Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/
Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?
Pretty functional design.
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
Both are attempting to dismiss something useful and important, over trivial and manageable issues, mostly for culture war reasons rather than rational reasons.
Data centers are loud, raise energy prices for everyone around them, and use drinking water in tremendous quantities.
This isn’t a culture war, this is a class war.
Edit: you might be a bot. No comments in the last 47 days, then a string of hard-pro data center comments in the last week.
EDIT: NO! Wth is this map? I have to click to expand the clusters. Ah well, all is good.
It also accepts user reporting of new developments, breaks them down in several categories (tracking proposed, operational, under construction, etc).
And eventually it can also track more information about them, specific to their cases (amount of water and energy used, pollution reports, etc). E.g. it has information like "1.2 GW AI factory broke ground May 12, 2026 at Eastgate Commerce Center (Little Blue Pkwy & MO-78). 400 acres, up to 10 buildings. ~1,200 construction jobs / ~130 full-time. Multi-billion-dollar investment; $150bn taxable industrial development revenue bonds secured." for some.
Brockovich is an environmental activist. Her project uses the public as a source of data for the map ("community reports")
DCR does not
The way they are operated, they do.
But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.
2. Despite beef using far more water, is it getting anywhere remotely as much coverage as data center water use?
3. Senators like Sanders proposed stopping data center construction nationwide - have senators proposed similar nationwide bans for beef?
Tell that to the aquafers we’re emptying that won’t refill for generations.
Water is renewable, but not necessarily in the right place or in timely manner.
Using treated potable water to cool servers is just taxpayers subsidizing server cooling.
Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Can you see the difference?
> Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.
Almost all other foods don't use trillions of gallons of water like beef does. If someone's goal was to reduce water use, then shouldn't they be making at least as much noise about the non-necessary thing using far more water compared to data center's billions, not trillions, of gallons?
Why is the difference in what specific use case the consumers of these products are serving with them one that's relevant to the discussion?
I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).
Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.
An electronic circuit drawing 1W of input power will dissipate all of that 1W as heat (assuming it's not outputting light or sound or other physical side effects).
Though there might be practical differences though between the excess heat intentionally exhausted, and other heat. Just speaking from a very macro sense.
In local terms its a fair bit of heating but zooming out it's a drop in the bucket.
According to Google, one ton of water takes about 730kWh to boil. So I think you’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s only ~450 metric tons.
(But this assumes that no heat is radiated away in other forms.)
Otherwise it's 1.16 Wh/kg (or kWh/ton) to rise the temprature by 1°C. Thus one needs a delta of 80°C, so 93 Wh to boil a kg of 20°C water. That's what my napkin math was based on. I used that metric a lot to calculate heat deltas in storage tanks.
My 1500W space heater could boil 4.32 gallons of water every hour. But it isn't.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized by concentrated minority interests in specific spots in the country. The only big picture thing about it is the left-populist sideshow it's created.
That seems very untrue - multiple areas have already banned data centers, and senators like Bernie Sanders have proposed stopping data centers nationwide. This is just the next phase of NIMBY-ism. Alternatively, source that the "data centers the industry wants are all going to get built"?
> I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers.
I'm guessing you're referring to rather cherry-picked data? I've seen data center opposition making even the national news, but I don't recall any '4-story apartment buildings' opposition doing so? And senators like Bernie Sanders are proposing halting data centers nationwide - are there any similar proposals to similarly outlaw such housing construction nationwide?
> People just like opposing development.… When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
Agreed.
I feel like what's obviously happening here is that people have a rooting interest against AI, and highly-publicized pushes against "AI data centers" in specific areas are simply sparking joy for people.
Many people similarly have a 'rooting interest' against public housing, public transit, even new housing in general in their area, and similarly celebrate when housing, transit, etc. get stopped. <shrug>
If that was the case then why are the majority of data center projects getting scrapped?
https://gizmodo.com/data-center-project-cancellations-quadru...
Why are insiders saying they only expect about 10% of data center projects to ever be completed?
Why is 2026 already shaping up to have less than half of planned data centers break ground on construction?
