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

191–200 of 346 posts

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

#191

Post by hunterpayne »

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.

You have never set foot on a farm.

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

#192

Post by tptacek »

no-name-here wrote: post #186
tptacek wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course multiple areas have already banned data centers. So what? The United States is absolutely enormous. Data center buildout --- especially for AI training --- has a much easier problem than housing does. Housing needs to be built near centers of economic activity, which means that every marginal unit of housing is likely to be infill and has to pass muster with relatively dense neighborhoods of people who hate…

Is the argument that opposition to, and proposed bans of, data centers are only occurring on sites near dense population centers, as opposed to even covering incredibly low density sites? I'd say data center opposition goes beyond housing opposition as state-wide or even national bans have been proposed. Many people similarly have a 'rooting interest' against public housing, public transit, even new housing in genera…

That's exactly what I'm saying. This is an old story; it's just getting airplay because of the "AI" connection.

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

#193

Post by tptacek »

cratermoon wrote: post #170
tptacek wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think advocating against building data centers in Box Elder County Utah kind of gives away the whole game here. The impact logic is so clearly motivated. Have you ever been there? Or even near there? Like, driven from San Francisco to the East Coast at one point? It's a literal wasteland. It is like being on the moon.

I knew someone would come out and say that. To answer your question, I have driven through, multiple times. I suggest starting with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire to raise your awareness.

I've been there. If you could pick any place in the world to site a data center, Box Elder County would be high on the list.

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

#194

Post by nixass »

tiffanyh wrote: post #21

Why go through the effort when such work has already been done? https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/ Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?

This map is inaccurate, for at least one major FAANG player. General metro area seems to be good but actual physical location is way wrong, not even the campus is right

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

#195

Post by fc417fc802 »

petre wrote: post #151
fc417fc802 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever x…

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.

300 MW hr is approximately nothing to the broader environment. A constant gigawatt load is (off the top of my head, probably off a bit) something like 5 sq km of solar over a 24 hour period on average. Granted some of that light would otherwise be reflected but that gets us in the rough ballpark.

In local terms its a fair bit of heating but zooming out it's a drop in the bucket.

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

#196

Post by pchristensen »

jpster wrote: post #180
robwwilliams wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Impact and externalities.

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

#197

Post by cootsnuck »

ojbyrne wrote: post #172
cootsnuck wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

Yea, my bad. "majority getting scrapped” was sloppy wording.

More accurate to say would be that a big chunk of the AI data center pipeline looks delayed/speculative. 16GW is slated for 2026, but only 5GW is actually under construction. https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outloo...

I do think it's a bit ridiculous though to not consider someone a tech insider who was a director for a decade at one of the biggest tech companies in history...

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

#198

Post by abigail95 »

petre wrote: post #151
fc417fc802 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever x…

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.

Yeah it gets radiated into space

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

#199

Post by esikich »

866-RON-0-FEZ wrote: post #36

[flagged]

They do. All of my friends are non-tech and I've given up trying to explain any of this. The average person just does not understand how "the internet" gets into their phones, what makes a website tick, how their iPictures get backed up, etc. It's all magic. If they haven't had a lifetime of at least a passing interest/curiosity in tech, all of my explanations sound like bullshit. Watch their eyes glaze over as you try to explain how Netflix uses CDNs or how their catering website is a VM in AWS. It's just too fucking abstract coming from 0 tech knowledge, which is where the average person is. It's really sad how rabid people have gotten over this.

When I was a kid in the 80s I was excited at the progress of PCs and thought how cool will it be when everyone can compute! We will be so empowered! It seems the exact opposite happened and no one knows or appreciates how any of it works. "I just want to consume digital content, use it in all aspects of my life, and also fuck data centers! I want this awesome digital life but I don't want those jobs in my state!"

I feel bad because a data center was just rammed through in a city near me and I thought "good, the people protesting this shit don't know what they're talking about anyway." There's a lot of current issues where I honestly think the public has no business chiming in on because they don't have the expertise to have an opinion on it anyway, which feels gross to me, but here we are.

Post reply on HN