Comment by phil21

> 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.