Local community opposition is a big driver but so is permitting and infra procurement.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/why-...
All of this is inconvenient to big tech's "inevitability" narratives.
Except sorta - "Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, who spoke to Heatmap, expects only about 10% of the projects that are currently underway to ever be completed."
Perhaps that's why he's a "former director" but that doesn't really qualify as an "insider."
More accurate to say would be that a big chunk of the AI data center pipeline looks delayed/speculative. 16GW is slated for 2026, but only 5GW is actually under construction. https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outloo...
I do think it's a bit ridiculous though to not consider someone a tech insider who was a director for a decade at one of the biggest tech companies in history...
Actually it's a completely insane idea that can't be reasonably discussed.
A lot of the "sneering" I see from everyone who isn't an investor or an executive is a consequence of resistance to outreach. It's very difficult to discuss subjects with people when many now interpret factual explanations as propaganda and reassurance as manipulation.
By the way, plenty of people feared electricity a great deal (and it wasn't exactly implemented safely when it was new). In the 90s, many people also thought the Internet was a temporary fad, a mere novelty that would fade in some years.
There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.
If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty not to as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to actively pursue policies based on falsehoods. Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
If somebody does want to give up on research and working out the truth, please actually give up and say you don't know. Stop coming to the city council meetings and plastering "millions of gallons" on even the social medias where that's surprising.
> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.
Just stop lying and defending liars while slandering the honest people who notice! I don't care how rich the ceos making you angry are, I don't care how pure the hatred in your heart is for this technology, none of that makes it okay! You don't get to demand my empathy while defacing the commons, sorry.
I don't think tech companies appreciate the extent to which they used to get the benefit of the doubt just because people liked them.
The industry is actually doing real work on water issues in response to these complaints. Big tech companies are funding projects that will allow them to replenish more water than their datacenters consume. This isn’t actually that hard of a goal for them to meet, because as we know, the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale. Regardless, this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
Anyway, all of this is a distraction compared to the real problem of carbon emissions. It confuses me that environmentalists are getting sidetracked by the water use distraction here when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
Water issues are always local issues. There is no national water distribution system or national aquifer.
>this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.
This will remain to be seen. So far, if it had worked out that way then there would be less vocal opposition to these data centers. Local perception seems to be that there will be nuisance to dangerous noise levels; heat islands which can cause local disruptions to weather events; closed-door agreements to build this infrastructure instead of open community involvement in the process; and other issues including concerns about excessive water usage especially in areas where there are already troubling water availability trends due to other forms of development.
>when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.
Here in NTexas, the availability of and proximity to natural gas compression stations is key to data center siting from the ones that I have monitored. Plans seem to include construction of gas turbine generators to power the new data centers and these generators are sited on parcels very close to existing compressor stations and high-voltage power lines and small or medium local lakes.
AI does have clear tangible benefits everyone can see and understand! That's why ChatGPT has 800M+ actives! Those people aren't just experimenting anymore, they're getting real value. I myself ask models questions about all kinds of things many times per day, it's entirely replaced search engines for me. It's much more immediately useful than something like aviation which created a lot of noise and risk (objects falling out of the sky!) yet took many decades to become available at a price point ordinary people could afford.
That seems needlessly pedantic, even for HN. I genuinely thought the scare quotes were spelling out the distinction I was making, but for the record:
"Rational" is used in the sense of "derived from logic", or "correctly understood". "Reasonable" is used in the sense (this is very common in legal paradigms, for example) of "an understandable opinion", or "an idea likely to be held by a typical person".
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says... Assume good faith.
Please don't post shallow dismissals...
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
When AOC is waving a jar of brown water in congress she's being disengenous. Just like the killed Amazon office in NYC it's just gonna kill jobs.
Can you cite a source for this? I can't find it anywhere.
It does seem like a canard.
Your page: "This discoloration happens because of rust, dirt, or old pipes in your plumbing. Problems with the city water supply can also cause it."
We're saying the same thing. It's the responsibility of the water system to pump clean water to people. Customers actually using that service can't be blamed for the system's failure to deliver it, as the customers aren't actually making the water brown themselves.
