Comment by wholinator2
1 day ago
But aren't they trying to build data centers outside of smaller localities, where they do exist somewhat in isolation? Water cannot just be transported thousands of miles, water itself exists in isolated pockets. Straining the water resources of towns is a problem! You can't just say "the US is big so if you look at the maximum possible widest numbers, it looks small". You have to look at the actual human impact. I think data centers look bad because of the human impacts that I've seen, not some highly abstracted spreadsheet.
> Straining the water resources of towns is a problem!
Citation needed.
I'm sure you can find a few outlier cases, but in general speaking terms datacenters - AI or not - are not even a rounding error on any local water source so far.
It's just not a thing. It's made up for social media rage bait.
> I think data centers look bad because of the human impacts that I've seen
What human impact is this, precisely speaking? Outside of the (again) few outlier cases, datacenters are basically warehouses you didn't even know existed until you were told to be mad about them. Plenty of friends who know I'm in the space have recently asked me about this, not having a clue they've been living within a mile of a facility for the past decade.
Facilities with co-located power plants are not datacenters. Those are power plants with a datacenter attached to the side of it. The power plant would be the concern. Even then, these are exceedingly rare and a symptom of a generation or two of American's deciding not to invest in energy infrastructure.
Power usage is a concern due to the lack of investment in generation or transmission infrastructure in this country the entire time all HN members have been alive - along with the outsourcing of effectively all US industrial capacity to third world nations. Anything else is effectively amped up rage bait without a grounding in reality.
Water is a locally isolated resource, but again these guys aren't dumb. Nearly all of the water impacts from data centers that I have seen in the news are imaginary. Most actual large-scale facilities have been built in places where water is so abundant it constitutes a natural hazard. In other places, the data centers exist alongside other much larger water consumers, which in my mind tends to absolve them. For example, one of the most objectionable (IMHO) data center sites is Phoenix, but all of the data centers in the area use something like 1% of the water evaporated by the local nuclear power station, not to mention golf courses and agriculture, so it seems weird to complain about the data centers.