I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ...
*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
We’re building data centers in the U.S. at an unprecedented and increasing rate [1]. Is it so hard to imagine that something which was fine at one scale may begin to cause issues at some massively higher scale?
If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems.
Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything.
You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.
One thing I never see pushback about: Northern Virginia has the highest density of data centers in the United States. Google tells me there are over 600 data centers in Virginia (that is nuts!). This build-out has been happening for more than 25 years. Until very recently, I have not heard any pushback from people in that area. What am I missing?
Oh, it's absolutely easy to imagine. That is what should give us pause. We are fantastic at imagining things. We are less fantastic at being reasonable.
Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)
It's not so hard to imagine that something which was fine at the old scale may cause issues at the new. At the same time, it's also not so hard to imagine that the new scale still isn't particularly large and that there are about a million more important things to worry about.
The question isn't whether it's possible for something to become problematic past a certain scale. The question is whether data centers are at that point, or will be anytime soon.
The actual facts and figures that are presented in opposition tend to be stripped of the larger context, which makes me skeptical. The graph you linked looks wild, but in a country that spends two trillion dollars per year on all construction, is the jump from $1 billion/month to $4 billion/month very important?
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
> they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.
*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"
"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.
What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.
A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.
You are right this seems to be misleading in a calculated way. And just because this is a junk paper doesn’t mean the groundwater issues aren’t real. I don’t really know who would be incentivized to publish this because as you say if it’s environmentalists they risk discrediting themselves.
I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."
Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.
> there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
ChatGPT has been the most downloaded app every month for a year and a half.
How is there a big difference between those two things? People want Netflix, people also want the output of AI whether that is lobster Jesus or something else. This seems more like substituting what people want, which clearly includes AI, for what some people think others should want. I can guarantee you there are people who don’t want Netflix and think it’s a waste of resources that encourage people to binge TV, become a couch potato, and end up being drags on the healthcare system. Should their preferences override those who do want it?
There's also different building pressures. Before, companies would want to build / power / maintain the smallest amount of data center hardware they could while still serving their needs. Overprovisioning just meant worse opex number.
Now, because supply is so constrained relative to demand, there's no limit. More is always better, which leads to a crazy amount of construction (as its negative effects).
The conflating of a data center and an AI/GPU farm is disingenuous at best, and the AI people know what they are doing. None of the "traditional" data centers are being powered on site with gas turbine generators. New GPU farms are also being designed with much larger footprints with much more needs from the public utilities.
I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else.
Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.
As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end for planned facilities. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water.
This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.
That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.
AI inference and training GPUs require way, way more power than anything manufactured before. Like, between 2020 and 2026 we went from ~400W for an A100 to ~1400W for an NVIDIA B300. And you cannot make that happen without changing the datacenter itself. More noise, way more complicated cooling setup, new power sources, etc. Not all datacenters are created equal.
The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms
This is very important, filling racks with GPU's instead of CPU's is vastly more power hungry (and hence will generate a lot more heat). Vera Rubin is 1800-2300W, mind boggling, these data centers even have new power architectures coming.
And I know what people will say, Vera Rubin is vastly more efficient, but that only matters if you have saturated your needs, it's meaningless if you need that capacity, and I'm sure it will run pretty much at a 100% 24/7.
Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors.
Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners.
Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.
Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.
All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.
If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.
I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.
Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.
Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters.
Being within a few hundred meters of a building that's consuming tens to hundreds of megawatts will do that, yes. I have no idea how big a normal factory would be to consume that much while running.
There is a lot of conflicting information out there, partly because the resources / environmental consequences of the current rollouts are incredibly multi-dimensional, and most articles only focus on a subset of them - and there seems to be rapid innovation happening in some of the infrastructure that can void an article from a year ago.
The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals.
I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.
It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.
Tell that to the people who have to live next to them and all the people going on about how AI is going to change everything.
Some outrages are based on real things. Not everything is a moral panic. It's like saying the Epstein victims (for example) are just a moral panic because society refuses to hold the rich and powerful accountable and the news cycle moves on.
One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.
Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it.
I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.
It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.
It's new, noticeable, memorable, and the companies involved (tech) are uniquely unlikable. Incumbents that use more resources in ways that create unwanted externalities are better about doing things more stealthily, and look rather boring. Also they've been there the entire time, so easier to accept.
Step 1: Convince the public (voters) that Data Centers are the evil boogeyman
Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies).
General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations!
Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around.
Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage.
Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure.
Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason?
“Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!”
Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players.
Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”.
i2p = dead
Hyphanet = dead
TOR = dead
[insert self hosted service] = dead
I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.
I served two terms on my town's planning commission.
It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.
In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.
Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so.
(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).
Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok
-inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns…
It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.
People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.
Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth.
Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.
What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?
4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.
> My skeptic meter
Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD
>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.
It's both.
As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.
You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.
The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.
It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)
I've done a bit of research into it, and I think it's a mix.
The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.
The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.
The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem.
I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.
Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much.
I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.
> Two AI Data Centers Require More Energy Than All Wisconsin Homes Combined: Just two AI data center projects — the Microsoft data center in Mt. Pleasant and Vantage data center in Port Washington — will require a combined 3.9 gigawatts (GW) of electric power, which is enough energy to power 4.3 million Wisconsin homes. There are only 2.8 million housing units in the entire state.
> In fiscal year 2023-24, we supplied more than 20,749 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of power for more than 1.6 million electric service customers, including nearly 6,000 in the Owens Valley.
