Meta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Why the horror? I'd prefer the gas remain in the ground, but given the gassy production of US shale oil, I guess I'd rather it be used for this than just flared. I am frustrated that pollutant emissions aren't being policed, and also that the sudden turbine demand plus supply chain issues mean using aeroderivative turbines that are quite a bit less efficient than more complex combined cycle turbines.
https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/how-gas-turbine-power-plants-wor...
I doubt this is really reducing the rates of flaring and leaky wells. Its just additional demand.
The biggest problem I've seen is they tend to build these somewhat close to residential areas with generation on-site. Often these power generation centers aren't right next to residential areas due to both air and noise pollution. But governments are often seeming to turn a blind eye.
Only about 35 percent is “associated gas” production from oil production.
(And to head it off at the pass: if that can't be done then this should be done at all)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
We could have cheap and available renewables, but we instead destroy them in bureaucratic hell that nobody cares about.
Is that not perfectly reasonable? Someone doing half the job and dumping the rest on everyone else seems like exactly the sort of thing a regulator exists to prevent.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the issue is that solar would be located somewhere remote, the backhaul to get that electricity where it needs to be requires significant upgrades, and that takes time. Which is unfortunate and indicates historic mismanagement of said infrastructure but nonetheless the present day policy of "fix the problem first" seems perfectly reasonable.
Sounds civil to me.
Zoning laws, noise ordinances, toxic waste disposal, food safety standards, etc.
I can't run a frozen lasagna factory from my house. It's illegal. I don't have political approval.
If the people do not approve of data centers, they don't get built. Simple as that. Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. Businesses are granted their existence and places of operation by the state and local municipalities that license them.
You mean such as the broad nationwide concern regarding data center construction in recent months? A large portion of the population expressing concern and alarm that the bureaucratic processes involved don't adequately represent their stake in the matter? That sort of political (dis)approval?
This is a complicated issue. Datacenters don't just depend on energy, they also generate noise, use water, but also generate some jobs and have fewer of the externalities (such as big trucks that load and unload regularly, and less water usage, no chemical usage, etc) that come with the usual light industrial uses. Most of these comments are just ways for people to vent and at best confuse the issue and at worst set them back, IMO at least.
My comment in this chain was glib but it was responding to a comment whose purpose was to vent or express disapproval, so I don't think I brought the conversation down. That didn't stop me from picking up downvotes of course.
You appeared to be suggesting that there is something wrong with political approval (however that's determined) being required for something to move forward. It was pointed out (correctly I believe) that political approval broadly refers to the process by which we arrive at societal consent.
At that point you tried to dismiss the broader situation as "a couple dissenting commenters" but that is very clearly not an accurate description of things. These buildouts have been receiving scrutiny and often refusal across the US for some time now. You might well disagree with what you see happening, believe the populace to be misinformed or senselessly jumping on a bandwagon, believe the overarching political process to be flawed, or whatever else. But none of that stands counter to the reality that there is currently broad community pushback across the US and that it is indeed the associated political processes that determine what is and isn't allowed. The populace is well within its rights to deny the construction of datacenters regardless of if such an outcome is a wise course of action.
Yes but the crux of your reading of my comment is you think I'm trying to downplay the opposition to buildouts. Do you know how much opposition there actually is? Is it geographically concentrated? Is it demographically concentrated?
What I've seen is the usual tech skeptical online publications have made a big deal about this issue, the usual pro tech sources say nothing about it. Anti tech politicians have run photo ops in anti tech publications, and pro tech politicians have done the same. Big newspapers like the NYT have run the occasional article about opposition but have largely left the issue alone.
> But none of that stands counter to the reality that there is currently broad community pushback across the US and that it is indeed the associated political processes that determine what is and isn't allowed. The populace is well within its rights to deny the construction of datacenters regardless of if such an outcome is a wise course of action.
Is it broad? Has anyone shown how broad it is? I sure haven't seen a march on DC about it. Before the YIMBY movement organized, this is exactly how housing issues used to be covered on progressive media btw. Protests of 30 people in a community of thousands used to get amplified to galvanize anti-housing support. To some extent this is the job of media, to give editorial voice to sympathetic concerns, but as someone now involved with housing politics I've come to realize that the truth of the scale of opposition to local builds like this can has a lot of incentives around every motivated actor to inflate their support. Community surveys are the only thing I've seen that works and even then advocates will show up to meetings and shout at the opposition claiming that the survey results are rigged.
As far as the "associated political processes" this depends heavily from state to state and county to county. Opponents to UC Berkeley's student housing tried to block housing by claiming humans are noise pollution. This only works because California has CEQA. Residents of Texas could not sue on those grounds.
