The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
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?
The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States.
There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
There are many reasons to not like these things nearby (anywhere it affects power or water too). And on top of that they've been "somehow" getting massive incentives and tax cuts, despite bringing in very little money or employment, which costs the area even more in future years.
It's everything combined, and pushback has been somewhat successful. Success in a protest tends to help bring more success to the same protest elsewhere.
Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking generically why no one talks about it
But, had I been, it is not all of these things because one of those things is abject misinformation - water usage is not a real problem and touting it as the issue hurts the protests. 30B gallons of water globally for data center cooling is 100x less than the leaky pipes in just the United States
If data centers are such a big issue that we must stop them, communicating that without lying is the protestor's responsibility. You'll never have a successful protest if it is motivated by falsifiable information and water usage is still the number one thing I see written about and spoken about my protestors. It is impossible to get on board so long as that misinformation is front and center of most arguments
I agree the total usage isn't particularly large, and any "they'll use up all the fresh water everywhere" FUD is flat out wrong. But it can be a large jump for an area, and they've broadly shown themselves to be incredibly amoral and willing to fight legal battles with infinite money just because they can. They are not good neighbors.
> There have been quite a lot of extremely-drawn-out lawsuits about them drawing more than claimed, dumping hot water into streams and damaging the ecosystem, and polluting other water sources by dumping dirty water into drinking water affecting areas.
And I support strict EPA guidelines and heavy fees for violators! I just think that we should keep the conversation clear and not introduce facts that can be easily overturned as it moves the conversation away from impact and to the argument being made
So people fight by pattern recognition: abnormally incentivized and extremely large? Kill it with fire immediately. It's mostly reasonable and more effective than anything else at the moment.
Beyond this, it is my opinion that people are cowards. The few who care about this issue enough to perform terroristic actions won't spur any sort of meaningful change in the general population because the general population is not made up of extremists. The general population will not do anything that endangers their lives no matter how much they praise another for doing so
Luigi kills a healthcare CEO. Endless chatter about how this is the end for big pharma, the people are rising up, they better count their days because the people are paying attention. Nothing has happened since but more dead people due to denied insurance claims. But there sure are a lot of people talking about how another Luigi will show up sometime soon
An arsonist burned down a large warehouse. Endless chatter about how this is the end for big corporations screwing us at the register, how workers will rise up and burn even MORE if they don't get treated better. Nothing has happened since to these big businesses. There is no tiktok trend for large scale arson, no worker unionization. Nothing changed but boy do people talk about i
I would rather solve it politically by strengthening the EPA. We may just disagree here and that is fine.
I agree that'll be a much better end-state to be in, but is it the best right now? ... idk. We're in an increasingly blatant "smash and grab" phase for major corporations right now, and they need to be stopped quickly.
Something is being done, urgently (vastly faster than the larger legal system), and public outrage is loud and annoying and widely visible, which is indeed what I want. Beyond that it isn't especially fair to say "if you like to eat, why haven't you solved world hunger", particularly when those EPA/zoning laws aren't in place yet, so I'll just ignore that part.
My points have consistently been (1) lying is the quickest way to make an issue divisive as they focus on the lies and not the cause and that (2) that you cannot trust members of the general public to undertake radical actions nor can you sit by and egg them on to achieve your goals for you.
Data centers are coming up left and right and no violent uprising has stopped them from being built. What has slowed them down in certain communities are those communities coming together, organizing, and making themselves heard via political action. Which is the avenue I am advocating for here in this conversation with you.
You are here discussing how someone must do something and how it needs to be done urgently because it is so pressing. No one challenged you to solve it. Equating any call to action, especially for an issue that you yourself declare urgent, to solving world hunger is an immediate end to this conversation. If you cannot take your own views seriously, neither can I. No one is going to take care of the bothersome priest for you as living out your ideals is your problem, not theirs.
This is the world-hunger-equivalent bit fwiw. It's rather explicitly "if you care about this, why haven't you solved it", an over-the-top bad-faith argument.
Telling you to live out your own ideals vs committing stochastic terrorism online is, rather explicitly, not asking why haven't you solved that. We know that because no where in my text do you find me asking you to solve it or asking why haven't you solved it.
