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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

> This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year.

You are not wrong, but the whole issue is a bit silly: there should be legal ways for data centres (and other commercial operations) to just send a few million dollars a year to whichever community they need to convince; instead of having to dress it up as free heating.

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But paying the money is less resource efficient than using the waste heat for a productive use. As a general rule we should probably insensitvise good use of resources that benefit the general population.

Im general. But the way AI is growing is not a general case, but exponential. It shouldn’t be slowed down by generalisations.

Surely there's something missing from your argument. It shouldn't be slowed down because it's growing exponentially?

Presumably you think that the end result of extreme and rapid ai growth is beneficial to most and that is why it shouldn't be slowed down? That arriving earlier at whatever end-point you have in mind will provide so much benefit that it's worth disregarding the pains to get there?

Or is there something else to your argument? Because if there isn't, you are staking an awful lot on your expectation coming true. Especially that going slower doesn't provide any worthwhile benefits to the outcome.

I mean it's kinda obvious you don't wanna throw baby out of bath water when technology is at its infancy.

There's nearly 0 downsides to absolute majority of people to continue building out datacenters. Yet I see this derangement syndrome with headlines like "I’d Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast"[0]. This is just as farcical as calling cars a national security threat in 1920s and any sufficient army should be run by cavalry.

0: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/ai-cancer-pro...

Using waste heat like this only makes sense in some places some of the time.

And when it does, people should obviously go for it. Work out a deal, when there's some surplus to share.

the datacenter doesn't have a few million dollars to spare.

The heat is waste heat. If it cannot be recovered as a profitable source of energy, the datacenter won't be able to pay that few million dollars.

Recovery isn't the issue, the issue is that district heating systems are pretty much a rarity across the world for a number of reasons. Recovering waste heat - no matter if from datacenters, industrial processes or eve wastewater/sewage - is trivial, but getting the heat to somewhere it still can have a productive "secondary usage" is a massive and expensive problem.

Yes. There's eg combined power plants that use waste heat from power plants to heat houses. The problem is that this tends to make the power plants less efficient at electricity generation.

So this waste heat recycling should only be done where and when it makes sense.

(But that's pretty easy: absent any legal requirements, the involved parties have all the right incentives already. It's all internalised between the parties.)

> The problem is that this tends to make the power plants less efficient at electricity generation.

Huh what? Never heard of that one before.

> absent any legal requirements, the involved parties have all the right incentives already

Well... that's the problem, they don't. Sure, datacenter operators could go and offer to install district heating, waste heat recyclers and whatnot, and it would likely be profitable. But, and here it gets annoying, it's not profitable enough.

> the datacenter doesn't have a few million dollars to spare.

What makes you think so? Datacentres are already very expensive, and getting permissions quicker (or at all) might be worth a couple million dollars.

> The heat is waste heat. If it cannot be recovered as a profitable source of energy, [...]

Yes, they should make all deals that make sense for both parties, definitely. But it's only viable in some places some of the time.

That means is called property taxes. Datacenters pay a lot of them, and in Loudon county specifically residential property taxes have fallen as a result.

You mean they have dropped rates, or you mean that residential property values have fallen, and thus they pay less property taxes?

The property values are up, the rates are down.

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