271–280 of 383 posts
My guess is that the locals have proven themselves easily dazzled by the contract dollar amounts and arent thinking about the future. Remember the FoxConn debacle? That was WI.
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Commensurate to the actual cost?
Certainly commensurate to the price . It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price. AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a…
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Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off. These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
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> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
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Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.
A few, most don't. If it's cheaper to use an open system then the closed system are only built for show, to soothe the public.
The fundamental problem here is municipalities getting into cozy, sweetheart deals with corporations.
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I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions astray here. The actual decision at question here is whether the local government provides the necessary approvals for a company to build what they want on their private property. It's good and proper for the government to consider the impacts on a local community before approving a big construction project. That process will need to involve some amount of open c…
Its the same argument for high-density hog farming. If the use of private property may impinge on the neighbors, either through invasive noise, or costs to public utility infrastructure (power, water) then the community ought to have some insight and input, same as they have input into whether a high density hog farm can open right on the border of the community. Yes some people see the datacenters as part of an ethi…
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The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.
The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute. Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.
I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm hav…
What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades. They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left. Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profi…
https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri...
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You didn't answer my questions. How is The Boring company going? And in this context, you can also ask: "Is he putting money into something that will obviously fail?" Also, go back and read how many people who were "smarter than him" there nine years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223020
Here Bezos, sundar, Jensen all are invested. On boring: it’s easy to say in hindsight.
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I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations instead.
> Now keep in mind that a man's just as good as his word > It takes twice as long to build bridges you've burnt > And there's hurt you can cause time alone cannot heal