It works better to read the text written then to read it, get mad about an imaginary statement, and justify your outrage via a quote you create out of thing air. If you can't do that, you don't need me to include me in your imaginary argument between you and yourself.
But if you truly cannot do that, and we have no proof to say otherwise, maybe log off and take a breather. No one should be so upset that reading becomes a challenge.
Which is claiming I'm doing nothing because you haven't seen it. The implication is that you're disregarding "my ideals" unless I do something so impactful that you would have passively noticed.
I fully believe that's not what you intended, but that is a rather straightforward read of what you typed out, so I pointed it out.
I am in full support to address it ahead of time and nothing I have said goes against this.
You are lying here.
> it's all people seem to care about.
You were specifically asking why what "all people seem to care about" is "the whole data center heat/water thing," and when somebody told you that's this is not the only thing people care about, you immediately lied about what you just said.
Even by the end of the comment:
> water usage is still the number one thing I see written about and spoken about my protestors.
So you're still not talking specifically to this person, but making easily falsifiable generalizations. And you still haven't claimed why water and power usage are not problems, you've just decided that people must only talk about "the main problem" but somehow not being the "main problem" becomes "falsifiable information" by the end.
It's just garbled when it's not dishonest.
I have "mixed" feelings about data centers, although they're pretty clear. I do not think that we will get the utilization out of data centers that we are expecting, I do not think there is as much revenue as needed in it, so I think this is a massive waste of resources. But if I am wrong and we do, I think noise pollution, heat pollution, power usage and water usage are worth it. I also think that poor and powerless people are being victimized by the placement of these things, just like they are in most large polluting capital expenditures. This should be compensated for. I also think that the longer data centers are delayed, the better idea we will have of their potential utilization.
The idea that current data center water use is as much as 1% of all of the leaky pipes in the US is not a statement of its insignificance, it's a statement of its massive significance. You might as well say that all of the shootings in the world are only 1% of all of the deaths from heart disease.
> The idea that current data center water use is as much as 1% of all of the leaky pipes in the US is not a statement of its insignificance, it's a statement of its massive significance. You might as well say that all of the shootings in the world are only 1% of all of the deaths from heart disease.
Google what fallacies are. You should start with False Equivalence
The way you're using language here is putting the problem so close to the edge that abuse, ignoring the quality of lives of residents, would seem just so logical.
Which is why we need laws around where data centers can and cannot be built. Something I clearly alluded to in my first comment. Do you want to make up things I never said such that you can make some snarky comment and feel good about yourself or have a real conversation? If it is the former, fuck off.
It mostly needs zoning as you say and maybe require each project put down a bond to supply a power plant expansion / new plant that covers their projected energy uses, imo. That sorts out a lot of issues. Maybe put some kinda tax on them and use it to pay for local infrastructure or schools for PR too
Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking generically why no one talks about it
Most datacenters I've been to around the world are barely noticeable. Most of them are in warehouse districts and the AC chillers are barely noticeable over the chillers on other nearby buildings. Often, they WANT to be nondescript.
That being said, I've not been to any of these new ones which are both significantly larger and also can have onsite turbines that run all the time and not just during power outages.
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.
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.
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.
If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
no, it's a thing because you can put water in terms that even a hair dresser can be convinced to get scared and angry about. No technical knowledge required.
All of the irrigated golf courses combined use more water than all of the US data centers combined.
same if increasing alfalfa farming was increasing significantly
it's harder to stop something that already exists (shutting down existing golf courses or alfalfa farms has consequences for the local communities) than to stop something from coming into existence in the first place
DCs, new golf, new homes, new alfalfa, new ranching - the math isn't there.
Tech people saying ignore the water problems are saying implicitly that AI, despite showing up late in line for access to a resource that's an old, old problem in the western US, is more important than hearth and home considerations fighting for the same dwindling resource.
The average western farmer/rancher, their own judgement and contributions to this problem aside, definitely love coastal tech people sniping their pre-colorado compact water rights via all that goes into getting water rights like that.
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.
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!