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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

What is the advantage to not keeping them a secret? The populist movement against AI is growing rapidly, and is supported by bunk science which affirms people's pre-existing biases (like the idea that data centers suck up all the water in a community, or raise the ambient temperature by a single-double digit number of degrees F).

AI is a genuine source of economic growth. I can understand wanting to curtail it, but in return you are getting fewer jobs, less economic growth, more money to other countries who don't allow protesting or even complaining about data centers, etc.

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The US has deindustrialized and since the rise of NIMBY politics hasn't built new industry in any scale at all. The first freeway revolts happened in 1959. In the meantime, basically everyone has agreed that industrial growth and manufacturing as an abstract concept is Good (TM) but definitely not in my backyard. For a long time these kinds of things were just being built in neighborhoods where the residents were too poor/politically disconnected to organize, but eventually that too became difficult.

Since automation became big in industrial processes, most industrial development has been labor-poor (few workers) but continues to be land intensive. That means while industry might generate tax revenue, it doesn't have a coalition of labor advocates willing to champion the capacity because not many jobs are created. So we find ourselves in 2026 with an inability to actually build new industrial capacity in any form. The anti-tech crowd is angry at the data centers, but the same exact thing is happening when it comes to permitting new power generation and transmission lines. In fact many of the concerns related to data center power usage could be allayed if we had more power generation but nobody wants power generation in their backyard.

For decades now the US has been dancing around the idea that there is no by-right way to build anything anymore, so building any new large structure becomes a collective action problem that just ends up failing. Even when things get built, costs are massive. This has even affected things that the US is ostensibly really good at making such as highways, as evident in the recent Texas highway expansions ongoing.

This is an excellent analysis. The NIMBYism is pretty self-evident I think but I never thought about the disconnect automation may have caused between industry and advocates for industry.

I think it's good to remind people that the industrial revolution was very close to never happening.

This is from Dud Dudley writing in 1665, whose own ventures to manufacture steel en masse before Abraham Darby succeeded.

> "I have been opposed by many adversaries, as by wood colliers, mine owners, and others who, being poor men, did, by misguided advice, throw down and destroy two of my furnaces and my works, and caused much of my pigs and bar iron to be carried away."

There were plenty of examples through history of "near-misses" where establishment land/wealth holders suppressed nascent steel industries. It was almost an accidental series of coincidences that the industrial revolution happened - the Glorious Revolution in England and Abraham Darby's secret financing network.

Fascinating quote and good point.

It should also be remembered that while the industrial revolution netted humanity enormous wealth and eventually a higher average standard of living, it also kinda sucked for the generations of working class living through it, prior to labor reform. Millions of people lived entire lives where the industrial revolution was nothing but bad for them and never saw the upside. So anybody opposing a new industrial revolution is not necessarily acting out of irrationality.

Kind of. I think the history is interesting here and complex.

One of the hard things to grasp is that the industrial revolution was preceded by an environmental collapse. Part of the reason there was a switch to coal (despite being seen as inferior to wood at the time) was massive depletion of wood in England and the high cost of importing not just timber but even just firewood.

Add this in to the enormously expensive wars England was fighting all through this period and stressed everything from labor and food supplies (which also triggered demand for steel and copper and brass) The industrial revolution happened against a backdrop of national crisis so it's hard to know what was being caused by the revolution and what the revolution was helping paper over.

And on top of this, when Engels and Marx wrote about the squalor and desperation of their time (which was very real), nearly a hundred years had passed and something much different was happening. Massive amounts of peasantry were being dispossessed of lands and forced into urban slums. Cities grew something like 10x in a single generation. This wasn't really the fault of the industrial revolution but because of really bad policy.

(BTW, this period in England when wages and quality of life backslid is now called "Engels' Pause" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engels%27_pause)

>basically everyone has agreed that industrial growth and manufacturing as an abstract concept is Good (TM) but definitely not in my backyard. For a long time these kinds of things were just being built in neighborhoods where the residents were too poor/politically disconnected to organize, but eventually that too became difficult.

These NIMBY jerks have redefined the entire country to be their back yard

The NIMBYs were pissy that the poors were allowing industrial development said "those poor people are stupid and wrong for accepting the industry" and the legislated hoops so that they essentially have a "say" in what these poorer communities can allow.