Companies are in the business of privatizing profits and socialising losses.
The industry is pushing a line about little to no use of water based on the "existence" of closed loop designs. But even the closed loop designs come with major drawbacks and require investment in waste water treatment infrastructure since they still have to "bleed the lines" monthly to get rid of the sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, PFAS, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives.
It is not at all inaccurate to say data center consumption of water is a huge concern. Too many on HN seem to be puppetting industry lines without realizing it. Closed loop systems are still uncommon and come with their own problems.
Trump has been neutering the EPA for a reason.
I don't know if HN is really naive or just pretending.
But golf courses are about 2.1 to 2.2 million acres while data centers are between between 340,000 and 840,000.
But I agree with your point. We should be closing both down. They are both water guzzlers and polluting our environment
Both are massive environmental problems and the economic externalities have not been accounted for.
If we had the exact same number of acres of golf courses and data centers, data centers would use more water.
Just one random Google result:
For reference: https://www.datacenterjournal.com/data-centers/oregon/portla...
I believe clusters of dots with no reference links probably are duplicates in many cases. The ones that are ground-truth are the ones where site names and owners are listed or where a supporting article is linked.
I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it.
And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.
We don't build the chips or even the machines that build the machines that build the chips. We don't own all the rare earths and our ability to generate electricity isn't anything special.
The data centers are getting built. Up to us if it's in Utah or overseas.
There are communities that are on water restrictions where datacenters have no such restrictions (and pay less).
It's also true after some datacenters opened the local aquifers were polluted.
Then there are legit concerns about noise, air quality from LNG generators, etc
Plenty of very legitimate reasons to dislike them, and each community likely has a different set of concerns.
But at the macro level, it is not really a big number so far. From ~2.48 million in 2023 to ~2.37million now. Or a 5% drop in employment in 3 years.
Fred: All Employees, Computer Systems Design and Related Services (CES6054150001)
Is "Telecommunications" the only tech that's actually been steadily automating it's workforce since 2000:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051700001
edit: or is "Telecommunications" the old school landlines and such, and this is just the effect of the Internet
Clearly that's a domain that has been automating at the very least since the human operated plug and board switching centres with human operators that answered phones and hand routed calls left the network centres.
And also they come with huge tax breaks.
Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
- https://idahoconservation.org/blog/the-dark-side-of-data-cen...
- https://www.akcp.com/index.php/2025/09/02/truth-about-data-w...
An abstract concept is being affected in unspecified ways by a generalized category of activity?
> If they were to run a highway through the middle of San Fransisco, a lot of people would also be affected.
Right. That's why they'd need to do all of the hard work to acquire all of the necessary property rights, easements, contracts, etc. from those people in order to undertake such a project.
Are data centers being constructed on other people's property without their consent? Are the actual negative externalities that impact specific people -- not the vague, all-encompassing notion of "the public" -- not being addressed within their context? I'm not aware of any of that happening.
> Like in Eastern Oregon a data center used agricultural water for evaporative cooling. The remaining water that was pumped out has nitrate levels over 5x the legal limit. Enough to cause cancer and miscarriages in nearby homes.
This is a good argument to back up the proposition that fertilizer-rich water from agricultural sources shouldn't be fed into municipal water supplies for use as tap water. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this proposition holds regardless of what intermediate uses the water may be put to as it travels from the farm to your kitchen faucet.
It's a terrible argument to back up the proposition that people shouldn't build data centers. It would be akin to citing the MV Dali incident a few years back (in which a cargo ship with improperly maintained power systems collided with a bridge) as an argument against the use of containerized logistics.
> Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
Yes, that's what we'd hope for. Would you rather that they weren't?
People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise. And with almost zero upside for the community. The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
Yes. Obsessing over what people you have no relationship with are doing in their own facilities based on loose-associative, emotion-laden reasoning that leads you to believe that they are somehow harming you is 100% the conspiracy-theory mindset.
> People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise.
No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.
