Hacker News Reader

Comment by tucnak | Hacker News Reader

They don't have to worry about people blocking DC construction in the US either. All new AI datacenters are designated "dual-use" so the federal government is already letting local councils know to fuck off.

View on HN

they can also put them in better places, vs trying to arbitrage expensive electricity costs and various US corruption thats built more around paying people off than getting things done

Yeah, but that brings up another problem that China doesn't have. Their federal government is always on the same page. The US federal government changes every two years and it doesn't seem like one side is going to be allowing building of AI data centers anymore and in fact might just ban AI in general.

It's hard enough to build them in the US that multiple companies are unironically spending 10s of millions of dollars to try to build them in space

Which cynics could say is marketing hype, but I tend to believe it's extremely difficult to build anything land/energy intensive in the modern United States

Or some people have more money than sense. Building data centers on earth is trivial compared to getting the same amount of compute to space.

There are places that aren’t in the US that also aren’t in space. I still don’t get why it makes any sense to put this stuff in space, but if it does, it’s not the political difficulty of building stuff on earth. So it’s hard in the US. You’re telling me Mexico wouldn’t allow it? Argentina? Mongolia? Build a data center on a French nuclear test site in the Algerian desert and it’s still easier than space.

10s of millions isn't even a rounding error in the context of AI-related spending.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com