That's an average of 2.3 GW over the year.
-----
> The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water.
> When Google purchased a defunct aluminum smelter in The Dalles, it also acquired the right to pump massive amounts of water from underground — up to 3.88 million gallons a day. That’s almost as much water as the entire city averaged per day in 2024.
> The corporation transferred those water rights to the city in 2021, Bentz noted, allowing The Dalles to pump more water from underground. The city only obtained part, not all, of the former smelter’s water rights, Mays said after OPB’s story published.
It's the rights to pump the water. Google can pump up to 3.88 million gallons per day and the city can't bill them a penny for that. Also, because it's an old claim, it's likely more senior to other water rights.
> I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.
Not Phoenix, but I learned an interesting fact about some of the huge data centers in Las Vegas, which pre-date AI: since it's 72 degrees or cooler for more than 70% of the year, during those months they can just pipe in outside air without needing to cool it first.
On top of that, I think both Phoenix and Vegas have fewer natural disasters than other major metro areas.
> Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.
A closed cycle cooling system doesn't solve the overall problem of water usage. Yes you have a cycle within the datacenter, but you need to then move that energy somewhere else, out of the system. Eventually that energy needs to find its way in the environment. A close loop system for a datacenter reduces the water use on site, but actually increase electro use. If that electricity comes from a power plant that is cooled by water you just moved the problem upstream
> The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.
It doesn't work like that because skipping your DoorDash burrito doesn't make the energy not used for that available for data center use.
The AI data center energy problem is that they use an order of magnitude more than regular data centers and they are being built at a massively higher rate than regular data centers and they are being built in places where many are being built and their owners are in a hurry.
The electric grid is designed to handle growth in demand, but this is growth way beyond anything that was anticipated.
It's gotta be costs, right? Everyone wants this done fast and at large scale, so they're going for any sites with existing large electrical connections I assume.
The outrage is real to the individual, but manufactured. Media (e.g. 404media, Ed Zitron) promotes anything that engages for clicks, views, and subscriptions. Other parties do it to hinder competition, weaken the US, or distract from much worse polluters.
> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.
Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center.
It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers.
If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.
It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right?
Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.
From my research, data centers and - more importantly - the electricity required to run data centers, are consuming a lot of water.
Sure you can argue that it's less than other industries, but that ignores the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure in the US. Any statistic you use right now is obsolete in 18-36 months when X times more data centers are running.
Also on a local level the water use can even be significant. I don't think you can rightfully tell residents who are seeing an outsized amount of their water going to data centers that they're "panicking" over nothing.
You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.
One HUGE issue is that datacenters don't have an afterlife in the communities where they're located.
They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices.
If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised.
Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
It’s just a big tip-up warehouse with precast walls. If you stripped out all of the extra electrical distribution and cooling equipment, you’re left with a giant warehouse which can easily be repurposed.
If the ai bubble bursts, these buildings will be able to be repurposed unlike rust belt factories. With all of that cooling, you could turn them into a weird form of multi-family housing. Or use them for indoor skate parks, kart racing tracks, whatever you can imagine. I don't think rust belt is an appropriate comparison. Also, these places don't hire that many people like a factory did. If the factory shut down, entire towns could collapse with it. If a data center shut down, maybe 20 people would notice????
> Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
The issue is an incentive one, for the companies involved in the construction.
Right now, they are getting paid so much to build it fast. Time is of the greatest importance. Nothing else is mattering to anyone involved except how fast datacenters are being built. At best, this is an after-thought.
As such, I believe that we have to change the incentives to create more sustainability but it requires time, discussion. Perhaps laws can help in making them more sustainable but currently, the sad reality is that for all the parties actually involved, I don't think that many truly care about the after-math or repurcussions of it as much as its the only thing that they want right now
It is real but it's about the unaccountability, dishonesty, and misanthropy of corporate overlords, rather than about the externalities of data centers per se. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901
It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one.
Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing.
In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.
The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down.
But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.
If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth
We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.
My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.
Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact
Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done
They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.
But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous
Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.
There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.
Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.
Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.
You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.
At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.
It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.
Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up
What recent mass-media panics have been legit?
For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.
These days there always seems to be panic regardless. I find it better to look at the merits of individual claims rather than try to group everything together into a binary answer like a possible conspiracy on one thing means nothing else needs to be considered.
Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere.
I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already.
For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list. I say this as someone who has traditionally voted for environmentally conscious options/representatives - my previously existing circle doesn't spend that much time talking about AI compared to other causes.
Degrowth has always been a big part of Anglophone culture. This is just the latest part of that. If you see the various parties as those downwardly mobile vs those succeeding you can automatically place people predictably into where they’ll land on various issues.
It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.
> The mean air temperature on the upwind side of the facility was approximately 42.7 °C, increasing to 43.5 °C in the neighborhood near the eastern boundary of the data center campus on the downwind side. The observed ΔT of approximately 0.8 °C extended roughly 500 m downwind
Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated over, seems like 500-1000m was their search window from their text. The next paragraph discusses how one of the sites they compare to is a relatively lower average temperate than the rest of Phoenix. Not really convinced by this methodology. Seems like doing something in a flat field with an array of temperature sensors would be a much more robust way to look at heating effects over some reasonable distance. Plenty of data centers fit the bill of flat and semi-isolated, curious why they chose these sites to look at
If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts.
I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.
