Design and Related Services (CES6054150001)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ces6054150001
Is "Telecommunications" the only tech that's actually been steadily automating it's workforce since 2000:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051700001
edit: or is "Telecommunications" the old school landlines and such, and this is just the effect of the Internet
Clearly that's a domain that has been automating at the very least since the human operated plug and board switching centres with human operators that answered phones and hand routed calls left the network centres.
People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise. And with almost zero upside for the community. The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
Yes. Obsessing over what people you have no relationship with are doing in their own facilities based on loose-associative, emotion-laden reasoning that leads you to believe that they are somehow harming you is 100% the conspiracy-theory mindset.
> People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise.
No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.
Any opposition to data centers that's statistically greater than the baseline opposition to any economic development (which perennially comes from certain quarters) can be reasonably attributed to worry about AI technology particularly.
> The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
The fact that they're owned by unlikable charlatans is also a driver of motivated reasoning and conspiracy theories.
Do you not recognize that half of the things you listed are ESSENTIAL for a community? The rest at least provide employment. Datacenters bring nothing for the community besides a handful of jobs not nearly commensurate with the downsides.
That premise isn't one that's generally adhered to as either a moral or legal principle, especially in the US, where we tend to have a strong preference for protecting property rights, and only justify restrictions on the basis of preventing harm to others, not some obligation to create benefit for them.
But aside from that, you seem to be conceding the point -- that opposition to new data centers is coming from concerns about AI itself, and not concerns related merely to the constriction of new commercial infrastructure.
The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI. AI is in the zeitgeist. And also datacenter construction is increasing as a direct result of AI. I fully agree that the reason datacenter memes are on instagram right now is because of AI.
But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative. AI does have some small part because, as much as you may dislike it, sentiment about the purpose of a project does have an effect on a community's willingness to give a green light. But it's far from the defining issue at a local level where the actual resistance is. Communities were rallying against datacenter construction well before AI entered the conversation.
> The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI.
Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
> But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative.
No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.
I never said there was??
> No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.e
I did not. I said the online AI fervor brings eyeballs to local datacenter projects and once people are aware of these projects they are against them because of the negative impacts to their community not simply because they are against AI if they even are. In fact many people in Utah are pro AI but against the construction of Stratos simply because it is _bad_for_their_community_.
> Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
You can say power consumption and resultant increase in costs for residents isn't an "externality", I don't really care. If my power bill goes up by $5 a month then a datacenter is bad for me and my community and I don't want it on my grid. You can say I don't have the right to stop construction and they have the free ability to build what they want and buy any power they want from the power company, I don't care. I have to power to use my government to stop the construction of something through whatever means are available to it or me.
The reality we live in is that these datacenter projects require buy-in from the states and municipalities. These projects almost universally require discretionary approval from governing bodies to some degree. That may be regarding tax incentives necessary for profitability or zoning or a myriad of other red tapes. Many of those governments are responsive to the people and the people _do_not_want_ datacenters in their community.
You can say they only don't want it because of AI fearmongering mindrot, I don't agree. I think it's because once people are aware of the projects and understand the facts they recognize datacenters are only to the detriment their community and I don't care to argue that further with you on their motivations. Regardless of their motives they are free to use their government to block datacenter construction by any legal means.
We don't build the chips or even the machines that build the machines that build the chips. We don't own all the rare earths and our ability to generate electricity isn't anything special.
The data centers are getting built. Up to us if it's in Utah or overseas.
I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it.
And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.
There are communities that are on water restrictions where datacenters have no such restrictions (and pay less).
It's also true after some datacenters opened the local aquifers were polluted.
Then there are legit concerns about noise, air quality from LNG generators, etc
Plenty of very legitimate reasons to dislike them, and each community likely has a different set of concerns.
Something like 20 years on we’re still hearing that “most” bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, even though that study (authored in part by Elizabeth Warren of all things!) was methodological nonsense.
I don’t understand why some people want to call everything violence. Watering down the meaning of a word doesn’t help anything.
I think you should look up the dictionary definition of violence, because none of your usages of the word match the definition.
Which definition are you using?
My guess though is one of you is a more temporarily embarrassed millionaire than the other so it won’t happen
The code is interesting though, it's not minified, it's very readable, and nicely indented with lots of comments.
