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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result.

Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...

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Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it.

I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.

Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.

I fear you may be correct.

On the other hand, how does that combine with his apparent narcissistic need to be seen? Is his need so simple it can be met with "line go up"?

Why would it have to be consistent? I've seen so many things be said and be done that do not mesh at al that this is really a very minor thing.

Think about it, the list is just about endless by now it's hard to tell the lies from the intentions and the character deficits.

I want to understand how his mind works. Not sure what value this is, now I think about it: I'm unlikely to time a bet against him well enough to win it.

So, for this point, I don't care that the words and actions he emits have no apparent rational long-term coherency, but I do care about the coherency of the system behind them which generates them.

Think of it like me wanting to learn how an LLM works so I don't get surprised by it doing more than a Markov chain.

You'd have to become a billionaire first and that takes a particular mindset. The two might be mutually exclusive.

> I wonder why it had to be built near so many people

I can't read the link either, but at a glance, the first one wasn't. It's in clearly industrial land a long way from any houses, with its closest neighbors as far as I can tell being a steel mill, a few existing power plants, and a wastewater plant.

The second one is practically right in the middle of a bunch of neighborhoods, and for that, yeah, I want to know as well. I'm guessing the land was cheap, industrial-zoned, and near a substation?

(Not to excuse what Musk is doing in either case - it's fucked and has wide ranging effects. But I think it's important to clarify the first because I've seen a repeated trend of people acting like a new DC is going to be built in the middle of a peaceful picket-fence neighborhood, and then you look it up, and it's actually being built on top of a former steel mill a mile away from the nearest house. It gets annoying.)

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