Comment by sjoedev
19 hours ago
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.
Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people.
Can you spot the difference?
> Eating meat fills my belly.
So do many other things which use less water.
The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef.
> Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool.
What, is 70 not good enough?
Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people."
* yes, one to one hundred and twenty, there's that much uncertainty in the estimates for the AI.
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You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.
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What a weird line to draw. Data centres do a lot more than what you report. E.g. they might host your electronic health records. They might host census data, or weather data, or your kid's school learning management system.
> A data center costs my community
No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers. Anything they like to consume, no matter how frivolous, is accepted as morally better on a metaphysical level.
> further enriches a few already rich people.
Meat eaters damaging the Earth is okay because it's "equal"? 300 million people deciding they're entitled to consume anything they want in ever-increasing quantities is a problem because... there's 300 million of them!
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People say this and then use AI for literally everything they do.
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It directly and indirectly increases your quality of life and it is something you use every single day.
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"i can't eat a cargo container so it's useless" -guy who can only see one level up the chain of abstractions that allow him to fill his belly.
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The datacenter means I don't have read/write YAML anymore. Checkmate. I would burn the world than ever deal with YAML again.
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A data center allows the website you're whining on to function. If they're really as inconsequential to your life as you're implying, maybe you should boycott them by not using any websites or apps that rely on a data center to function.
Data centers generate export revenue. For a country that has struggled to export as much as it imports, that seems very valuable to its national economic health, and sabotaging one of the few major export industries, and one that's growing rapidly at that, seems counterproductive.
Data centers also generate local tax revenue. In fact, across industries, they have the best tax revenue to tax resource burden ratio, using very little government services while paying significant property tax.
And the environmental damage, whatever that is, is negligible relative to other industries. Their only output is some noise pollution nearby and whatever emissions are produced in the power plants that give them electricity. All industries require electricity in proportion to how much economic value they produce. So unless you want degrowth and no industry, you're going to have energy consumption.
In fact, rising energy consumption is a sign of a growing economy. That's why China has seen its energy consumption grow far faster than any other major economy while its economy has also grown far faster.
They do use water but their water usage is mininscule compared to agribusiness, or even fast food restaurants and golf courses. And the potable water usage can be brought down. They just use the water for cooling. So they could use treated wastewater or recycle the water they use. Newer data centers use these more water efficient cooling systems. So water usage is not a major long-term concern. Not one that justifies crippling this key emerging industry.
AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. At least data centres enable me to communicate with distant colleagues, watch enriching movies, and use very strong AI tools to accelerate my research.
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How does it cost your community money?
How does it damage the environment? By using energy? Like literally any other human enterprise?
What's wrong with it creating wealth? You don't have to spend money on it, it's none of your concern what other people do.
and if we’re gonna start worrying about how much a building raises the nearby temperatures, let’s also start looking at whether or not buildings are using dark or light colored roofing
People have their priorities, and putting the data centers into their mix isn't what they asked for. To say "resource abusers think this is a resource abuse" isn't really a counter argument.
When you account for post build runtime use it never looks like a big deal
Account for the runtime of the extra mining, production of materials... the scale blows up exponentially when externalities of all those extra screws and zip ties are appropriately accounted. An issue with Americans in particular as capitalism propaganda completely ignores externalities like kids in textile sweatshops not given a choice of college or the mines
3c global increase by 2050 is locked in. Meaning another 10-15 degrees local warming.
If Exxon could predict the min-max of the exact trend in the 1970s.
Physical reality doesn't give a shit about our rhetorical ability to blame a corporation or rich person; everyone consuming this shit is part of the math of the problem.
It's incredibly disingenuous to wonder why people would be concerned about projects that:
* Take a bunch of their tax money with no benefit to them
* lower their property value
* Make electricity and water more expensive (both of which make other things they use more expensive also)
* can cause other environmental impacts that raise inconvenience and expenses both directly and indirectly
so some AI douchebags can have a shiny datacenter to enable their bosses' stated desire to replace them with the very same AI might be opposed to the current AI drive datacenter boom.
Whatever actual benefits AI has, or tech in general, the way it is being approached right now is a disgusting and blatant attempt to steal as much as possible from everyone. People don't like that, and the like even less how the people doing it pretend they don't understand the dislike while building bunkers to protect themselves from the anger.
i don't think either of the first two things are generally true (usually tax positive, new usecases generally raise property value).
it sounds like you just want to ban American industry altogether, we've quietly let extreme conservatism sneak up on us in the US it seems.
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To be completely honest, normal people being able to set their AC to a sane temp does sound very valuable, and probably totally worth slowing down the slop machines a little bit.
what if rather than enumerating the list of allowed/disallowed economic activities based on some moral criterion, we just tax the rich and redistribute it. i kinda thought this is what we spent the entirety of the 20th c. litigating but maybe i'm mistaken
So we got a lot or bike paths and roads instead of the old railway tracks, many of them built during railway mania boom cycles. I wonder what will we use these shoddy windowless boxes for ?