The curated data center list is just some inline JSON.
The javascript uses var instead of let or const, I'm not sure if this is just style choice, or there is some code post processing.
It doesn't use react, AI seems to almost always opt for react for front end design, unless told otherwise.
If I had to predict either way, I would guess that it is significantly AI generated, but that isn't the same thing as being sure.
Almost every link submitted to HN has a comment about the content being AI generated, many of which are not, I would rather talk about the "tells" rather than make confident assertions that I can't prove.
JavaScript is always a mess, but it's a _different_ mess between humans and AI, and this function `loadCommunityReports` really reads AI-first to me.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
Not this shit again. Someone writes in clean English, people on HN are like iT muST bE Ai caUSe NoONe wouLD wrITe lIKE tHAt
Like I get it looks a lot like apps built with AI but weren't LLMs trained on real website and a metric ton of website templates?
Is it possible they used a template or other UI library?
It's just vibes. There really are no reliable, simple criteria to determine if something was made with AI, and that shouldn't be surprising, since the whole point of LLMs is to mimic humans' work.
I wrote a whole post about it. Tldr: "I dont like this shit so it must be AI". BENEATH. EVERY. FUCKING. POST.
https://write.as/shantnu/llm-witch-hunts-are-getting-really-...
For code, I haven't read as much slop so I'm not as sure but one big tell is an unusual number of basic & unnecessary comments. And if it's version controlled, hilariously long commit messages with multiple sections.
It's more reasonable to suggest that a mismatch in tone or register between the style of writing and the venue it's being published in could be an indicator of AI, and it's possible that people misidentifying these tropes as being AI indicators per se may themselves be suffering from a filter-bubble effect, e.g. someone who doesn't typically read long-form writing might only be encountering conventions of long-form writing in AI-generated content, and misattributing them to AI in itself.
That itself isn't such a great criteria on some sites where you have different userbases who interact with the site in different ways. For example, Reddit has a large "old guard" userbase that treats it like a traditional message board, with longer-form and more in-depth discussion, along with a lot of more recent users who treat it like Twitter, and expect everything to be short and informal. Users in the latter group misidentify posts by those in the former group as AI more and more frequently.
Probably something to do with the way they do RLHF?
All noise, no signal.
I 100% agree. And I notice you are being downvoted by the LLM Witch Hunt Committee.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/nZyt5Yb3kqxj5thc8
https://www.governor.nd.gov/news/burgum-one-worlds-largest-d...
> WILLISTON, N.D. – Gov. Doug Burgum today announced the construction of one of the largest data centers in the world near Williston as North Dakota continues to emerge as a hub for high-performance computing, including cryptocurrency mining.
> The Atlas Power Data Center being built by FX Solutions Inc. is part of a $1.9 billion, multiyear project that will require more than 100 workers during the two-year construction period and create more than 30 permanent jobs, according to Richard Tabish, president of Missoula, Mont.-based FX Solutions. Atlas Power, an operator of high-density facilities serving cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing utilizing alternative power generation, will own and operate the data center following its completion.
> ...
> The first phase of the project will consist of 16 buildings, each 350 feet long by 30 feet wide, to house tens of thousands of servers that will conduct high-performance computing using 240 megawatts of electricity. Phases 2 and 3 call for expanding to 500 megawatts and then 700 megawatts, adding additional buildings and servers.
And later...
https://kfgo.com/2023/06/25/williams-co-residents-frustrated...
> WILLISTON, N.D. (KFGO) – Residents west of Williston were hopeful for a few hours on Tuesday, June 20, after the Williams County Commission voted unanimously to instruct the local power co-op to shut off electricity in a portion of a local cryptocurrency mine. But Corey Seidel said he knew the effort had failed by nightfall, when the servers were still operating at their usual levels.
I also wanted to add useful and accurate tools on things like local noise, water or grid impact. In addition to actually monitoring progress via satellite imagery and building a basic graph model for filling in missing attributes.
The reason why I stopped was that I significantly underestimated the effort required to complete such a project to the standards that I wanted to. As you can probably tell the site itself is AI assisted but all of the information was collected by hand which just takes time that I no longer had (~30 mins per site). The only way this would have made sense was as research project or something which sadly didn't line up.
