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US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

theguardian.com

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Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#161

Post by PunchyHamster »

throwaw12 wrote: post #100
thegreatpeter wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what’s the solution? No data center? Let the current landscape of power companies operate as is?

Let's make some assumptions first: 1. DCs must be built anyway 2. You can't take away energy from households (3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost negatively to households (otherwise why we have this discussion) based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy will be b…

Many problems with it:

* power generation is not local in most of the cases. You'd be still fucking energy market to anyone outside it

* power is also used by companies people actually want. Even if household power cost wont chance thanks to that approach, the price for power for every single business around will increase.

* similarly any other manufacturing business will cost more. In essence, the AI boom will reduce profit margin of every single business that has electric power as significant cost in the production. Which is a lot of industries.

"Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice idea but it is pretty hard to realise. Unless we start outright denying connection to power grid but that's pretty dangerous political precedent to set.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#162

Post by youknownothing »

That still doesn't necessarily mean that prices won't be impacted indirectly. Let's say Amazon (or any other AI behemoth) builds a mini-nuclear plant to feed the electricity of their data center (as has been touted). Let's say every one follows suit. That implies an increase in the demand of uranium, which means an increase in price, which means an increase in the costs of the other nuclear plants, which is translated to higher electricity costs.

One could say "use renewables", but even that has externalities: that means an increase in demand for solar panels, or wind turbines, or the labour to maintain them, which again leads to an increase in prices.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#163

Post by drooby »

jdross wrote: post #158
drooby wrote: post #149

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing. Alaska and Norway understood something critical…

We usually just call this collective extraction “taxes”

A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created. A royalty collects payment for access to something you already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was never theirs.

It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#164

Post by PunchyHamster »

myrmidon wrote: post #59
sparky_z wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would adding a new supplier to the market cause the price of power to go up?

Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier". The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for c…

I'm sure power plant building companies won't say no to more business

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#165

Post by PunchyHamster »

koolba wrote: post #144

We already charge different rates for residential vs industrial water usage. Why not do the same here and simply charge them more? The state could also impose a direct data center surcharge on their usage.

Coz that fucks up every industry, even the ones actually useful to people.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#166

Post by PunchyHamster »

imchillyb wrote: post #135

The way to enforce this would be to provide US citizens with free electric and charge companies only. That will never happen, but would prevent we the people from bearing these costs directly.

It would just make other industries subsidize AI datacenters

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#167

Post by nDRDY »

blitzar wrote: post #139
nDRDY wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown. When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.

my read was ... we should cut down trees, burn them and bury the ashes to save the planet

It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#168

Post by terminalshort »

drooby wrote: post #149

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing. Alaska and Norway understood something critical…

You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#169

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

mistrial9 wrote: post #156
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dodgeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change). And it's not just data centers, i…

> gonna fuck over any endangered frogs Extinction is forever -- your frustration, and that committee process, does not compare directly to species extinction.

you care, and i care, and i think even the person you're replying to cares; that's great, but the people involved in the business of making these decisions treat them as a matter of procedure.

as long as the boxes are checked, most public sector employees are not going to stick their neck out. it's steady work that pays all right and has great benefits (and even pensions sometimes). a lot of people in the public sector aren't willing to step out of line for "frogs" even when they should or want to.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#170

Post by terminalshort »

dsl wrote: post #48
miyoji wrote: post #36

You can read the actual pledge at [0]. The executive order regarding it is at [1]. There's some speculation in the comments about what is or isn't in the pledge. I recommend reading it yourself. [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/ratepayer-protec... [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/rate...

It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers. We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter. This absolute…

Good. I want more power plants built, especially ones that don't emit CO2.
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