They usually leverage environmental laws to do this stuff because the richer areas are already developed and paved to high heaven. They aren't doing greenfield development and the laws are construed to basically punish/prevent greenfield development and allow brownfield development and re-development. Of course, residential gets exemptions to all sorts of stuff so their ADUs and the kind of development they do are mostly unaffected but the industrial stuff out in the sticks is all but prevented.

I see this in my own city that's over an hour drive from the rich places. We want to allow manufacturing but the state will take our grant money if we don't have and enforce a ton of rules and process that make that prohibitive so basically no industry can afford to create a facility except the biggest of BigCos.

A very good, 100% true comment.

Now obviously sometimes new developments really are bad, or they're being targeted at terrible spots -- you don't want a very polluting factory right next to a residential neighborhood.

But we've overcorrected drastically. The rules should be sensible and out in the open; planning committees should only be checking whether companies and governments have followed the law as written, not listening to every single possible objection from neighborhood residents about a new apartment complex affecting street parking or creating shadows.

As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, a "neighborhood group" that's using environmental rules to block a low-cost, employee-owned grocery store being added to a site that was already basically a grocery store (Sam's Club) before, is an insane weaponization of the rules. Nobody who was writing these laws ever intended environmental protections to be misused like this.

You're conflating AI and AI Data centres. What kind of "jobs" does AI data centre creates? More jobs for factory workers who assemble video cards to be shipped and installed in a rack?

I think OP is talking about the downstream implications of productivity growth. Which is still yet hypothetical.

AI is designed to funnel productivity growth away from workers (less labor, downward pressure on remaining jobs) and to shareholders

so not only is it hypothetical but if it becomes a reality (which seems probable), it is highly destructive to the average person

The downstream portion isn't proven, and more importantly, even if it was, it's not localized to where the data center is built (and its effect on the local population).

Data centers don't grow on trees.

Data centers require lots of technicians to install, maintain, and decommission servers. Who do you think installs those video cards?

How many technicians? And from where? Its unclear to me how often this stuff actually needs to be done. And how resilient the overall system is to failure. Is it imperative to swap out one point of failure immediately or can you let them batch up and send Joe from California out qaurterly?

Technicians are constantly behind in work. Many data centers are pulling 24/7/365 shifts to keep up with demand. Larger data centers have hundreds of full time employees.

Yes many servers are left in fail over states for long periods of time, but that can only be done because new capacity is actively being deployed to make up for that fail over. Modern data centers are far too big for a single person to be repairing things every once in a while. Stuff is breaking every hour of every day

Thanks for the info. So the technicians are there on site daily? dozens? hundreds?

Im not too surprised there is quite a bit to replace. Sure the failure rate should be low but the scale is massive. Its interesting to get an order of magnitude though. Every hour is more frequent than I thought.

100-200 FTE's per data center by one estimate.

I have let's say 17 data centers being built in my town. 1700 jobs is not enough according to the people in opposition. The real number is likely higher, and my town is under 30k people.

Its not just quantity of jobs though. Are the jobs going to locals? Are the technicians coming from some small town that was chosen for the economics of building and runnign the datacenter? It seems fairly likely they would pick a small town that doesnt really have the knowledge base to serve as technicians. I mean it would be cool if they hired local.

There is training programs for this kind of stuff in the local universities which are an hour or less drive away. I would agree, there probably isn't too many people in town with the skills - probably lots of people will move to town.

I worked for a company that ran a pretty big, high-security data center--75,000 square feet serving thousands of customers. There was a team of 6-8 technicians and a couple dozen security guards. None of them were particularly great or high-paying jobs.

These were the same promises crypto mining operations were making, hearing them again so soon will leave a lot of people skeptical.

Why are they bunk science? I’m not an environmental expert, but the research papers and policies I’ve read don’t seem to be egregiously wrong.

I’m asking genuinely, I’m open to changing my mind here.

Andy Massey writes about this stuff and is generally heavily disliked by the anti-data-center folks

* https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-ar...

* https://blog.andymasley.com/p/i-might-have-found-the-specifi...