[1] https://investigationsofadifferentkind.com/
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled condensers which leads to large amounts of water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled condensers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data center waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/132936/changes#diff-...
The power an "AI data center uses" in a single rack used to be, or is still in many cases, the power draw of an entire room or even floor.
Going from a few megawatts to ~10GW.
https://www.riotplatforms.com/bitcoin-mining/corsicana/
> Riot Platforms has initiated a large-scale, 1 gigawatt development to expand its Bitcoin mining and hosting capabilities in Navarro County, Texas with its new Corsicana Facility.
> Development of the Corsicana Facility has begun with an initial 400 megawatts of capacity on a 265-acre site. The substation was energized in April 2024 and mining operations have begun.
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/archive/2...
> In 2008, the city of Rockdale lost about 80 percent of its workforce following the closure of the Alcoa steel plant. Today, the old Alcoa plant is occupied by Riot Blockchain’s Whinstone facility, believed to be the largest single Bitcoin mining operation in North America. As an industry that relies on high levels of electricity, the company was drawn to the facility due to its existing power infrastructure, including valuable high-voltage transmission lines and large substations.
Brokovich might not know it. But her web people certainly used AI to build this site. From the Emojis, cards, to the single colored left border.
I agree with this.
At the same time, all of the data center proposals in my state are in remote locations nowhere near any residences. They’re still the target of protests.
But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.
At some point national and state level goals must supercede local control if progress is to ever be made.
Also there's no evidence that more data centers = "progress".
This page must be hosted from a data center as well...they could add a star to the map for their own hosting?
How much electricity does their site use, etc? I've seen counters like this before, I think, about the electricity a site uses based on the weight of the page, etc.
"...you said on an iPhone. Heh. Gotcha."
Datacenters provide very high utility with very low per capita externalities. There’s really no reason to care this much about them.
Why are you ok with spending $100 on groceries but not $100 on poison?
Software ate the world, now the world eats software.
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
When I was a kid in the 80s I was excited at the progress of PCs and thought how cool will it be when everyone can compute! We will be so empowered! It seems the exact opposite happened and no one knows or appreciates how any of it works. "I just want to consume digital content, use it in all aspects of my life, and also fuck data centers! I want this awesome digital life but I don't want those jobs in my state!"
I feel bad because a data center was just rammed through in a city near me and I thought "good, the people protesting this shit don't know what they're talking about anyway." There's a lot of current issues where I honestly think the public has no business chiming in on because they don't have the expertise to have an opinion on it anyway, which feels gross to me, but here we are.
> I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025
They of course call them “hyperscalers” because they’re the same size as all the other things. /s
there is almost no reason to build them in the US even without this luddite bullshit.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
AI is also the new thing currently being forced on basically every person and upending society. It shouldn't be surprising it's on the forefront of people's minds or that they might want to try to prevent it.
Why?
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing. Jobs aren’t a left-right thing.
That seems a bit bizarre, since people opening new facilities are usually responsible for paying for their inputs with their own funds -- if merely increasing demand for power or water is itself generating externalities, that implies that there's a much more fundamental economic problem that needs to be resolved.
Where I live, for example, consumer rate increases above a certain level have to be validated by the state's Public Service Commission.
In what fairytale land does this describe the US today?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich
ie it is in the economic interest of the writers to tap into (and foment) the FUD around "data centers."
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
there's lots of ways food production is malevolent. the animal cruelty, the worker abuse, not just its environmental impacts.
i don't know. my point is that, this kind of stylistic aesthetic vibes stuff about datacenters is kind of bullshit. i'm not the only one who is saying this. are people in the places with cheap electricity near urban centers that are appealing to datacenters and seeking to ban them also going to ban bad farming operations from their communities? that's a LOT of farming operations! i can come up with some way that almost all farming operations are malevolent. no. they're not going to do that. i don't think they should.
you can have a national policy for this kind of stuff, because the consumers and producers are in different places and our way of geography self-determination is kind of stupid. if it's a market failure because of how the borders are arranged - which happens a lot with environmental stuff especially! - don't let these little bitty communities decide.