Any opposition to data centers that's statistically greater than the baseline opposition to any economic development (which perennially comes from certain quarters) can be reasonably attributed to worry about AI technology particularly.
> The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.
The fact that they're owned by unlikable charlatans is also a driver of motivated reasoning and conspiracy theories.
Do you not recognize that half of the things you listed are ESSENTIAL for a community? The rest at least provide employment. Datacenters bring nothing for the community besides a handful of jobs not nearly commensurate with the downsides.
That premise isn't one that's generally adhered to as either a moral or legal principle, especially in the US, where we tend to have a strong preference for protecting property rights, and only justify restrictions on the basis of preventing harm to others, not some obligation to create benefit for them.
But aside from that, you seem to be conceding the point -- that opposition to new data centers is coming from concerns about AI itself, and not concerns related merely to the constriction of new commercial infrastructure.
The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI. AI is in the zeitgeist. And also datacenter construction is increasing as a direct result of AI. I fully agree that the reason datacenter memes are on instagram right now is because of AI.
But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative. AI does have some small part because, as much as you may dislike it, sentiment about the purpose of a project does have an effect on a community's willingness to give a green light. But it's far from the defining issue at a local level where the actual resistance is. Communities were rallying against datacenter construction well before AI entered the conversation.
> The recent increase opposition to datacenters online and at national level is absolutely due to AI.
Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
> But at a local level it is fundamentally not about AI, it's about the effect on the community, which again, is negative.
No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.
I never said there was??
> No, it's not. You just admitted that it isn't, and that these concerns are just being used as a pretext to challenge AI.e
I did not. I said the online AI fervor brings eyeballs to local datacenter projects and once people are aware of these projects they are against them because of the negative impacts to their community not simply because they are against AI if they even are. In fact many people in Utah are pro AI but against the construction of Stratos simply because it is _bad_for_their_community_.
> Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making: the complaints about exaggerated externalities (and novel arguments like complaining that power consumption per se is somehow an externality) are all contrivances, and nonsubstantive in their own right.
You can say power consumption and resultant increase in costs for residents isn't an "externality", I don't really care. If my power bill goes up by $5 a month then a datacenter is bad for me and my community and I don't want it on my grid. You can say I don't have the right to stop construction and they have the free ability to build what they want and buy any power they want from the power company, I don't care. I have to power to use my government to stop the construction of something through whatever means are available to it or me.
The reality we live in is that these datacenter projects require buy-in from the states and municipalities. These projects almost universally require discretionary approval from governing bodies to some degree. That may be regarding tax incentives necessary for profitability or zoning or a myriad of other red tapes. Many of those governments are responsive to the people and the people _do_not_want_ datacenters in their community.
You can say they only don't want it because of AI fearmongering mindrot, I don't agree. I think it's because once people are aware of the projects and understand the facts they recognize datacenters are only to the detriment their community and I don't care to argue that further with you on their motivations. Regardless of their motives they are free to use their government to block datacenter construction by any legal means.
You distinguished data centers from other types of facilities on the basis of those other facilities having external effects that are "essential to a community", and then used that distinction as a basis for arguing that it's acceptable to restrict the construction of data centers.
Arguing that it's OK to restrict activities because they aren't generating positive externalities is equivalent to arguing for rules that mandate positive externalities.
> I said the online AI fervor brings eyeballs to local datacenter projects and once people are aware of these projects they are against them because of the negative impacts to their community not simply because they are against AI if they even are. In fact many people in Utah are pro AI but against the construction of Stratos simply because it is _bad_for_their_community_.
That seems a little dubious to me, since I'd expect people who are against large commercial developments regardless of how they're being used to already be aware of proposed development projects without having to learn of them via online AI hype. The sorts of NIMBY-minded folks you're talking about are the sort that routinely monitor municipal governance, and especially things like building permit issuances, zoning board discussions, etc.
My suspicion is that the people you're talking about here are anti-AI activists trying to make a "parallel construction" argument to advance their position.
> Many of those governments are responsive to the people and the people _do_not_want_ datacenters in their community.