Regarding water usage, in general data centers do not use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing

> The Georgia data center is only using ~2% of the county’s water. For comparison, a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is using ~4% of the county’s water. A construction plant for Rivian cars is using about the same amount of water as Meta’s data center. The data center is functioning like any other normal industry in the county.

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

Regarding data centers increasing ambient temp, the paper is simply measuring the surface temperature of the buildings, going against the claim that a data center, merely by its presence in a community, raises the ambient temperature by a few degrees or more

https://andymasley.com/writing/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-...

I know both sources are from the same guy, but he cites many primary sources in his articles

Thanks for the reply and links, I’ll give it a read today.

>Regarding water usage, in general data centers do not use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing

Are the claims really that "Data centers use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing"? I dont think so.

Even if thats true, that doesn't mean they cant have a disastrous effect on the local water supply. This isnt a good rebuttal.

Frankly I tend to think the anti-datacenter crowd is overreacting. But I don't think you've addressed the real criticisms being levied.

In some passing research I saw the datacenters do continuously consume water (its not a one time cost like some claims I've read). And smaller size ones may use water equivalent to around 1000 households, and larger ones may consume closer to the equivalent of around 20,000 households. Evidently the massive one in Utah will at least double the state's entire consumption of water.

Can all of these places handle it?

I dont know. But that's the question, not if other types of heavy manufacturing have higher demands. And frankly it's inevitable that at least some locations cannot handle it. Which doens't mean you should be anti-datacenter in general. It means you can't just blanket dismiss the water concern for all locations.

Data centers do use water, and a lot of it, but the claims being made are hyperbolic and not squared with reality.

One criticism I often see is that data centers somehow pollute the local water supply. Data centers use water in a closed loop, their impact on local water quality is negligible. Industrial manufacturing and even agriculture have a far greater deleterious effect.

> The EPA’s national assessments repeatedly identify agriculture as the leading source of impairment for rivers and streams due to nutrient and sediment runoff, with continued nitrogen and phosphorus problems that affect drinking water and coastal ecosystems.

The thing is, AI data centers bring in far more tax revenue than other water-guzzling domains (like golf courses), but use less water overall. Extreme panic over specifically their water use is disproportionate

> How much of this will be AI? Almost all this growth will be driven by AI, but because AI is only 20% of data center power use, its growth will have to be huge to triple total power usage. One forecast says AI energy use in America will be multiplied by 10 by 2030. Because water use is proportionate to energy use, we can multiply AI’s water use by 10 as well.

> So in 2030, AI in data centers specifically will be using 0.08% of America’s freshwater. This means it will rise to the level of 5% of America’s current water used on golf courses, or 5% of U.S. steel production, or be about 173 square miles of irrigated corn farms.

> The average American’s consumptive lifestyle freshwater footprint is 422 gallons per day. This means that in 2023, AI data centers used as much water as the lifestyles of 25,000 Americans, 0.007% of the population. By 2030, they might use as much as the lifestyles of 250,000 Americans, 0.07% of the population. Not nothing, but 250,000 people over 5 years is just 4% of America’s current rate of population growth. If you found out that immigration plus new births in America would increase by 4% of its current rate, would you first thought be “We can’t afford that, it’s way too much water”?

>One criticism I often see is that data centers somehow pollute the local water supply.

Yes, I think this one is completely misinformed. For example AOC held up some dirty water from a local resident's tap. Fine, that's bad. But it was a result of digging during the construction process and the fact that it was a data center was irrelevant. And the implication that it permanently ruined local's water supply was just wrong.

>The thing is, AI data centers bring in far more tax revenue than other water-guzzling domains (like golf courses), but use less water overall. Extreme panic over specifically their water use is disproportionate

I guess that's not surprising to hear. A lot of people against data centers are probably also against golf courses though. I think AI is valuable but a lot of opponents see it as a net negative. Not saying they are right - this is definitely a point against the anti datacenter crowd. But it is consistent from their perspective so I dont think this point will persuade them. Would need to attack the claim that AI is a net negative.

> This means that in 2023, AI data centers used as much water as the lifestyles of 25,000 Americans, 0.007% of the population. By 2030, they might use as much as the lifestyles of 250,000 Americans, 0.07% of the population.

A 10x increase in AI data center buildout between 2023 and 2030 seems unlikely, given the large number of AI data centers either in progress, or in the planning stages.