We need some gatekeeping. We need automated fact checking. We need moderation based on someone's domain expertise and not how well their argument appeals to readers. User moderation is fundamentally broken and maybe only worked for a while due to the participants tending towards a particular background. Also, in the age of AI it's questionable if community forums can even continue to exist.
I do not believe for one instance that people are coming from a legitimate concern around planet-burning and reaching their conclusions about AI vs. reasoning backwards from wanting reasons to be anti-AI. Very few people I've met seems willing to make one iota of earnest personal sacrifice for avoiding actual in-real-life planet-burning industries.
Actively pisses me off hearing climate rationale for opposing something so relatively inconsequential while the house is on fire from pre-existing industry that is grandfathered in.
A lot of those aren't really online problems. People will always be discussing from feelings, bickering, so on. Go to any town hall meeting or debate club and you can see the same. Take a look at politicians and their discussions too, yeah?
If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.
if you've ever read Plato's dialogues or are familiar with the court politics of the eunuchs during, well, any Chinese dynasty, you might be convinced that even those that sit squarely in the seat of power and have the best access to food, education, and disposable time in their era are all still just a bunch of ideologues prone to bickering, constantly arguing from feelings and having little echo chambers, and so on
has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations
When you label people who disagree with you ideological extremists, you're part of the problem. They're properly labeled "people who believe things that I don't believe" and they deserve a counterargument rather than a curt dismissal or demand for silencing. If you have the courage of your own beliefs, it should be trivial to offer one.
It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answer, it's good AI slop.
Agreed, also with the people claiming foreign influence or fake accounts. I like AI, I use it a lot for work. I do not think people opposed to data centers are under foreign influence. It's pretty obvious why someone wouldn't want a huge building in their neighborhood. It's also pretty obvious to me that we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates in places like Phoenix Arizona! There can be discussion for sure, but to accuse people (who are quite frankly taking a pretty obvious and easy to understand position) of being "foreign agents" or "extremists", is just wrong. If anyone is the extremists, it's us, the heavy AI users.
The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:
>Why is that?
The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.
So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?
Right, but even then, why would we not discuss noise pollution?
The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States.
There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.
For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.
Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers.
All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.
You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.
It's much more tangible for your average person than circular financing deals or chip supply constraints. And unfortunately social media is an amplifier for tangible misinformation.
Industry build-out in the USA? It's raising our energy and water costs.
Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese.
Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!
People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons.
That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.
There's a certain group of people (the kind of people who used to spend a lot of time on twitter and now spend a lot of time on bluesky) that's convinced that their environmental activism is what defeated NFT and are trying to repeat that to defeat AI because it's the same "tech bros we hate".
Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem.
My first thought: Phoenix is a large city. Google maps tells me that it is north-to-south is about 38km, and west-to-east about 28km. Plus, it seamlessly blends into other cities to the west and east, similar to Los Angeles County (it is endless!). The headline is wildly overstated. Literally, they are measuring residential neighborhoods built next to large data centers. Yeah, no shit Sherlock. If I built housing next to some industrial plant that emits lots of heat, the same effect would probably occur. The reality of people living in a place that experiences summertime temperatures of forty-five degrees Celcius, your enormous air conditioning unit will just work a little bit harder. You spent hardly anytime outside during weather like that. If anything, this just sounds like bad land zoning laws in Phoenix. The intent of this peer-reviewed study seems suspicious to me.
Interesting, as we increase our total global power consumption, losses in the form of heat will increase proportionally.
This is more of a zoning problem
"...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"
With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks?
Coding agents are increasingly popular right now, and they can use millions of reasoning tokens per hour. Basic ChatGPT queries hardly use any tokens by comparison.
Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.
industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits
honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
If they're zoned like heavy industry, that seems fine for any noise/ heat etc. If they're zoned for light industry or similar to office buildings like the other comment says I feel like that could have different impacts - an office building will have some of this but probably has much less equipment and energy needs, less venting heat out maybe?
But if we're going to keep factories and chemical plants away from housing we can keep data centers over with them I think. Out of sight, out of mind, less chance of local protestors, maybe even closer to good power plants for transmission. Everyone wins?
It's the issue du jour because of foreign influence. The situation in Phoenix is due more to poor zoning since the DC is right across the street from a residential area.
> I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too
If anything about this paper is accurate, which it clearly is not, then the >8000MW rejected to the atmosphere from the nearby Palo Verde power station should be raising the air temperature at least 250C, 1km downwind. Which it obviously does not.
Using energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas.
But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
Not necessarily; a building satisfied by its own rooftop solar should be roughly heat neutral since that energy was already there. The problem is with the power density these buildings imply, requiring energy movement. Everyone could run Qwen 3.8 27B at home with a solar panel and it'd make no difference. Companies could run their traditional servers on-site at their offices, etc.
Not quite. If the roof were highly reflective and it's a clear sky, it would reflect sunlight (including infrared) back into space. Of course, we're talking about such minimal levels of power here compared to, say, heating a house in the winter that it's irrelevant.
It needs around 300 W to run Qwen 3.8-27b here, which is roughly eqivalent to me as a human walking around and doing basically anything other than sitting still.
> But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment
The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.
The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.
Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.
1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.
All I can think of when reading this was Hank Hill yelling at his neighbor: "Dale you giblet-head, we live in Texas, where it's already 110 in the summer. And if it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!" [1]
During peak sunlight conditions, a standard black asphalt surface will readily absorb solar radiation, sending its surface temperature to 150°F–190°F .