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.
Rack densities have also more than doubled just in last 5 years
It's an order of magnitude.
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.... :)
To continue to take us off topic, there is actually pretty limited evidence that this is true.
It is true that wine doesn't do anyone any good (unless you count it making people more social or something). But the effects of one glass a night is indistinguishable from zero. There are definitely statistically significant morbidity effects at 3.
I've been shocked reading public health proclamations that "anything above zero" is bad, and then reading the actual underlying paper they refer to, which clearly states exactly the opposite finding. I think it is an extension of the public policy belief that the public cannot be trusted with moderation, and so therefore must be communicated to in absolutes, and nobody will read the underlying paper anyway.
Most modern research I have seen says there is no safe levels of alcohol where you will get no negative effects on your body. 7 glasses of wine per week isn’t that low. Is it worse than sometimes eating crap food? Maybe not. But it isn’t without risks.
Like I said on another topic: for the average man on earth, you're probably right, the carcinogenic effect of alcohol is smaller than eating red meat.
But if you are overweight or a preclinical obese, any amount of alcohol put you closer to clinical obesity.
i don't agree, i think you are just describing a measurement problem, we have a clear mechanistic understanding of why 'anything above zero' would be bad, and are able to measure this in sufficiently large populations for larger drinkers. the effect size is smaller and thus unmeasurable above the noise floor for one glass a night, but the mechanistic story is clear.
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isn't one glass a night already lack of moderation? by drinking a glass a night, or even weekly such as every friday night you're creating habit and dependency.
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According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption (1). Every molecule of alcohol is measurably bad for you physically
People want to conflate their personal desires and perceived social benefits with health benefits because mental health and physical health have overlaps
However they need to be separate to actually make a claim about alcohol as there are millions of people in functional communities that reject alcohol and have non of the negative effects
(1) https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
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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?
Better question, why don't they just build them in N. Virginia then?
I assume that data center builders can get cheaper land and/or lower taxes and/or easier regulations elsewhere. Also, the US is gigantic, so you want to have data centers geographically dispersed to reduce ping time for customers.
> What am I missing?
nation states trying to slow progress. I was pretty perplexed as well, now we're concerned about data centers? They're everywhere already.
Oh wait, it's a FUD campaign sewn by competing nations using social media so they can, hopefully, catch up. That makes a lot more sense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
Yeah man, I'm sure the largest industrial mfg country in the world is desperate to buy time to outbuild the decaying husk of a mfg country that can't even build the transformers needed to power these data centers.
Of course that's exactly what a US propaganda mill would say
Just as complicit in obfuscation of reality through quantity of time spent in a topic: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
A nuclear power station puts out many times the waste heat of the sites mentioned in the article. We've apparently mostly made peace with the local impacts of those.
Thermal efficiency is in the 30s, so roughly 2x the electrical output as waste heat. Looks like waste heat from nuclear is still quite a bit more than from data centers.
Data centers are growing quickly and that's not including the waste heat from generating the energy the consume, just taking a quick look at the relative direct emission.
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?
I feel like this has to be reiterated every single AI discussion. Anytime someone points out something it enables, someone has to go “well that existed before” as if the scale is somehow 1) irrelevant and 2) not orders of magnitude larger.
If you gave me one night, a pot of coffee, and few scruples, I could probably dump hundreds if not thousands of fake posts on the internet. Hundreds would easily break through and who knows, a handful might even go viral on Twitter. Yeah I could do that 5 years ago, but not nearly at the same scale. Maybe a few dozen?
Back to DCs: it’s like saying “well we had coal fire plants years ago.” Ok…well there are more now generating way more power and spewing way more pollution. It’s not the same situation anymore. This DC build out is massive.
I think both sides of the debate are guilty of being too vague about it, probably because being more precise is pretty difficult. "Data centers already existed." "The scale is vastly larger than before." OK, this exchange contains zero new information. "Already existed" doesn't mean it's fine now, and "vastly larger" doesn't mean it's bad now.
This DC buildout is massive? Yep. So massive that it merits substantial public opposition? Citation needed on that part. And any citation that compares current or projected DC activity with past DC activity is missing the point.
Two concrete examples: the above graph showing a multi-fold increase in construction expenditures is useless, because it gives no indication of the absolute significance of the current level. It tells me very little. For a better example, here's a graph of RAM prices over the past year and a half: https://whereismyram.com/us/price-chart. Here, we can see that data center buildout is big enough to massively affect the global market for an important commodity, and we can translate that into some sort of understanding of how this affects ordinary people.
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Your point would stand better without the insincere analogy.
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