'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'
techwerkers.nl
techwerkers.nl
I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
Personally I think data centers should pay a 100% fossil fuel tax. Markets respond to incentives.
But I agree that their strategy is lacking. It would probably be easier to get people in general to support it if it didn’t affect them directly, sadly.
Anyone with hard data, step right up...
It does change people that don't know about your cause against it, quite reliably as long as activism results go.
For climate change, everybody probably heard about it, so yeah.
PETA's brand recognition has probably made more people anti-vegan than all other vegans put together.
- the original poster seemed to feel that some gas consumers should pay much more than others. If we do policy based on vibes, this makes sense. Big = bad vibes = pay more. But IMO vibes are a very bad basis for good policy and will just make things worse.
To be clear, I think you’ve got the right direction – free stuff for humans up to a point and then market rate for everyone/everything after that. I just think it’s silly to pretend that companies are polluting for shits and giggles. They’re polluting for us.
I think that pricing pollution is the right way to go, I just know that the outcome isn’t going to be some magical world where companies pay for pollution but consumer don’t. The only way it works is that the costs get passed on and the consumer pays.
The decision by either would face the same trade off - an increase in costs that their customers/patrons may not care about or be willing to pay for.
The answer for both is the same - price externalities so that the decision to pollute less is economic rather than moral.
But they'll just use AI powered flock cameras instead, so never mind.
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O
Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.
The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.
Indeed. A single bad review of a product from a user, if justified, can build the impetus to destroy a product. Three bad reviews probably will.
Insurance costs too can be affected.
Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.
To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.
That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.
You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).
In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.
> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
There are two directions this idea can go:
- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.
- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.
If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:
- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police
- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters
The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.
If this was actually about real sabotage and causing real damage, the move would be to do something similar to what they're doing (incur structural damage) but keep quiet about it. Let them continue building out the DC and then watch the floor collapse when it gets loaded with server racks. Chipping out some concrete that's been clearly marked:
> mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint
Is a very minor inconvenience in a construction project of that scale compared to having the building collapse when it's partially filled with servers.
I'm not sure what the actual size of the on-site construction crew is, but one that's going up locally here is budgeted at $1.7B for the initial build-out and up to $12B for the total investment including all of the hardware that'll run inside it. A bunch of cameras, potentially perimeter radars, and a few security guards are really really minor additional costs. The facility they're building here is supposed to be 500,000 sq.ft. The cost of all of the additional security for managing this problem is probably less than a single rack of servers.
I wonder if they bothered to get high concentration vinegar.
This is a nonsensical, stupid and fruitless symbolic act. Why should someone be crippled, blinded or killed by their foolishness?
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.
It's the same tired pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
On the flip side a lot of people's jobs are likely being threatened by the technology, so there is sizeable receptive audience already.
They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests, really. However I'm also pretty sure a lot of players are engaging in submarine warfare as well (https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).
Because they are the monied interests.
What they don't want is for the conversation to turn from people blindly rejecting data centers (for any reason) to people saying wait a minute, let's embrace technology/AI but let users benefit from every aspect instead of being capital's bitch every second the day.
Data centers being built by me - more than 20. A friend of mine works for an audio engineering firm and shared that the tech does not really exist yet to do more than get the modern data centers within city noise ordinances. You are going to hear them for a couple miles. As if I needed convincing he was legit - last week his coworker got flown out to my neck of the woods to conduct a study on the planned DC's in my town.
The opposition, though. They are not armed with sensible facts when they show up to city council meetings. They are armed with clickbaity headlines. I joined the local DC opposition group to offer advice on how to get the city to take them more seriously and was quickly banned for talking sense.
Yes, obviously. Scroll up or down.
You have to be special to think this is comparable to paint throwing on works of art or blocking public roads. Everyone outside tech hates AI.
No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.
LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.
So that's pretty much everyone
This is designed to... affect the corporations. (Swaying public opinion could be seen as a secondary effect.)
I also realize it's not that simple. They probably didn't affect Microsoft here, rather a construction company, who are now calling their insurance company? Or the construction company is eating the cost for the damage, because it's deemed that the site wasn't adequately secured?