This doesn't add up. New data centers are being built regularly, so it's not possible for all of the premises of your argument ("data centers require government approval", "governments are responsive to the people", "the people are opposed to data center construction") to be true, since data centers would not be constructed if they were. At least one of these premises must be false, and I think there's a strong possibility that all three may be false.
Something like 20 years on we’re still hearing that “most” bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, even though that study (authored in part by Elizabeth Warren of all things!) was methodological nonsense.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
Not this shit again. Someone writes in clean English, people on HN are like iT muST bE Ai caUSe NoONe wouLD wrITe lIKE tHAt
The code is interesting though, it's not minified, it's very readable, and nicely indented with lots of comments.
The curated data center list is just some inline JSON.
The javascript uses var instead of let or const, I'm not sure if this is just style choice, or there is some code post processing.
It doesn't use react, AI seems to almost always opt for react for front end design, unless told otherwise.
Like I get it looks a lot like apps built with AI but weren't LLMs trained on real website and a metric ton of website templates?
Is it possible they used a template or other UI library?
For code, I haven't read as much slop so I'm not as sure but one big tell is an unusual number of basic & unnecessary comments. And if it's version controlled, hilariously long commit messages with multiple sections.
It's more reasonable to suggest that a mismatch in tone or register between the style of writing and the venue it's being published in could be an indicator of AI, and it's possible that people misidentifying these tropes as being AI indicators per se may themselves be suffering from a filter-bubble effect, e.g. someone who doesn't typically read long-form writing might only be encountering conventions of long-form writing in AI-generated content, and misattributing them to AI in itself.
That itself isn't such a great criteria on some sites where you have different userbases who interact with the site in different ways. For example, Reddit has a large "old guard" userbase that treats it like a traditional message board, with longer-form and more in-depth discussion, along with a lot of more recent users who treat it like Twitter, and expect everything to be short and informal. Users in the latter group misidentify posts by those in the former group as AI more and more frequently.
Probably something to do with the way they do RLHF?
Well, that's the assumption I'm challenging. That does not seem to be a substantiated fact at all.
Most of the arguments I've encountered online that attempt to make the case that LLMs do have a writing style that's readily distinguishable from human writing are deeply afflicted with confirmation bias, and are often based on circular reasoning.
My comment above was a rhetorical question intended to point out the fact that LLMs are specifically designed to mimic the patterns of writing found in their training data, so the idea that they'd all converge to some other set of pattern is not by itself plausible.
It's not a assumption or confirmation bias. It's plain as day if you read any of these AI generated (or assisted) articles. You may as well ask me for proof that HN readers are pedantic.
Validating your criteria against the same subjective impressions that informed those criteria in the first place is an exercise in both circular reasoning and confirmation bias.
I wrote a whole post about it. Tldr: "I dont like this shit so it must be AI". BENEATH. EVERY. FUCKING. POST.
https://write.as/shantnu/llm-witch-hunts-are-getting-really-...
It's just vibes. There really are no reliable, simple criteria to determine if something was made with AI, and that shouldn't be surprising, since the whole point of LLMs is to mimic humans' work.
All noise, no signal.
I 100% agree. And I notice you are being downvoted by the LLM Witch Hunt Committee.
https://www.governor.nd.gov/news/burgum-one-worlds-largest-d...
> WILLISTON, N.D. – Gov. Doug Burgum today announced the construction of one of the largest data centers in the world near Williston as North Dakota continues to emerge as a hub for high-performance computing, including cryptocurrency mining.
> The Atlas Power Data Center being built by FX Solutions Inc. is part of a $1.9 billion, multiyear project that will require more than 100 workers during the two-year construction period and create more than 30 permanent jobs, according to Richard Tabish, president of Missoula, Mont.-based FX Solutions. Atlas Power, an operator of high-density facilities serving cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing utilizing alternative power generation, will own and operate the data center following its completion.
> ...
> The first phase of the project will consist of 16 buildings, each 350 feet long by 30 feet wide, to house tens of thousands of servers that will conduct high-performance computing using 240 megawatts of electricity. Phases 2 and 3 call for expanding to 500 megawatts and then 700 megawatts, adding additional buildings and servers.