A clean white roof reflects up to 80% of sunlight, and topping out at around 95°F–115°F. (https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roo...)
"The attribution of this warming to data center waste heat is supported by the consistent alignment of the temperature signal with the prevailing wind direction across multiple sites, dates, and meteorological conditions. "
Well, no? That could also mean that the heat island effect of the (statutorily mandated) employee parking lot is causal.
You can look up the NTT PH1 Datacenter from the study on Google Maps. It doesn't have much of a parking lot but due to poor industrial zoning, it's right next to a residential suburb. It's basically a failure of urban planning.
It's in the middle of a large, disturbed area with big commercial buildings, roads, and parking lots, only some of which are data centers. This type of disturbance tends to get hot in the sun. But the larger question is how they are attributing the temperature at the end of the cul de sac to the data center when the somewhat more obvious reason for a hot spot there is that nothing shades it. That is, the measured cooler streets are shaded by the houses, but the edges of the neighborhood are shaded by nothing.
Anyway the main problem with this paper is it does not have an explanation for why the response isn't linear. If areal density of heat rejection was able to raise air temperatures this amount, then nobody would be able to go anywhere near a thermal power station without being vaporized.
But ... but ... but ... ai companies have safety teams that ... well ... make sure some kind of singularity mumbo jumbo threat wont happen. The thing they dont care about are ... well ... actual people and actual environment.
That doesn't make the slightest difference for two reasons:
1. Natural gas still produces CO2, which is a climate change driver. (And, since burning more of it will only increase global temperatures, the data center will have more trouble losing its excess heat.
2. Even if a data centre uses a totally clean energy source, it's still excess usage. That clean energy could have been used elsewhere. Until all energy is clean, usage by unnecessary sources is a net negative.
that's already raising the local area temps, why not put that wasted fuel to work instead?
build the datacenters literally next to the fracking fields, absolutely no-one there to complain, they all moved away already from the toxic air/water and there's already unlimited fuel
I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ...
*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
We’re building data centers in the U.S. at an unprecedented and increasing rate [1]. Is it so hard to imagine that something which was fine at one scale may begin to cause issues at some massively higher scale?
If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen...
Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything.
You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.
44 replies →
One thing I never see pushback about: Northern Virginia has the highest density of data centers in the United States. Google tells me there are over 600 data centers in Virginia (that is nuts!). This build-out has been happening for more than 25 years. Until very recently, I have not heard any pushback from people in that area. What am I missing?
Valid point, but this looks like (roughly) 1 billion to 5 billion in a period of 10 years.
5x in a decade. The way it’s talked about you would think it’s orders of magnitude.
2 replies →
Oh, it's absolutely easy to imagine. That is what should give us pause. We are fantastic at imagining things. We are less fantastic at being reasonable.
Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)
9 replies →
It's not so hard to imagine that something which was fine at the old scale may cause issues at the new. At the same time, it's also not so hard to imagine that the new scale still isn't particularly large and that there are about a million more important things to worry about.
The question isn't whether it's possible for something to become problematic past a certain scale. The question is whether data centers are at that point, or will be anytime soon.
The actual facts and figures that are presented in opposition tend to be stripped of the larger context, which makes me skeptical. The graph you linked looks wild, but in a country that spends two trillion dollars per year on all construction, is the jump from $1 billion/month to $4 billion/month very important?
3 replies →
Your point would stand better without the insincere analogy.
1 reply →
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
11 replies →
> they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
https://www.loudoun.gov/faq.aspx?TID=241
4 replies →
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
Everyone would be singing their praises.
9 replies →
> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.
Well they say
*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"
"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.
What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.
A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.
You are right this seems to be misleading in a calculated way. And just because this is a junk paper doesn’t mean the groundwater issues aren’t real. I don’t really know who would be incentivized to publish this because as you say if it’s environmentalists they risk discrediting themselves.
I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."
Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.
6 replies →
> there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
ChatGPT has been the most downloaded app every month for a year and a half.
4 replies →
How is there a big difference between those two things? People want Netflix, people also want the output of AI whether that is lobster Jesus or something else. This seems more like substituting what people want, which clearly includes AI, for what some people think others should want. I can guarantee you there are people who don’t want Netflix and think it’s a waste of resources that encourage people to binge TV, become a couch potato, and end up being drags on the healthcare system. Should their preferences override those who do want it?
6 replies →
There's also different building pressures. Before, companies would want to build / power / maintain the smallest amount of data center hardware they could while still serving their needs. Overprovisioning just meant worse opex number.
Now, because supply is so constrained relative to demand, there's no limit. More is always better, which leads to a crazy amount of construction (as its negative effects).
The conflating of a data center and an AI/GPU farm is disingenuous at best, and the AI people know what they are doing. None of the "traditional" data centers are being powered on site with gas turbine generators. New GPU farms are also being designed with much larger footprints with much more needs from the public utilities.
You really think Lobster Jesus is what most of this is doing?
It's doing code, analytics, training, research, operating services. The silly slop stuff is a small rounding error of usage.
1 reply →
[dead]
I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else.
Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.
As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end for planned facilities. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water.
This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.
That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.
AI inference and training GPUs require way, way more power than anything manufactured before. Like, between 2020 and 2026 we went from ~400W for an A100 to ~1400W for an NVIDIA B300. And you cannot make that happen without changing the datacenter itself. More noise, way more complicated cooling setup, new power sources, etc. Not all datacenters are created equal.
