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Comment by emsign | Hacker News Reader

Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of:

* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick

* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials

* rising electricity bills

* rising water bills

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> use too much ground water

Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.

The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?

Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off.

These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.

"Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in particular struggle with their water supply and should not be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too lazy to think.

Wisconsin (the state FTA) is bounded by two of the Great Lakes and doesn't generally have water problems.

Ummm, I live in Wisconsin (since 1996), and that isn't how that works at ALL.

Can you make more substantive comments besides saying "wrong!" ? I don't disagree with your claim but it's extremely low effort and adds nothing to the conversation.

Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.

Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.

They use evaporative cooling towers because you need far fewer of them. The evaporating water can be separate from the main cooling loop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower#Heat_transfer_me...

A few, most don't. If it's cheaper to use an open system then the closed system are only built for show, to soothe the public.

Charge them more for water and electricity until they're using the amount of water you think is right.

The fundamental problem here is municipalities getting into cozy, sweetheart deals with corporations.

Yup, and the abuse of NDA's compounds the issue

I'd rather have something to eat or take a shower at home than talk to an LLM.

Tell that to the poor people in Mexico, where hundreds of new data centers are sucking the local aquifers dry... (hurting the people directly)

Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.

Not building energy production and distribution for the past 50 years is what is causing electricity prices to increase. Chickens coming home to roost. Eventually you run out of the previous generation’s infrastructure investments and cheap tricks like efficiency gains to avoid real capital investment.

Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit. This was always coming for us.

So long as they are paying market rates like any other power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from regulatory rates then there would be a problem.

The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.

If we can’t figure out as a society how to come out ahead with a much more robust electric grid after this giant investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational scale.

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