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Comment by dabinat | Hacker News Reader

The impression I get from conversations with non-technical people is that they associate data centers with AI and all the associated controversies and negative externalities that come with that. They do not realize that there are non-AI uses for data centers. I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before people are openly trying to torch data centers.

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To be fair, 99.9999% of all new datacenter projects are explicitly for AI and only for AI. Only AI projects want this much rack space. All the big tech companies combined (except their cloud computing arms) could fit together in just one of these AI datacenters.

Have a source for that?

Since you just submitted a statistic without any evidence substantiating it, I will leave this here for future readers: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

It looks like much more like 50% of new datacenter capacity is for AI workloads.

I have family in Lakeland, Fl which is an area that is currently deciding on whether to build one. All I've heard from them is they're worried about their power rates and water bills going up. Their assumption is the added strain on the local infrastructure will be passed on to them.

People are drowning everywhere with inflation and anything that is perceived to lead to a higher monthly bill is going to encounter resistance.

Some of the people are upset that it's AI. Most in Utah are upset about drought conditions and reports of heavy metals in the air thanks to parts of The Great Salt Lake's lakebed being exposed to the air, and now this being rammed down their throats with no explanation of how it doesn't make all that worse.

Not to mention it's being given an 80% tax break, and the air quality is Salt Lake City being the worst in the world on bad days (the plan is for this data center to be natural gas powered).

The proposed build out will consume 9gw of electricity, all LNG fueled

The entire State of Utah, *combined* consumes less than half that much energy.

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