“That achieves nothing” sounds like what a Microsoft PR person would want you to think.
"The real friends are the clicks and attention you receive along the way."
There is a surreal component to all this.
In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.
Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.
Having data centers in your country seems incredibly important, especially to the EU. You'd really hope to see the exact opposite of this behaviour.
Level of effort is a thing.
EDIT: And Cryo32 said the same thing elsewhere, a few minutes ago!
Sure you can build a data center near me, if your going to fund a new swimming pool and library with the taxes you pay. Also I get reduced local taxes? Even better!
Infrastructure building would be a whole lot easier, if people could directly tie it to tangible benefits.
lol this is not "worker opposition", these are the antics of over educated downwardly mobile elites.
I had previously done some napkin math (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984659) which found LLMs + humans are way more efficient than humans alone, but that analysis is by definition simplistic, and as some point out, does not account for outliers like coding. Fortunately, I just came across this source: https://gist.github.com/mdodkins/9b49624855cc41570c9d1012e0d...
That looks accurate and lines up with my previous numbers. A heavy day of Claude Code usage is equivalent to running 0.7 of a dishwasher cycle. Already that sounds pretty decent, but let's put that into context and refine the simplistic analysis a bit. Discussing footprints in terms of [electricity / water / CO2] tuples, that is approximately:
1.3 kWH / 2.6L / 540g
Compare that to a human's daily footprint (US averages, scaled down to an 8-hour workday; the numbers are actually higher if you look only at office use):
10 kWH / 102L / 4KG
As a % of the human footprint, that is ~ 13% / 2% / 13%.
Right off the bat water usage is negligible. But at a minimum if LLM usage saves a human 13% time at a task, we're at breakeven i.e. the LLM resource consumption is compensated by the savings in human consumption. Anything more than 13% and we actually start conserving resources on average!
Now I know the productivity impact of LLMs is a contentious topic, but my past comments include studies (from 2024, in the era of spicy autocomplete, long before coding agents!) showing ~30% boost in throughput and/or time savings. Interestingly the survey-based https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/ finds a consistent 30% time savings across industries. A human completing a task 30% faster consumes ~30% less resources i.e. we save ~3.3 kWH / 34L / 1.3KG per day.
This gives us a net savings of 2 kWH / 31L / 760g per human per day!
Even with 2024 estimates of productivity numbers we are conserving resources! I would wager that a full day's use of Claude Code today offers a much, much higher boost.
You could say coding is a small part of software engineering, but then resource consumption scales down correspondingly. The upshot remains that for a given task overall resource consumption goes down with increased LLM usage! In fact, if LLMs were adopted across all knowledge workers to do all possible tasks, we could recoup the enormous environmental cost of training models in a few business days! Subsequent ongoing savings can more than compensate for a lot of the slop produced elsewhere.
So -- and tongue only partly in cheek -- if you really want to make an environmental impact, use LLMs more.
That ignores the fact that the then-unemployed human will not change it's resource consumption in any way, because a human coding or a human sitting around idly do have roughly the same resource footprint.
Except of course if you are arguing for doing the Skynet thing and terminate all humans replaced by AI...
And if those resources had an environmental impact, and if you were truly concerned about the environment, why would you want to choose the option that expends more of those resources?
Think of it this way: if you had a doubt you wanted to resolve, would you drive to the library and spend hours or days scanning through reference material... or would you do a Google search?
That is essentially what the "environmental impact" debate comes down to, but nobody is talking about it that way. We can talk all day about the impact of AI on jobs and society, but the impact on the environment is a red herring, and a destructive counter-productive one at that, as TFA shows.
But when thinking about society and the environment, there are different considerations that make the simplistic capitalist thinking wrong in certain situations. Human labor is such a resource that cannot be strictly evaluated by monetary values.
For example (caveat: slight intentional alteration): > would you drive to the library and spend hours or days scanning through reference material... or would you do a [prompt and have AI provide you with a summary]?
