Comment by ben_w
17 hours ago
> 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.
When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result.
Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...
Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it.
I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.
> I wonder why it had to be built near so many people
I can't read the link either, but at a glance, the first one wasn't. It's in clearly industrial land a long way from any houses, with its closest neighbors as far as I can tell being a steel mill, a few existing power plants, and a wastewater plant.
The second one is practically right in the middle of a bunch of neighborhoods, and for that, yeah, I want to know as well. I'm guessing the land was cheap, industrial-zoned, and near a substation?
(Not to excuse what Musk is doing in either case - it's fucked and has wide ranging effects. But I think it's important to clarify the first because I've seen a repeated trend of people acting like a new DC is going to be built in the middle of a peaceful picket-fence neighborhood, and then you look it up, and it's actually being built on top of a former steel mill a mile away from the nearest house. It gets annoying.)
Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.
4 replies →
JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument.
AC and meat are bad for the environment but they deliver personal benefit. Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives. That's it.
> JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument.
I'm replying to someone who themselves argued the analogies.
> Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives.
To the extent that statement is true, it applies equally to most primary and secondary economic activity.
Having a farm in your community has no appreciable personal benefit: for scale, the UK famously gets a lot of their sheep meat from New Zealand, as far away as it is physically possible to be.
An abattoir similarly has no substantial local benefit, but worse has much detriment owing to the psychological damage it does to the workers, leading to higher rates of arrest for violent criminal offences: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816...
Unless it's at the scale where it becomes a company town, having a factory, a warehouse, etc. these things are all heavily automated or mechanised and employ only a few of the locals as a percentage of the population. Putting anything that isn't service-sector in your community (i.e. schools, hospitals, shops, restaurants, hairdressers, etc.) is going to be of "no appreciable personal benefit" when considered in isolation.
Almost all primary (farming, fishing, mining) and secondary (manufacturing) comes with negatives (pollution, higher wear on the roads and utilities).
>Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money,
In what country do you not have an electric bill?
It can be done even in rich countries, but the point is I think the opposite of your implication: I am claiming that it is hard to avoid causing costs to one's community (and that almost everything causes more impact than one might expect), I am not claiming to have achieved such avoidance.
Water issue is highly local. Eating meat from where it grew has zero impact on whether this or that datacenter waste water where it is expensive or lacking.
These bad faith "but you exist and do unrelated things" fallacies are a.) bad faith b.) make people have ai people more.
Bringing uo AC while you defend datacenters making global warming worst is just a cherry on top.of it. Just underlines anti-human fck you all ideology of it all.
We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%.
Of the two, use of air con in the US is a bigger source than current data centres, and in the middle of the range of extimates for how many new data centres will actually get built over the next few years.
It would of course be much better if both AC and DC (in both senses) were powered by renewables, but y'all elected someone who thinks they're a woke Chinese scam or something, possibly because one got built near a golf course in one of his foreign properties, possibly as a favour to the people who gave him that new aircraft for his "library".
Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?
Training is part of why there's two orders of magnitude range in the estimates. However, I believe yes, they do include energy production impact.