> Data centers use water in a closed loop

"Closed loop" doesn't mean no net water use after filling. There are leaks, and the water in the system needs to be processed for reuse, and that processing needs clean water.

Even if there is no next water use, "closed loop" refers to cooling the data center proper, and excludes the water for the (primarily) thermoelectric power plants which power those data centers - a power load which is higher due to using closed loop cooling instead of evaporative cooling.

Given that many of these are the same companies which once promised net-zero CO2 emissions by 2030, you'll excuse me if I insist on full information about the total environmental impact and tearing up all of the NDAs they require from local governments.

How many liters per kilowatt-hour does each site use? How much CO2, NOx, and particulates are produced? What are the power sources? Why are EPA waivers needed and appropriate?

This should ideally include the supply chain - those GPUs need a lot of very pure water, and 83.2% of Taiwan's power and almost 60% of South Korea's comes from fossil fuels.

> their impact on local water quality is negligible.

So there should be absolutely no issues in publishing all this information, right?

> far more tax revenue than other water-guzzling domains (like golf courses),

Which people already complain about because they use too much water, and often exist only because rich people got special arrangements. For some examples of the antipathy for the Santa Fe Country Club and golf courses in general, see https://www.reddit.com/r/SantaFe/comments/w9g4ak/the_city_of... .

But even the Santa Fe Country Club case highlights how tax revenue is only part of the total economic benefit. For example, they were allotted 700,000 gallons of treated effluent per day, in exchange for public golf access with reasonable fees. While data centers typically used treated water, not treated effluent, and don't allow public access or activities.

For that matter, local birders visit the municipal course, Marty Sanchez Links, to see the birds using the water features and irrigation pond. Not a benefit a data center will offer.

From what I hear, surrounding residential prices go up around a golf course, and down around a data center, so looking at just a single entity's tax revenue isn't enough. To say nothing of the special tax deals the data centers insist on.

Under NDA, of course, which should be illegal for this sort of issue.

> AI in data centers specifically will be using 0.08% of America’s freshwater

Since you think these centers can be sited anywhere, why are these data centers being put in water constrained places like Utah, rather than water rich places like Michigan?

> The average American’s consumptive lifestyle freshwater footprint is 422 gallons per day.

Sante Feans use under 100 gallons per capita per day.

If you think the average American use is relevant, then put the data centers some place where there's water.

> If you found out that immigration plus new births in America would increase by 4% of its current rate, would you first thought be “We can’t afford that, it’s way too much water”?

Water use per capita has been decreasing over time due in part to mandated water-efficient fixtures and appliances, but also (at least in New Mexico) to changing practices like allowing xeriscaping in places which once mandated lawns, rain barrel and cistern rebates, mandated toilet retrofits, and water use awareness programs.

Or see this projection for Utah, at https://lpputah.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Water-Use-Why... .

Population go up. Per capital water use go down. No problem.

Data center go up with nothing else going down? Problem.

How much water will the Utah data centers use? You don't know.

> > The Georgia data center is only using ~2% of the county’s water. For comparison, a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is using ~4% of the county’s water. A construction plant for Rivian cars is using about the same amount of water as Meta’s data center. The data center is functioning like any other normal industry in the county.

How much employment and localized value/tax revenue is created by the pharma plant compared to the data center to offset the environmental effect?

> I can understand wanting to curtail it, but in return you are getting fewer jobs,

since AI -- as designed to be deployed -- is taking away jobs, then by enabling data centers you are in fact getting fewer jobs

yours is the same perverse argument that was used to build Walmart Supercenters (lower prices! they'll create jobs!) which literally destroyed the economy of many small towns and communities, and paved the way for every other big box retailer to do the same

so don't be surprised that people aren't eager to enable something that is designed to destroy their livelihood

Since electricity demand has outpaced supply they are increasing prices: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...

> AI is a genuine source of economic growth.

If only they could spur even more economic growth with the planning and construction of more fabs for all the RAM it will need (assuming the level of growth that their S-1s are claiming)

more money to other countries who don't allow protesting or even complaining about data centers,

The point of living in a rich country is that you don't lower your standards to shit holes with corrupt governments...

>but in return you are getting fewer jobs,

Certainly not in any meaningful way.

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