Of course on the first glance, as a lazy person myself, the choice is obvious. But is it really? Doing the research yourself has secondary benefits, such as higher familiarity with and learning of the topic. Even as a boss who pays money for people who do that, I'll sometimes gladly pay money so they'll learn and become better employees.
> That is essentially what the "environmental impact" debate comes down to, but nobody is talking about it that way.
Because the environmental impact of human labor behaves differently than the environmental impact of other resources.
If you consume less steel the environmental benefit is clear. Less consumption means less extraction, less processing, less waste and pollution, etc. There is also a direct feedback loop through our capitalist system to induce this. Nobody will mine iron ore that won't be paid for, processed, sold as steel. In that sense, steel is a flexible resource, because there is a direct relation between demand, supply and environmental impact.
If you consume less human labor, things are not so clear and easy. There is a base rate of the "production" of humans, that is relatively independent from the flow of money (actually, it might even be an inverse relation: the less money you have, the more you procreate). The production of human labor is also a slow process, since it takes around 2 decades for a human to grow up. So the resource "human labor" is basically an always-there-resource at some amount that won't be influenced by market forces. The environmental impact of that amount of humans won't be influenced by market forces. So for the environment, it is actually better to give those humans something to do, and use human labor as an always-there-resource, instead of using flexible resources. Same thing for society, humans with nothing to do are generally considered a problem, so you need to give them something to do.
So in a strictly capitalist sense, you are right. But when talking about the environment and society, human labor is a special resource that cannot be treated like other resources.
Yes, by changing the incentives to align with their desires.
I guarantee if a politician had a serious chance of introducing something like this that record breaking amounts of money would be poured into even a primary election these days to stop them.
Right wing populists are nearly as useless as left wing populists now. The people they put into power and now betraying them for monied interests and they’re powerless to stop them. Fools thought they were the harbinger but in reality they were just the vessel.
It’s why major populist characters like MTG and Massie are giving up and getting slaughtered by puppets in a suits in primaries. It’s why Trump has been friendlier to the neocons that spent years insulting him than populists that helped propel him to power.
The real ghouls on the right that need to be stopped are the neo-reactionaries. I knew we were headed for strange times when the Silicon Valley elites simultaneously opened their pockets for the second term. It was purely a power play and it’s seemingly been effective.
I suspect the populists, right and left will care no more for the world they envision than they would for the status-quo even.
If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.
Everyone talking about how stupid and ineffective this is. The whole point is to interrupt business as usual to draw attention to the stupidity of our continued head in the sand path. The damage (or lack thereof) is largely irrelevant. The fact a regular person is risking jail to try and stop business as usual is the entire point. It starts with one person.
I believe they are just acting out, and doing so and yet another non-constructive way.
Math is not theirs forte!
In 2024, datancenter have consumed 1% of the total worldwide electricity production and are responsible for 0.5% of the co2 emissions.¹
1- https://www.carbonbrief.org/ai-five-charts-that-put-data-cen...
The buried ledes here are firstly that a concrete building is a one-time thing, where once it's built it is built and that's that. (The 8% of pollution is a yearly recurring thing from the production of concrete, but an individual concrete building is done polluting once construction is finished.) On the other hand, an AI data center contributes its pollution every year continuously forever.
Secondly, the matter of scale. Concrete took billions of buildings to get to its share of the pollution done. You will be hard pressed to find anything in the world period that can be produced at that scale without causing significant pollution. It's almost miraculous that it's only at 8% globally, especially when compared to AI data centers, of which there are only 12,000. You could build a dozen buildings out of concrete every day for the next 40 years and on a global scale you would not move the needle on how much pollution concrete is responsible for. Do the same with data centers and while the math is a bit harder you will wind up being responsible for ~30% of the pollution on Earth.
It's far grimmer to realise that people know, they just don't think we have an acceptable answer yet.
I'm not willing to accept any climate action, if it means I can't go on holiday abroad or it makes my life meaningfully more expensive etc.
It's selfish, but we need to solve it in a way that makes people globally richer.
(This is one of the great things about renewables coming down in price)
They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.
I hope they look very carefully how this was organized, where the money came from.