Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

niemanlab.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 346 posts

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#171

Post by hunterpayne »

tptacek wrote: post #103
ajross wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the wastewater issues can be real in some environments. It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed and mitigated. It's not like these things have the ecological impact of steel foundries or fruit orchards, but they're not parks either. I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what th…

I don't see it that way at all, but then I'm a housing activist, and I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers. People just like opposing development. It's very satisfying! When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously. The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized…

[flagged]

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#172

Post by ojbyrne »

cootsnuck wrote: post #161
tptacek wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it that way at all, but then I'm a housing activist, and I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers. People just like opposing development. It's very satisfying! When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously. The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized…

> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. If that was the case then why are the majority of data center projects getting scrapped? https://gizmodo.com/data-center-project-cancellations-quadru... Why are insiders saying they only expect about 10% of data center projects to ever be completed? Why is 2026 already shaping up to have less than half of planned data centers break ground on constructi…

That Gizmodo article says none of the things you characterize it as saying.

Except sorta - "Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, who spoke to Heatmap, expects only about 10% of the projects that are currently underway to ever be completed."

Perhaps that's why he's a "former director" but that doesn't really qualify as an "insider."

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#173

Post by dantillberg »

hunterpayne wrote: post #155
petre wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The heat has to go somewhere and that is the environment. 300 MWh is enough energy to boil over 3k metric tons of water. That's 107 medium fuel trucks for perspective.

Luckily AI data centers produce nowhere near that amount of heat. Remember the heat is waste and 300 MWh is the total draw. Some of that energy becomes heat. That ratio is somewhere like 100:1 though. Also, the waste water is only like 10F hotter than the intake. We build GW sized PP all the time and they will leak far more heat (as like on the order of 100x) than a 300 MWh AI data center. Thought there were supposed…

> Some of that energy becomes heat.

I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).

Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#175

Post by Morromist »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #145
Morromist wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is useful for programmers and a few other groups of people to do their jobs faster. For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up. If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.

automation is pervasive in farming. it's already an AI business. it will be a generative AI business in many ways too. farming, lots of kinds of farming, especially the most profitable kinds, is unpopular too. to me, this popularity contest thing, that boils down to, "everything visible that people do for money is invalid, except for the thing i do," is not a good way to lead.

I'm hearing from you: "People shouldn't have the right to determine how their country is run - I should - because I'm a technology-man, so I'm better than them."

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#176

Post by doodlebugging »

efnx wrote: post #14

It’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?

I was asking myself the same question about whether there is duplication in the site locations. I believe that there is based on looking at my own area. I see several reports from nearby zip codes but none of them locate the proposed data center at the correct site even though I figured out where it was supposed to end up by doing a minimal level of study of the area. I didn't see a link to the articles that a couple of the site locations referenced so it isn't possible to determine whether three people saw and reported the same article without providing a link or whether there is are fact three different data center locations proposed or in the works.

I believe clusters of dots with no reference links probably are duplicates in many cases. The ones that are ground-truth are the ones where site names and owners are listed or where a supporting article is linked.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#178

Post by ghayes »

WatchDog wrote: post #125
eleventen wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think it's absurd to pretend like you can know how a stranger thinks. If I had to predict either way, I would guess that it is significantly AI generated, but that isn't the same thing as being sure. Almost every link submitted to HN has a comment about the content being AI generated, many of which are not, I would rather talk about the "tells" rather than make confident assertions that I can't prove.

For example, https://mydetector.ai/ai-code-detector/ says 90% likely AI. Not that I trust the tools, but there are telltales to me in this function from the site:

     Object.values(zipBuckets).forEach(function(b) {
       var latest = b.reports.map(function(r){return r.date;}).sort().reverse()[0];
       // ...
       var popup =
         '' +
         (noteLines ? '' + noteLines + '' : '') +
       // ...
     }
Certain ergonomics are hard to miss since a human who writes heavy FP would opt for a `(r) => r.date` lambda, where the computer has no problem writing out inline `function(r)`-style declarations. Similarly, the HTML mapping function could go either way, but mixing in large sets of text with hard constants would be really uncommon for humans to write.

JavaScript is always a mess, but it's a _different_ mess between humans and AI, and this function `loadCommunityReports` really reads AI-first to me.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#179

Post by hunterpayne »

no-name-here wrote: post #141
jmye wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a serious comment? No one, in an environmental discussion, ignores how much water beef needs. It’s a central part of most vegan/vegetarian commentary. But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.

1. Beef uses trillions of gallons of water per year, while data centers use billions - data center water use is nowhere remotely as much as beef. 2. Despite beef using far more water, is it getting anywhere remotely as much coverage as data center water use? 3. Senators like Sanders proposed stopping data center construction nationwide - have senators proposed similar nationwide bans for beef?

You can go ahead and try to do that. Politically, to say its a DOA bill, is the understatement of the century. Also, water is renewable. This entire discussion is absurd and scientifically illiterate. There is a reason why nobody says, "party of science" anymore.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#180

Post by jpster »

robwwilliams wrote: post #144
rcpt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither have much impact on the local area so equal weight makes sense

Living downwind of Colossus I and Colossus II in Memphis has orders of magnitude more weight than even a convention large data center. On par with a large cargo airport like MEM (FedEx hub).

What does “has more weight” mean in this context?
Post reply on HN