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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is, putting it gently, not a majority opinion in the US and especially not in Texas.

In the same way “smoking causes cancer” was a minority opinion in the 50s and 60s.

You hope. People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!

(I think the way through this mess is huge investment in renewables, and that blue states have calamitously dropped the ball by pushing so much data center construction to red states that aren't going to incentivize that.)

"People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!"

This statement can be applied to literally any topic and it fills me with a dread that is only matched by trying to fathom the inifinite nature of the universe and time. The notion of having good faith, well intentioned debate and discourse around any conceivable subject just feels impossible most of the time.

That was my point. People disagree about this topic. I happen to agree that climate change is a real and imminent problem (though probably not, with the previous commenter, about its solution space). Pointing to public opinion about smoking in the 1950s is a conclusory argument; it doesn't get us anywhere.

The problem is that the two sides disagreeing are not equal.

Unfortunately for your point, their votes count equivalently.

It’s a good thing then we know the science for smoking is bad and too many data centers == bad

A surprisingly small number though. 15%.

> This is, putting it gently, not a majority opinion in the US and especially not in Texas.

Texas is the largest producer of renewable energy in the country.

Indirect side effect of the fact that you can build things in Texas.

Yes, because they have open permitting and encourage development. But they are also the largest producers of fossil fuels in the country.

They're actually not the highest on a per capita basis. 3 states produce more than double Texas's, by that metric.

I think you're talking about coal production that's sold to other states. Texas leads in both coal and natural gas consumption by far. Texas produces an insane amount of energy.

Yes, but I wouldn't fault Texas for producing electricity to sell to other states.

And in any case, that lowers Texan per capita consumption even more given that they're not actually consuming all of it.

You seem to have a huge misunderstanding of how big the Texas grid is. And no, it shares almost nothing which is why we had a huge power crash in the freeze of 2021.

>Texas led the nation in energy consumption in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The EIA reported Texas' total energy consumption was twice as much as California's, the second-highest energy-consuming state, and more than three times as much as third-place Florida. The EIA's State Energy Data System finds U.S. total energy use peaked in 2007. Between 2007 and 2023, Texas energy consumption rose 21% while U.S. energy use decreased 5%.

I have zero idea where you're thinking that Texas exports power, or doesn't use it all, but it's very odd given the plethora of evidence to the contrary.

Doesn't Texas have a separate grid which would mean that they can't sell electricity to other states?

Correct. We have very little cross transfer capability to other grids. Add to that the Texas grid consumes 2x the power of California, so the scales are huge.

Unfortunately opinions don't change the reality of physical processes.

Fortunately.

It's not majority opinion to be against data centers? One of the largest bipartisan issues of our time, something like 70% of the US population being against it in some capacity (likely even higher)?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...

That poll says Americans broadly oppose data centers in their local area. A poll of all Americans would likely find broad majority support for the construction of data centers in Texas; a poll isomorphic to this one would also find similarly broad opposition to the construction of apartment buildings in their local area.

Reuters/Ipsos did some polling on general sentiment about data center construction nationwide last month. “Building data centers at a rapid pace across the US is mainly a good thing” only 33% support, which is a +15% change from local community buildout but hardly a majority.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-wary-ai-driven-da...

The "9 out if 10 Americans vote to light other Americans on fire" effect.

That is the most American thing I've ever read.

I'm not convinced these two things (data centers vs apartment buildings) are that similar, though there is probably some overlap.

People don't just hate the idea of data centers "in their backyard" the way they do with housing, they also just fundamentally despise the tech companies and personalities who are creating these data centers.

People say this all the time online, but actual opinion polls show otherwise. People generally love Amazon, and have a high opinion of OpenAI (if you're not in the industry, it's not unlikely you don't really know who Anthropic is.)

The underlying principal components of these data center polls are very probably just:

(1) Concern about electrical bills, which are often valid, and noise, which sometimes can be as well

(2) Political polarization (Democrats --- I'm a lifelong Democrat --- are currently getting marching orders to oppose data centers)

(3) Bogus concerns about water.

We spend a great deal more time and energy thinking about DCs on HN than the median poll respondant ever will. And still, the idea that there's striking public opposition to data centers anywhere in the country is hard to support with evidence.

Fortunately, I think the public opinion fever about data centers is starting to break. I'm reading more and more left-leaning stories questioning the narrative. I think there's a good chance this sentiment crystalizes to something more specific and productive, like "stop letting Elon Musk do things".

What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize this has become a deeply emotional argument and the emotions right now are broadly not good. It feels similar to the Tea Party movement after 2008.

I'm not seeing polling break, just opinion writing. You're kind of making my case for me when you talk about people showing up to protests with guillotines.

I don’t know if I would trust opinion writing to be predictive of a growing reactive populist movement. I would caution people being dismissive of how angry people are, data centers are just a political focusing mechanism. It will get worse of course if all of this ends with an economic shock.

I agree that a lot of data center advocacy is just incoherent polarization and populism, as evidenced by the guillotines.

It is kind of bonkers if you consider that all of us already had "data centers" in our backyards already.

Every corporation and even most small businesses have had a machine room, wiring closet, or some kind of server shoved into a room, since 30 years ago now. They all had them in every office building you ever drove by, or lived next to, or shopped near. It's simply that people didn't even register them, because none of the general public really sees or knows what goes on in office parks, and behind the tinted corporate windows. It could be as benign as a toy distributor or as wicked as a defense contractor, and from the outside, they look alike.

But they've all had computers, and networks, for decades. And what we are seeing now is consolidation and concentration. The offices and parks and buildings are hollowed out -- they've laid off workers, they've gone WFH, and most importantly, they've gutted their machine rooms and removed on-prem equipment in migration to the cloud. So each and every company that migrated to the cloud has shrunk their own machine room's footprint by X amount that is reflected in data-center capacity by an identical (or perhaps larger) X. And that, of course, means that power, cooling, and resource consumption is not necessarily enlarged, but merely transferred and concentrated into DCs rather than power-hungry machine rooms, humming secretly inside every office building.

I look back to my first job--I worked at an ISP, and we colocated with the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The SDSC was a data center par excellence with the finest machines that ever existed on the floor. And I was still a kid when I'd be admitted to the main floor, I'd walk past a Y-MP, a Thinking Machine, an Intel Paragon, a Nearline Tape Robot, and there were our humble little pizza-boxes, sitting on a table trying to keep up with Usenet. Our own ISP offices didn't even have a machine room of our own, just a rack with a hub--yeah a hub--and a Sparc 2 pizza box to serve the office. We were already "in the cloud", as it were. More or less literally--SDSC was where they tested nuclear weapons, predicted the weather, and explored outer space, through the magic of FORTRAN...

So what people are complaining about is something they can see. If you're dying of cancer for 20 years but you never go to a doctor, you won't feel it. Once you see the doctor, the chemotherapy starts, and then you croak from the chemo. So this building of datacenters is simply bringing this into the open, and into the light. And people are angrily reactive at social media, and techbros, and surveillance capitalism, and AI-job-losses, and corporate hijinks in general, so data centers do give a focus to that futile rage.

But it's futile, and we all depend on data centers already, even before they are built, and we need DCs now to sustain our economy and our civilization as it already is. It's futile to resist and if you want to come in with a tractor to demolish them, you'll be arrested, and the Flock camera attackers will be hauled into prison too, and technology will just impassively march along as a juggernaut with no feelings, no remorse, and no mercy.

It's a pity; we were really nice folks for a few hundred years.

Really living up to the name there. :)

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