And later...
https://kfgo.com/2023/06/25/williams-co-residents-frustrated...
> WILLISTON, N.D. (KFGO) – Residents west of Williston were hopeful for a few hours on Tuesday, June 20, after the Williams County Commission voted unanimously to instruct the local power co-op to shut off electricity in a portion of a local cryptocurrency mine. But Corey Seidel said he knew the effort had failed by nightfall, when the servers were still operating at their usual levels.
I also wanted to add useful and accurate tools on things like local noise, water or grid impact. In addition to actually monitoring progress via satellite imagery and building a basic graph model for filling in missing attributes.
The reason why I stopped was that I significantly underestimated the effort required to complete such a project to the standards that I wanted to. As you can probably tell the site itself is AI assisted but all of the information was collected by hand which just takes time that I no longer had (~30 mins per site). The only way this would have made sense was as research project or something which sadly didn't line up.
https://www.riotplatforms.com/bitcoin-mining/corsicana/
> Riot Platforms has initiated a large-scale, 1 gigawatt development to expand its Bitcoin mining and hosting capabilities in Navarro County, Texas with its new Corsicana Facility.
> Development of the Corsicana Facility has begun with an initial 400 megawatts of capacity on a 265-acre site. The substation was energized in April 2024 and mining operations have begun.
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/archive/2...
> In 2008, the city of Rockdale lost about 80 percent of its workforce following the closure of the Alcoa steel plant. Today, the old Alcoa plant is occupied by Riot Blockchain’s Whinstone facility, believed to be the largest single Bitcoin mining operation in North America. As an industry that relies on high levels of electricity, the company was drawn to the facility due to its existing power infrastructure, including valuable high-voltage transmission lines and large substations.
The power an "AI data center uses" in a single rack used to be, or is still in many cases, the power draw of an entire room or even floor.
Going from a few megawatts to ~10GW.
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled condensers which leads to large amounts of water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled condensers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data center waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/132936/changes#diff-...
Brokovich might not know it. But her web people certainly used AI to build this site. From the Emojis, cards, to the single colored left border.
In what fairytale land does this describe the US today?
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
AI is also the new thing currently being forced on basically every person and upending society. It shouldn't be surprising it's on the forefront of people's minds or that they might want to try to prevent it.
Why?
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing. Jobs aren’t a left-right thing.
That seems a bit bizarre, since people opening new facilities are usually responsible for paying for their inputs with their own funds -- if merely increasing demand for power or water is itself generating externalities, that implies that there's a much more fundamental economic problem that needs to be resolved.
Where I live, for example, consumer rate increases above a certain level have to be validated by the state's Public Service Commission.
Why are you ok with spending $100 on groceries but not $100 on poison?
Software ate the world, now the world eats software.
This page must be hosted from a data center as well...they could add a star to the map for their own hosting?
How much electricity does their site use, etc? I've seen counters like this before, I think, about the electricity a site uses based on the weight of the page, etc.
"...you said on an iPhone. Heh. Gotcha."
Datacenters provide very high utility with very low per capita externalities. There’s really no reason to care this much about them.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
ie it is in the economic interest of the writers to tap into (and foment) the FUD around "data centers."
there is almost no reason to build them in the US even without this luddite bullshit.
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
there's lots of ways food production is malevolent. the animal cruelty, the worker abuse, not just its environmental impacts.
i don't know. my point is that, this kind of stylistic aesthetic vibes stuff about datacenters is kind of bullshit. i'm not the only one who is saying this. are people in the places with cheap electricity near urban centers that are appealing to datacenters and seeking to ban them also going to ban bad farming operations from their communities? that's a LOT of farming operations! i can come up with some way that almost all farming operations are malevolent. no. they're not going to do that. i don't think they should.
you can have a national policy for this kind of stuff, because the consumers and producers are in different places and our way of geography self-determination is kind of stupid. if it's a market failure because of how the borders are arranged - which happens a lot with environmental stuff especially! - don't let these little bitty communities decide.
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.