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This is more of a zoning problem
"...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"
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?
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!
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?
Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.
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
But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Chinese and Russians didn't double my electricity rates this year.
Neither did the data centers. Datacenters use less than 5% of US electricity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
I've only heard about datacenter protests in the past 2 years. So perhaps what the authors warned about is happening now?
so now we are speed-running global warming there are now record setting gas turbine sales instead of solar/nuclear * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8ziQCWK1w and for what? so we can have totally useless "AI" customer service agents where you still have to demand to talk to a human to properly get a problem solved
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* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/20/ameri...
* https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/gas-drillin...
that's already raising the local area temps, why not put that wasted fuel to work instead?
build the datacenters literally next to the fracking fields, absolutely no-one there to complain, they all moved away already from the toxic air/water and there's already unlimited fuel
I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter ma…