The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms
> The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms
Could you expand on that?
6 replies →
This is very important, filling racks with GPU's instead of CPU's is vastly more power hungry (and hence will generate a lot more heat). Vera Rubin is 1800-2300W, mind boggling, these data centers even have new power architectures coming.
And I know what people will say, Vera Rubin is vastly more efficient, but that only matters if you have saturated your needs, it's meaningless if you need that capacity, and I'm sure it will run pretty much at a 100% 24/7.
Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors. Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners.
Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.
Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.
All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.
If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.
I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.
Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.
Being within a few hundred meters of a building that's consuming tens to hundreds of megawatts will do that, yes. I have no idea how big a normal factory would be to consume that much while running.
There is a lot of conflicting information out there, partly because the resources / environmental consequences of the current rollouts are incredibly multi-dimensional, and most articles only focus on a subset of them - and there seems to be rapid innovation happening in some of the infrastructure that can void an article from a year ago.
The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals.
I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.
It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.
I hope so. The worst case scenario is that it develops into something like nuclear aversion in Germany.
Tell that to the people who have to live next to them and all the people going on about how AI is going to change everything.
Some outrages are based on real things. Not everything is a moral panic. It's like saying the Epstein victims (for example) are just a moral panic because society refuses to hold the rich and powerful accountable and the news cycle moves on.
Remember when people spent hours on the weekend protesting Tesla dealerships. I guess they protected us from whatever it was. Can’t remember anymore
The risk is that reacting to the panic, states lock in laws with destructive moratoriums they politically can't back out of later.
That's just a non sequitur.
Compare the scale of datacenter construction in the past decades vs the pace post 2022.
Also the general computing datacenters of the past are vastly different in societal utility vs the GPU only AI datacenters, which do just one thing
One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.
This post is quite hilarious to read, it has to be satire
Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it.
I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.
It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.
It's new, noticeable, memorable, and the companies involved (tech) are uniquely unlikable. Incumbents that use more resources in ways that create unwanted externalities are better about doing things more stealthily, and look rather boring. Also they've been there the entire time, so easier to accept.
Small scale natural gas turbine plants are bad for local human air due to NOx emissions.
100% true yet even when you solve this (for example with clean hydro in the northwest), you make zero progress with the anti-datacenter people.
5 replies →
Is there a better alternative for on-demand, on-location power generation?
2 replies →
Step 1: Convince the public (voters) that Data Centers are the evil boogeyman
Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies).
General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations!
Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around.
Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage.
Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure.
Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason?
“Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!”
Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players.
Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”.
i2p = dead Hyphanet = dead TOR = dead [insert self hosted service] = dead
I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.
I served two terms on my town's planning commission.
It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.
In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.
Amongst other issues, it is a proxy for the angst over AI.
Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so.
(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).
> There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area.
This is the trumped up rhetoric you speak of.
Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok -inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns…
It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.
People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.
Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…
The article isn't about warming the planet. So you're the one trumping up something that isn't there.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth.
Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.
What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.
That is using FUD to avoid accountability. In this case is the last one "doubt". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.
> My skeptic meter
Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD
>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.
It's both.
As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.
You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.
The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.
It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)
I've done a bit of research into it, and I think it's a mix.
The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.
The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.
The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem.
I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.
Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much.
I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.
> The energy thing is exaggerated.
https://www.wpr.org/news/wisconsin-energy-demand-to-rise-dri...
> Wisconsin energy demand to rise 40 percent by 2032, driven by data centers, draft report finds
> Draft report: Over 72% of peak electricity load is 'associated with three active data center developments'
https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-d...
https://www.cleanwisconsin.org/wisconsin-ai-data-center-powe...
> Two AI Data Centers Require More Energy Than All Wisconsin Homes Combined: Just two AI data center projects — the Microsoft data center in Mt. Pleasant and Vantage data center in Port Washington — will require a combined 3.9 gigawatts (GW) of electric power, which is enough energy to power 4.3 million Wisconsin homes. There are only 2.8 million housing units in the entire state.
Compare with the city of Los Angeles - https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/power-system
> In fiscal year 2023-24, we supplied more than 20,749 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of power for more than 1.6 million electric service customers, including nearly 6,000 in the Owens Valley.
That's an average of 2.3 GW over the year.
-----
> The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/15/as-googles-water-dema...
> When Google purchased a defunct aluminum smelter in The Dalles, it also acquired the right to pump massive amounts of water from underground — up to 3.88 million gallons a day. That’s almost as much water as the entire city averaged per day in 2024.
> The corporation transferred those water rights to the city in 2021, Bentz noted, allowing The Dalles to pump more water from underground. The city only obtained part, not all, of the former smelter’s water rights, Mays said after OPB’s story published.
It's the rights to pump the water. Google can pump up to 3.88 million gallons per day and the city can't bill them a penny for that. Also, because it's an old claim, it's likely more senior to other water rights.
https://www.oregon.gov/owrd/programs/waterrights/pages/defau...
> I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.
Not Phoenix, but I learned an interesting fact about some of the huge data centers in Las Vegas, which pre-date AI: since it's 72 degrees or cooler for more than 70% of the year, during those months they can just pipe in outside air without needing to cool it first.
On top of that, I think both Phoenix and Vegas have fewer natural disasters than other major metro areas.
> Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.