If you ask me, the fact that we're playing politics to litigate building shows we're lost. We can't leave every piece of infrastructure to the vagaries of the masses. As usual the rich and politically well connected will win and the poor will lose. Building needs to be ministerial.
> Do you know how much opposition there actually is? Is it geographically concentrated? Is it demographically concentrated?
No, no idea, and no idea. But I don't think that actually matters with regards to our point of contention.
Recently there have been many concrete examples of people showing up to raise objections about data centers with their local politicians and regulatory bodies. This has been well documented in the media whether or not a particular outlet such as the NYT has chosen to draw attention to it. The companies themselves point to the permitting process when explaining their own recent behavior. It is thus IMO facetious to question the claim that widespread political opposition exists.
Your housing example illustrates my point perfectly. I completely agree that the situation with zoning and permitting is absurdly dysfunctional and almost entirely to blame for high housing costs. But it is also clear that there is broad opposition to building more housing for one reason or another. You might view the influence of a particular group as outsized. It would not be unreasonable to be of the opinion that the political process gives too much weight to the naysayers and is in need of reform. But when opposition is successfully blocking something across wide swaths of the country then the statement "there is broad political opposition to that in the US" is correct more or less by definition.
https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
It might be a little more expensive for them, but it's cheaper when you factor in the costs of pollution which they aren't paying for and which they're forcing us to pay for through increased diseases and global warming.
In that world, natural gas just makes the most sense. The US hasn't build generation capacity in any meaningful way in decades. We've deindustrialized over time so it's been relatively okay, until a new form of industry (datacenters) starts putting pressure on the whole thing.
AWS us-east-2 (2016) and GCP us-east5 (2022) are both in Ohio. Not 100% sure they're close to an IX but my guess is there's existing infra to route onto.
> Building a facility that uses megawatts of energy in an old farm field in the country, and having long lead times to get it installed, isn't really indicative of "deindustrialization" is it?
Sorry I think my message might have gotten a bit conflated. I meant, in the offshoring that happened in the US in the late '90s-early '00s, the US ended up losing industrial demand. Obviously consumer demand increased in the meantime but we've been living on a mostly stagnant energy supply for a long time.
The tariffs I understand (even if they really don't make sense in this particular case) but the permitting I do not. Do you have more information or links?
> Wind requires a lot of land.
In rural but populated areas wind is generally installed on someone else's grazing area for a small fee. In truly unpopulated areas (ie desert) access to land isn't usually an issue since there's approximately zero demand for it.
That said I do agree with your general theme that our grid is underinvested and the management and policy surrounding it are a mess.
Take a look at [1]. The current admin felt that NEPA reviews were taking too long for utility grade energy projects and put in a cap for NEPA review length that does not apply to wind and solar. The article goes into how long utility scale solar projects can take to go through NEPA.
> In rural but populated areas wind is generally installed on someone else's grazing area for a small fee. In truly unpopulated areas (ie desert) access to land isn't usually an issue since there's approximately zero demand for it.
The challenge then is bringing the power to the datacenter, which often involves transmission lines, which goes back to permitting.
[1]: https://www.resources.org/archives/delays-to-wind-and-solar-...
* Did they expect the next five buildings to also take between two and three years to build if done in the same manner? I'd hope it'd be significantly faster the second time because they've perfected the design, found good local contractors and suppliers, etc.
* How much of the time was the actual structure vs. all the stuff inside they still have to do with the tents?
* How long are they expecting to keep this? Are they anticipating extra problems like leaking roofs?
* What are the "off-grid power plants"? Is this basically a whole bunch of diesel or natural gas generators? [edit: oh, yes, "The site is also powered by 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines". I wonder if they're trucking in the fuel too.] If so, yuck.
Or is this a building permitting issue where for some reason the bureaucracy surrounding a permanent structure is expected to drag on for years but somehow they got the tents permitted rapidly?
Good point; some permit loophole might make sense.
It occurs to me this also could still turn out to be a giant failure: these may all still be unpowered, empty tents. They might end up taking two to three years to turn on, might never get a critical permit at all, etc. I'm vaguely recalling some story from Google's past. They had an experimental datacenter (`pq` maybe?) built out of shipping containers. There was some way they had hoped this would be cheaper that (iirc) didn't work out at all because the local fire marshal declared each shipping container to be a full structure and thus an unexpected set of regulations applied. and/or each may also have been required to have an emergency power-off button for the entire facility, which were hit by accident more than one might hope. They never built a second datacenter with that design.
Also remembering that for a long while Google's Dalles, Oregon site had building 1, building 3, and an empty concrete slab between them called building 2. I suppose Meta could have done something similar and had the slabs ready to go long ago.
Seems everyone else imagined a camping tent. Different backgrounds I guess.
Maybe factorio needs container ships and trucks.
