Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices.

If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised.

Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.

The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms

It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."

The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.

The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.

The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem.

I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.

Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much.

I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.

It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one.

Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing.

In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.

If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen...

Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere.

I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already.

For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list. I say this as someone who has traditionally voted for environmentally conscious options/representatives - my previously existing circle doesn't spend that much time talking about AI compared to other causes.

It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.

[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.

What recent mass-media panics have been legit?

For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.

Compare the scale of datacenter construction in the past decades vs the pace post 2022.

Also the general computing datacenters of the past are vastly different in societal utility vs the GPU only AI datacenters, which do just one thing

They use order of magnitudes more resources.

Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.

*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"

"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.

What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.

A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.

It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.

Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact

Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done

They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.

But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous

Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.

Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.

All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.

If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.

I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.

This is the trumped up rhetoric you speak of.

We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.

(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).

It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.

In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.

It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.

People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.

Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…

I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.

It's both.

As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.

You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.

The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.

It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)

But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.

If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.

That is using FUD to avoid accountability. In this case is the last one "doubt". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt

4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.

> My skeptic meter

Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD

Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.

Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.

Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center.

It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers.

If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.

This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.

That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.

Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.

What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?

I imagine China bought the accounts or pay $20 for a post.

Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.

  Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters.

You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.

At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.

It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.

Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.

Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.

Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.

50 years later...

Sure you can argue that it's less than other industries, but that ignores the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure in the US. Any statistic you use right now is obsolete in 18-36 months when X times more data centers are running.

Also on a local level the water use can even be significant. I don't think you can rightfully tell residents who are seeing an outsized amount of their water going to data centers that they're "panicking" over nothing.

The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals.

I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.

Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.

Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies).

General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations!

Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around.

Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage.

Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure.

Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason?

“Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!”

Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players.

Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”.

i2p = dead Hyphanet = dead TOR = dead [insert self hosted service] = dead

I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.

The water use panic is so ridiculous. The sheep pushing it do so while sipping almond milk lattes. One almond milk latte uses the same water as tens of thousands of chat gpt requests.

~80–90 liters for one typical almond milk latte vs. ~0.3–15 mL for one ChatGPT request. Using a mid-range AI figure of ~5 mL: one latte ≈ 16,000–18,000 ChatGPT requests. Using OpenAI’s ~0.32 mL figure: one latte ≈ 250,000+ requests. Even with a higher AI estimate of 50 mL: still roughly 1,600–1,800 requests per latte.

But yes online there's a populist panic about it that seems disconnected and completely driving itself without basis in reality... Locally there's folks terribly angry about fairly small data centers and they don't realize how many are around them and they never notice. But they don't want to hear it, if anyone is anything but fervently anti data center then you're Elon's friend or something.

The panic reminds me of how the Great Fear in the French revolution was described folks believed everything was an indicator they were right, and denying it meant you were the bad guy ... and thus more evidence that their fear is true...

Some data centers in my area I would love to live near because on the property they have big green space and wetlands surrounding them.

That doesn't sound like a panic, that sounds like people wanting some consideration and moderation of infrastructure that's extremely disruptive and tied to a technology that's causing more damage than it's helping currently.

Your comment about the size of the earth is confounding. How is that relevant? Raising temps 4 degrees locally is a serious issue. Yes it will be worse if it scales but it doesn’t have to in order for us to care.

The tech companies could be building green data centers. Using renewable energy they are paying to add to the grid ( ie building the solar plant along with the data centers) and then flowing half the power they make back to the grid to lower prices. They could similarly work with water, purifying non drinking sources and adding to supply overall.

Costs would balloon but the negative impacts would go and getting a data center would mean jobs, lower prices for energy, less carbon and clean water.

Doing it the way we are - based on subsidies and pollution - is a choice.

This is necessary to bring "AI" possessed people back to reality from their feverish dream world, so we can get rid of all the negative externalities of the "AI" push & finally find out what this new tech is actually genuinely useful for.

If you catch me on fire my average temperature rise doesn't go up very much, but I have the barest of hints that it might have an impact.

come on now, HN is just a step above reddit. some of these discussions are pretty solid.

It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answer, it's good AI slop.

has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations

If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.

I think it's good that there are topics that elicit emotional responses. It does make the discussion a bit difficult, gotta admit that.

This site has as much of an ideological slant as any other site, this isn't a unique oasis in a sea of partisan echo chambers.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070

if they had voted differently we'd see more positive action

Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese.

Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!

For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.

This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:

>Why is that?

The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.

So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?

That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.

All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.

You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.

If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.

If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...

Then there is also the heat island effect. Concrete boxes will heat up an area more than dirt or wood, even if those boxes are completely empty inside. If you build them near where people live, people are gonna notice. Houses have gardens, industrial complexes such as data centers and factories don't.

Also, the effect is more concentrated downwind, so the heat effect is not some kind of uniform distribution in all directions.

If you had a hypothetical 1 GW generator and used a hypothetical 1 GW loadbank with 1 GW of resistive heating and a fan that was outdoors, the air temperature would rise.

honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour

I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now.

For me, noise would be my first concern

Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this:

>I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years

Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy.

Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world.

If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice.

The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.

The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.

The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.

Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.

1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.

All of the DC designs I've worked on the last few years have all included heat absorption chillers driven by engine exhaust (for reciprocating engine power plants) and HRSGs with steam driven chillers for the turbine power plants.