Comment by atleastoptimal
17 hours ago
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?
17 hours ago
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
Noise pollution is definitely being discussed: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
There are many reasons to not like these things nearby (anywhere it affects power or water too). And on top of that they've been "somehow" getting massive incentives and tax cuts, despite bringing in very little money or employment, which costs the area even more in future years.
It's everything combined, and pushback has been somewhat successful. Success in a protest tends to help bring more success to the same protest elsewhere.
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I've seen lots of talk about noise pollution with them? There's infrasound concerns and etc. No idea how real that impact is, but it's apparently measurable for a few miles away.
It mostly needs zoning as you say and maybe require each project put down a bond to supply a power plant expansion / new plant that covers their projected energy uses, imo. That sorts out a lot of issues. Maybe put some kinda tax on them and use it to pay for local infrastructure or schools for PR too
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"residential zoning" looks like an intentional misunderstanding of the problem. Putting one outside of "residential zoning" surely isn't a problem even if it robs an entire residential zone of power, right? Or then governments can't just re-allocate residential zones to industrial zones to get those juicy deals, right?
The way you're using language here is putting the problem so close to the edge that abuse, ignoring the quality of lives of residents, would seem just so logical.
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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.
> 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.
Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest, which includes LA, and LA's water system includes NorCal consequences, and California water issues include all-country impacts due to the farming there.
If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
California and Arizona use literally orders of magnitude more water for alfalfa farming than they do for data centers.
> Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest
no, it's a thing because you can put water in terms that even a hair dresser can be convinced to get scared and angry about. No technical knowledge required.
Millions of acre-feet of water, far more than all of the data centers use in the United States combined for evaporative cooling, are used to flood irrigate alfalfa crops in California and Arizona to feed cows. 5% of this is exported. It’s orders of magnitude more water.
All of the irrigated golf courses combined use more water than all of the US data centers combined.
if we were seeing a big increase in building new golf courses in those areas, we'd have the same protests
same if increasing alfalfa farming was increasing significantly
it's harder to stop something that already exists (shutting down existing golf courses or alfalfa farms has consequences for the local communities) than to stop something from coming into existence in the first place
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.
Noise and increased electricity costs. I feel like the people balking at anti-datacenter rhetoric are just intentionally missing the most obvious and directly impacting complaints from residents.
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.
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.
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!
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