A closed cycle cooling system doesn't solve the overall problem of water usage. Yes you have a cycle within the datacenter, but you need to then move that energy somewhere else, out of the system. Eventually that energy needs to find its way in the environment. A close loop system for a datacenter reduces the water use on site, but actually increase electro use. If that electricity comes from a power plant that is cooled by water you just moved the problem upstream
1 reply →
> The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.
It doesn't work like that because skipping your DoorDash burrito doesn't make the energy not used for that available for data center use.
The AI data center energy problem is that they use an order of magnitude more than regular data centers and they are being built at a massively higher rate than regular data centers and they are being built in places where many are being built and their owners are in a hurry.
The electric grid is designed to handle growth in demand, but this is growth way beyond anything that was anticipated.
It's gotta be costs, right? Everyone wants this done fast and at large scale, so they're going for any sites with existing large electrical connections I assume.
The outrage is real to the individual, but manufactured. Media (e.g. 404media, Ed Zitron) promotes anything that engages for clicks, views, and subscriptions. Other parties do it to hinder competition, weaken the US, or distract from much worse polluters.
> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.
Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center.
It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers.
If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.
It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right?
Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.
> Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it?
At some point, their 401Ks are going to depend on it.
1 reply →
From my research, data centers and - more importantly - the electricity required to run data centers, are consuming a lot of water.
Sure you can argue that it's less than other industries, but that ignores the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure in the US. Any statistic you use right now is obsolete in 18-36 months when X times more data centers are running.
Also on a local level the water use can even be significant. I don't think you can rightfully tell residents who are seeing an outsized amount of their water going to data centers that they're "panicking" over nothing.
You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.
One HUGE issue is that datacenters don't have an afterlife in the communities where they're located.
They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices.
If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised.
Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
It’s just a big tip-up warehouse with precast walls. If you stripped out all of the extra electrical distribution and cooling equipment, you’re left with a giant warehouse which can easily be repurposed.
If the ai bubble bursts, these buildings will be able to be repurposed unlike rust belt factories. With all of that cooling, you could turn them into a weird form of multi-family housing. Or use them for indoor skate parks, kart racing tracks, whatever you can imagine. I don't think rust belt is an appropriate comparison. Also, these places don't hire that many people like a factory did. If the factory shut down, entire towns could collapse with it. If a data center shut down, maybe 20 people would notice????
> Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.
The issue is an incentive one, for the companies involved in the construction.
Right now, they are getting paid so much to build it fast. Time is of the greatest importance. Nothing else is mattering to anyone involved except how fast datacenters are being built. At best, this is an after-thought.
As such, I believe that we have to change the incentives to create more sustainability but it requires time, discussion. Perhaps laws can help in making them more sustainable but currently, the sad reality is that for all the parties actually involved, I don't think that many truly care about the after-math or repurcussions of it as much as its the only thing that they want right now
It is real but it's about the unaccountability, dishonesty, and misanthropy of corporate overlords, rather than about the externalities of data centers per se. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901
It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one.
Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing.
In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.
The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down.
But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.
If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.
> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth
We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.
My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.
It’s not so binary
Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact
Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done
They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.
But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous
AI datacenters are a completely different beast than the "normal" cloud ones.
They use order of magnitudes more resources.
the information I have says they use 3-5x, which isn't even one order of magnitude
TikTok and social media
Of course, that's why the US wanted to buy it.
It's more like, not having Trump, and controlling the complete manufacturing pipeline from beginning to end
Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.
There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.
Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.
Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.
It's like literally any other change to society:
You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.
At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.
It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.
Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.
> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up
What recent mass-media panics have been legit?
For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.
It is 100% deranged nonsense. These people have absolutely lost their minds.
[dead]
These days there always seems to be panic regardless. I find it better to look at the merits of individual claims rather than try to group everything together into a binary answer like a possible conspiracy on one thing means nothing else needs to be considered.
Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere.
I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already.
For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list. I say this as someone who has traditionally voted for environmentally conscious options/representatives - my previously existing circle doesn't spend that much time talking about AI compared to other causes.
I did some digging and lots of anti data center accounts were from India.
I imagine China bought the accounts or pay $20 for a post.
Degrowth has always been a big part of Anglophone culture. This is just the latest part of that. If you see the various parties as those downwardly mobile vs those succeeding you can automatically place people predictably into where they’ll land on various issues.
It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.
> The mean air temperature on the upwind side of the facility was approximately 42.7 °C, increasing to 43.5 °C in the neighborhood near the eastern boundary of the data center campus on the downwind side. The observed ΔT of approximately 0.8 °C extended roughly 500 m downwind
Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated over, seems like 500-1000m was their search window from their text. The next paragraph discusses how one of the sites they compare to is a relatively lower average temperate than the rest of Phoenix. Not really convinced by this methodology. Seems like doing something in a flat field with an array of temperature sensors would be a much more robust way to look at heating effects over some reasonable distance. Plenty of data centers fit the bill of flat and semi-isolated, curious why they chose these sites to look at
The title is correct. You are looking at average temperature rise. The article states by up to which is the maximum temperature rise.
If you catch me on fire my average temperature rise doesn't go up very much, but I have the barest of hints that it might have an impact.
Never said anything about correctness.
If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts.
I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.
We need some gatekeeping. We need automated fact checking. We need moderation based on someone's domain expertise and not how well their argument appeals to readers. User moderation is fundamentally broken and maybe only worked for a while due to the participants tending towards a particular background. Also, in the age of AI it's questionable if community forums can even continue to exist.
Turns out people have quite strong feelings about career -ruining and planet-burning tech advances.
