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Comment by freediddy | Hacker News Reader

The greed with which the tech companies and data center providers are consuming electricity will be their downfall. By trying to make a few extra bucks by passing on some of the costs to consumers, it will trigger a huge political backlash that will screw them all. The fact they don't realize this is greed and hubris on their part.

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My state almost got a bill passed that would have made data centers pay for the new generating capacity. The House passed it, but the Senate strangled it. Thanks lobbyists!

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb593.html

The lobbyists are just doing their jobs well. It's the Senate that isn't. Blame the people who you pay taxes to purely to be impartial.

There's no reason not to blame lobbyists as well. A lobbyist saying "it's just business," doesn't excuse them for being assholes.

A comparison made by some Solaris guy comparing a tech magnate to a lawnmower springs to mind.

Their job is to represent their company. It's like calling a defence or prosecution lawyer an asshole for taking their client's side. It's the judge's job to be impartial, not theirs. And it's the regulator's job to be impartial, not the lobbyist's.

You're assuming these people know what a lobbyist does beyond the edgey cynical definition they learned about when they were 13.

Nice ad-hominem. Obviously if I think lobbyists are assholes it's because I'm un-educated.

lobbyists alao disbenefit from bad policy, and their clients will lose out worse when the population is much more pissed off.

these are still physical assets that can be destroyed in a riot

Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.

February: https://www.roanokerambler.com/water-authority-releases-goog...

April: https://cardinalnews.org/2026/04/14/former-roanoke-rambler-o...

This tells me they know what they're doing is unpopular and are willing to squash any opposition.

Consumers should consider cancelling their AI subscriptions if they don't like datacenters.

Most consumers don't have any AI subscriptions. Lots of people's primary experience of AI is it being forced on them through integration into existing products and services, more "greed and hubris".

i, an avid AI user, have never paid a subscription, as a point of data!

The day I'm force to pay for it, I'll stop using it.

Most consumers are willingly using AI. But they're using the free versions.

ChatGPT is the #1 most popular app on the app store, with nearly a billion weekly active users.

Most people don't have AI subscriptions. A lot of the most fervent detractor hate AI to the core and refuse to use it as much as possible.

Perhaps we should charge AI subscription "tax" to pay for more renewable energy.

Not sure if this is sarcastic, but there are effectively no consumers (as opposed to corporations) with AI subscriptions; the number of paid ChatGPT users is a rounding error. In the long run we should not expect the number of paid consumers for LLMs to be significantly greater than the number of paid consumers for search engines.

There are 50 million consumers with paid ChatGPT subscriptions as of Feb 2026.

This is already significantly greater than the number of paid subscribers to search engines. AFAIK that's just Kagi, and they only have ~100k subscriptions.

ChatGPT claims 1B MAU, so with 50M subscribers that's a 5% attach rate. And unfortunately for OpenAI there are only 8B humans on the planet, meaning an optimistic upper bound of 400M paying users if every human on the planet (this is an extremely generous upper limit, because the users currently without access to ChatGPT are statistically poorer). At $20/user/month even this absurdly optimistic projection doesn't break $100B annual revenue, which itself isn't even a quarter of Apple's annual revenue. And we all know these subscription prices are heavily subsidized and are going to increase, which, while it might improve OpenAI's financial outlook, definitely isn't going to have anything other than a negative effect on the number of subscribers, which is the point here.

Is there any evidence that individualization of responsibility works better than government policy?

Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.

What if we never signed up?

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