Comment by cogman10
1 hour ago
Fine, an exaggeration but not off by much.
If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh).
It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.
Okay. And? Data centers are aggregating the demand of nationwide consumption. They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.
Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.
It seems like the size criticism is one of proportionality-of-effect (in various domains such as energy usage, utility costs to citizens, and environmental effects upon water supplies and quality, land usage, noise pollution etc) upon the given locales in which they are proposed to be centralised.