I think it's good that there are topics that elicit emotional responses. It does make the discussion a bit difficult, gotta admit that.
I do not believe for one instance that people are coming from a legitimate concern around planet-burning and reaching their conclusions about AI vs. reasoning backwards from wanting reasons to be anti-AI. Very few people I've met seems willing to make one iota of earnest personal sacrifice for avoiding actual in-real-life planet-burning industries.
Actively pisses me off hearing climate rationale for opposing something so relatively inconsequential while the house is on fire from pre-existing industry that is grandfathered in.
A lot of those aren't really online problems. People will always be discussing from feelings, bickering, so on. Go to any town hall meeting or debate club and you can see the same. Take a look at politicians and their discussions too, yeah?
If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.
if you've ever read Plato's dialogues or are familiar with the court politics of the eunuchs during, well, any Chinese dynasty, you might be convinced that even those that sit squarely in the seat of power and have the best access to food, education, and disposable time in their era are all still just a bunch of ideologues prone to bickering, constantly arguing from feelings and having little echo chambers, and so on
has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations
>even on hacker news.
come on now, HN is just a step above reddit. some of these discussions are pretty solid.
> HN is just a step above reddit.
It didn't used to be this way. The line between HN and reddit is converging and now sometimes it's difficult to tell them apart.
4 replies →
When you label people who disagree with you ideological extremists, you're part of the problem. They're properly labeled "people who believe things that I don't believe" and they deserve a counterargument rather than a curt dismissal or demand for silencing. If you have the courage of your own beliefs, it should be trivial to offer one.
It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answer, it's good AI slop.
Agreed, also with the people claiming foreign influence or fake accounts. I like AI, I use it a lot for work. I do not think people opposed to data centers are under foreign influence. It's pretty obvious why someone wouldn't want a huge building in their neighborhood. It's also pretty obvious to me that we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates in places like Phoenix Arizona! There can be discussion for sure, but to accuse people (who are quite frankly taking a pretty obvious and easy to understand position) of being "foreign agents" or "extremists", is just wrong. If anyone is the extremists, it's us, the heavy AI users.
If only we had the same amount of concern about oil refineries and gas stations.
https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in...
https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic...
They did though. This was 3 years later: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration...
The group trying to do that got voted out of all majorities of power
The environmental concerns around oil refineries are a huge barrier to construction across much of the world.
Fossils use, production and trade needs to be rapidly ramped down to mitigate the climate catastrophe and resulting megadeaths on all fronts.
Won't someone think of the shareholders of the oil conglomerates?
On second thought, fuck 'em.
Let 'em burn.
... and solar panels.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
>but it's all people seem to care about.
This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:
>Why is that?
The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.
So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?
Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.
Right, but even then, why would we not discuss noise pollution?
The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States.
There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
17 replies →
It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.
The impact is highly geography dependent.
For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.
Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers.
All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.
> it's all people seem to care about.
You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.
Pretty sure everyone cares about their power bills and water bills going up. The people living next to them care about this other stuff.
It's much more tangible for your average person than circular financing deals or chip supply constraints. And unfortunately social media is an amplifier for tangible misinformation.
When you have no arguments on your side you have to make them up.
Industry build-out in the USA? It's raising our energy and water costs.
Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese.
Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!
People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons.
That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.
There's a certain group of people (the kind of people who used to spend a lot of time on twitter and now spend a lot of time on bluesky) that's convinced that their environmental activism is what defeated NFT and are trying to repeat that to defeat AI because it's the same "tech bros we hate".
Because they are hitting people's water and electricity bills (and or ability to get either at all) RIGHT NOW
Yea decreasing them
These comments are full of the "but you participate in society" fallacy.
Data centers can do a thing positively and yet have negative impacts that should be discussed. It's not that hard.
Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem.
If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
My first thought: Phoenix is a large city. Google maps tells me that it is north-to-south is about 38km, and west-to-east about 28km. Plus, it seamlessly blends into other cities to the west and east, similar to Los Angeles County (it is endless!). The headline is wildly overstated. Literally, they are measuring residential neighborhoods built next to large data centers. Yeah, no shit Sherlock. If I built housing next to some industrial plant that emits lots of heat, the same effect would probably occur. The reality of people living in a place that experiences summertime temperatures of forty-five degrees Celcius, your enormous air conditioning unit will just work a little bit harder. You spent hardly anytime outside during weather like that. If anything, this just sounds like bad land zoning laws in Phoenix. The intent of this peer-reviewed study seems suspicious to me.
Something smells wrong. You could dump a gigawatt into resistive heating and not see such temperature rises so far away.
where there is a demand for results, academia will meet the supply
Interesting, as we increase our total global power consumption, losses in the form of heat will increase proportionally.
This is more of a zoning problem
"...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"
A modern data center (1GW) is about the same as 140k additional cars in traffic in terms of direct heating.
Seems more likely that the heating is climate change driven primarily. But, 140k cars 24/7 is a lot of cars, so???
With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks?
The benefit to effort ratio seems fishy to me.
Coding agents are increasingly popular right now, and they can use millions of reasoning tokens per hour. Basic ChatGPT queries hardly use any tokens by comparison.
Out of curiosity, how are large data centers zoned?
When I worked at a big cloud provider the large sites were either within an existing industrial area, or off by themselves with lots of buffer.
I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now.