What is your source for this claim? It sounds like conjecture to me.
Neither power nor construction is easier in space than it is on Earth. Higher power means higher heat dissipation, which means higher-cost satellites or downsized AI hardware. Construction is monumentally more expensive when you have to ship GPUs and their associated infrastructure away from the planet where they're manufactured.
SpaceX's orbital compute will not compete against any ground-based AI capacity. It will most likely be used for edge processing of Starlink sensor data, either as an SAR solution, multiband jamming apparatus, or any other SDR applications used at the orbital scale. There is no other justification that I am aware of that necessitates space-based AI inference. The commercial space-based AI line is a glaringly obvious coverup.
Heck, call it public housing and bringing jobs into the community.
Ofcourse that only works once the Dutch borg adapts!
Also, building rapid temp shells plus nearby gas turbines paints a very different picture than the one conveyed by the "clean-energy" PR around hyperscale data centers.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hyperscalers/new-from-mi...
I wonder how the security is. It's just a matter of time until organized crime will start paying attention to this. Perhaps a bet for polymarket?
You know and I know that The Product is at best nowt more than 'astrology'. The Product does do search engine things though, and it could be scaled down to fit in a phone or even a watch, to be good enough for 'the pub quiz' or for writing a gormless email.
As for the article, META does very little for the vastness of the corporation. They have gazillions of developers yet Facebook and Instagram are as boring as ever, Threads and the Metaverse are just lame and what else do they do, apart from serve ads?
Edit For a little more context xAI colossus 2 looks to be an empty warehouse on 3/10/2025. By 12/2025 they had already either filled the warehouse or they couldn't use the space because they appear to built multiple structures outside for the datacenter.
For comparison again meta already had that datacenter there for a number of years and then over 2 years added those structures. In 9 months it appears Tesla built a datacenter into an existing building and added structures.
The difference between Meta and tesla is that meta has done it many times before and in loads of countries.
and
Safety
Are opposites.
Capitalism abides by your dollars not your voice.
So people can decry ai all they want but if they keep using it, it won't go away.
Even then it's probable that AI is a big enough productivity boost for certain industries that even if no consumers used AI, businesses would still prop AI up enough for it to live on.
Simone Weil had good theoretical and practical observations on force vs economy 100 years ago.
Americans are too comfortable. Leftist rhetoric is virtue signaling and costless.
I disagree with theories of continual revolution, but it's pretty clear that class warfare still has valuable asymmetric qualities.
from a business perspective, which of those two statistics would you give more weight?
"People use AI so this must be a revealed preference" is such a bad argument when people are feeling so precarious
in the context of answering the implied question of the parent (everyone hates it so why do they keep doing it?), it does not matter at all.
If a large proportion of people are only using AI because they are being threatened with unemployment if they don't, then there's going to be massive resentment building up
You may think that doesn't matter, but it does. History has shown over and over that you can only keep a lid on massive social resentment for so long before things break
why should a company listen to a gallup poll of ~1,500 people over their own internal metrics?
do you think all types of companies should heed the advice of gallup polls over their own metrics, experience, and research?
A good example of how this works is cocaine.
Capitalism and competition isn't always good governance. It works brilliantly in many places, such as restaurants or commodity goods. It fails completely for medicine or banking. It's in between for tech or education, but it's clearly failing for AI.
hypothetically, you own a widget company. you sell a lot of widgets. every month, you are selling even more widgets. the widgets are flying off the shelves. you keep ramping up production, and the consumers keep on buying.
gallup releases a poll that says "people hate widgets".
would you stop/slow down your widget production?
for the same reason Vladimir Putin should listen to Russian milbloggers rather than his own subordinates, the metrics are being cooked up by people who get promoted for good metrics
Also the shelf metaphor is itself troubled because you're not even really selling any widgets for profit, you're just handing them out for free at the expense of hundreds of billions in investments that really are going to deprecate pretty fast
i think you have severely misunderstood the hypothetical
this does not matter from the business perspective.
microsoft does not care that your company forces you to use their products. google does not care that your school forces you to use their products. TSMC does not care that you are forced to use their products when purchasing ~any electronics. etc.
Is is OK for them to build datacenters in US?
in any case, its not really that complicated in this case.
- the ai companies have a billion active users and billions of dollars in revenue.
- a poll comes back with 30% of respondents saying they are angry about ai.
so, why do the ai companies keep doing ai things despite ~30% of people not liking ai? well, its because they are making billions of dollars in revenue from their billion users. from the ai company's perspective, it would be madness not to keep shoving ai everywhere.
It can be simultaneously true that a large part of the public objects to a thing while the market generates profits from that very thing.
Of course the answer is for governments to step in as, as you point out, the AI-related companies are behaving as rational actors given their incentive structure.