For me, noise would be my first concern
Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.
industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits
honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
If they're zoned like heavy industry, that seems fine for any noise/ heat etc. If they're zoned for light industry or similar to office buildings like the other comment says I feel like that could have different impacts - an office building will have some of this but probably has much less equipment and energy needs, less venting heat out maybe?
But if we're going to keep factories and chemical plants away from housing we can keep data centers over with them I think. Out of sight, out of mind, less chance of local protestors, maybe even closer to good power plants for transmission. Everyone wins?
1 reply →
It's the issue du jour because of foreign influence. The situation in Phoenix is due more to poor zoning since the DC is right across the street from a residential area.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
8 replies →
> I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too
If anything about this paper is accurate, which it clearly is not, then the >8000MW rejected to the atmosphere from the nearby Palo Verde power station should be raising the air temperature at least 250C, 1km downwind. Which it obviously does not.
Using energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas.
But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
Not necessarily; a building satisfied by its own rooftop solar should be roughly heat neutral since that energy was already there. The problem is with the power density these buildings imply, requiring energy movement. Everyone could run Qwen 3.8 27B at home with a solar panel and it'd make no difference. Companies could run their traditional servers on-site at their offices, etc.
Not quite. If the roof were highly reflective and it's a clear sky, it would reflect sunlight (including infrared) back into space. Of course, we're talking about such minimal levels of power here compared to, say, heating a house in the winter that it's irrelevant.
It needs around 300 W to run Qwen 3.8-27b here, which is roughly eqivalent to me as a human walking around and doing basically anything other than sitting still.
> But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment
The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.
The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.
Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.
1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.
“Everyone in McKinney is dead”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzA8DcAiijc
My first real job was in McKinney, sad to hear they are all dead.
4 degrees Fahrenheit:
> "... air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C ..."
this is within 500m of the datacenter. this is a deeply unserious problem. parking lots are probably a bigger contributor.
Just wait until people hear about the temperature increases caused by parking lots....
the fact ppl reading this are not lol-ing makes me sad.
All I can think of when reading this was Hank Hill yelling at his neighbor: "Dale you giblet-head, we live in Texas, where it's already 110 in the summer. And if it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!" [1]
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0620288/characters/nm0362548/?i...
Now compare to how much an asphalt parking lot raises temperatures.
Eagerly awaiting your report.
During peak sunlight conditions, a standard black asphalt surface will readily absorb solar radiation, sending its surface temperature to 150°F–190°F . A clean white roof reflects up to 80% of sunlight, and topping out at around 95°F–115°F. (https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roo...)
"The attribution of this warming to data center waste heat is supported by the consistent alignment of the temperature signal with the prevailing wind direction across multiple sites, dates, and meteorological conditions. "
Well, no? That could also mean that the heat island effect of the (statutorily mandated) employee parking lot is causal.
You can look up the NTT PH1 Datacenter from the study on Google Maps. It doesn't have much of a parking lot but due to poor industrial zoning, it's right next to a residential suburb. It's basically a failure of urban planning.
It's in the middle of a large, disturbed area with big commercial buildings, roads, and parking lots, only some of which are data centers. This type of disturbance tends to get hot in the sun. But the larger question is how they are attributing the temperature at the end of the cul de sac to the data center when the somewhat more obvious reason for a hot spot there is that nothing shades it. That is, the measured cooler streets are shaded by the houses, but the edges of the neighborhood are shaded by nothing.
Anyway the main problem with this paper is it does not have an explanation for why the response isn't linear. If areal density of heat rejection was able to raise air temperatures this amount, then nobody would be able to go anywhere near a thermal power station without being vaporized.
The key is this says at distances up to 500m downwind. This is a nothing burger sorry
Cool, I'll be putting big data ai machine learning data center in your back yard.
No one has ever built a full datacenter in someones backyard...
4 replies →
will they give me free tokens
so now we are speed-running global warming
there are now record setting gas turbine sales instead of solar/nuclear
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8ziQCWK1w
and for what?
so we can have totally useless "AI" customer service agents where you still have to demand to talk to a human to properly get a problem solved
You haven't used the latest models! AGI is just around the corner! China! Russia!
But ... but ... but ... ai companies have safety teams that ... well ... make sure some kind of singularity mumbo jumbo threat wont happen. The thing they dont care about are ... well ... actual people and actual environment.
[flagged]
That doesn't make the slightest difference for two reasons:
1. Natural gas still produces CO2, which is a climate change driver. (And, since burning more of it will only increase global temperatures, the data center will have more trouble losing its excess heat.
2. Even if a data centre uses a totally clean energy source, it's still excess usage. That clean energy could have been used elsewhere. Until all energy is clean, usage by unnecessary sources is a net negative.
1 reply →
If only there were energy sources that didn't involve burning anything. Perhaps that nuclear reaction in the sky that wakes us up every day?
how about the non-stop methane burnoff for months ("flare") from all the oil fracking fields in the US that can be seen from SPACE for the past DECADE
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/20/ameri...
* https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/gas-drillin...
that's already raising the local area temps, why not put that wasted fuel to work instead?
build the datacenters literally next to the fracking fields, absolutely no-one there to complain, they all moved away already from the toxic air/water and there's already unlimited fuel
3 replies →
Reminder: 4 degrees = 0.0698131701 rad
(article says 2.2 [C/K], btw)
Are people thinking it is better to get AI from Xi?
This is like saying campfires raise nearby temperatures by up to 700°F – 900°F (370°C – 480°C) or so. We need to heavily regulate or even ban camping.