Post is from last week, and is just an intro to the map project, discussed here at length:
If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
81–90 of 133 posts
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
So successful that data centers are everywhere? I'm not following the logic here.
25 data center projects were canceled in 2025, up sharply from only 6 in 2024. 2026 numbers gonna be dramatically higher. 69 jurisdictions have enacted some form of moratorium, ban, or restriction on new data center construction. The friendly states such as Texas are just going to have all the data centers and thus reap all the financial and job benefits.
I think you're being single minded about the reason people don't want them. Not everyone is hungry for giant construction projects regardless of the "jobs gain"
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding water usage, in general data centers do not use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing > The Georgia data center is only using ~2% of the county’s water. For comparison, a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is using ~4% of the county’s water. A construction plant for Rivian cars is using about the same amount of water as Meta’s data center. The data center is functioning like any other normal in…
>Regarding water usage, in general data centers do not use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing Are the claims really that "Data centers use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing"? I dont think so. Even if thats true, that doesn't mean they cant have a disastrous effect on the local water supply. This isnt a good rebuttal. Frankly I tend to think the anti-datacenter crowd is overreacting. B…
Data centers do use water, and a lot of it, but the claims being made are hyperbolic and not squared with reality.
One criticism I often see is that data centers somehow pollute the local water supply. Data centers use water in a closed loop, their impact on local water quality is negligible. Industrial manufacturing and even agriculture have a far greater deleterious effect.
> The EPA’s national assessments repeatedly identify agriculture as the leading source of impairment for rivers and streams due to nutrient and sediment runoff, with continued nitrogen and phosphorus problems that affect drinking water and coastal ecosystems.
The thing is, AI data centers bring in far more tax revenue than other water-guzzling domains (like golf courses), but use less water overall. Extreme panic over specifically their water use is disproportionate
> How much of this will be AI? Almost all this growth will be driven by AI, but because AI is only 20% of data center power use, its growth will have to be huge to triple total power usage. One forecast says AI energy use in America will be multiplied by 10 by 2030. Because water use is proportionate to energy use, we can multiply AI’s water use by 10 as well.
> So in 2030, AI in data centers specifically will be using 0.08% of America’s freshwater. This means it will rise to the level of 5% of America’s current water used on golf courses, or 5% of U.S. steel production, or be about 173 square miles of irrigated corn farms.
> The average American’s consumptive lifestyle freshwater footprint is 422 gallons per day. This means that in 2023, AI data centers used as much water as the lifestyles of 25,000 Americans, 0.007% of the population. By 2030, they might use as much as the lifestyles of 250,000 Americans, 0.07% of the population. Not nothing, but 250,000 people over 5 years is just 4% of America’s current rate of population growth. If you found out that immigration plus new births in America would increase by 4% of its current rate, would you first thought be “We can’t afford that, it’s way too much water”?
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#84They're being built in as much secret as possible because everything is. Everything about land development is adversarial and the people who keep their mouths shut wind up taking fewer 4-7 figure screwings along the way than the honest people. It sucks that this how it is but even just the most casual familiarity with all the rules and processes makes it obvious why this is the way it is. You could find more than eno…
grocery stores? They are not comparable to data centers.
You are not being curious or good faith here.
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#85One reason is that politicians have vilified them for their own political means. Creating false narratives like they use huge amounts of water, when in fact the cooling is a closed loop system and use less water than a single busy restaurant. They are being used as yet another pawn piece to push inequity and climate change agendas. It’s been quite a successful strategy.
> Creating false narratives like they use huge amounts of water, when in fact the cooling is a closed loop system and use less water than a single busy restaurant My understanding was that often multiple cooling methods are employed and the ratio of use shifts seasonally; however, that evaporative cooling was still primary method, especially in hotter climates like CA and AZ. Can you help me understand what type of d…
Microsoft CEO Nadella just recently said their Fairwater (315-acre facility in Wisconsin) only uses around the same amount of water as a single restaurant over the course of an entire year.
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#86They're being built in as much secret as possible because everything is. Everything about land development is adversarial and the people who keep their mouths shut wind up taking fewer 4-7 figure screwings along the way than the honest people. It sucks that this how it is but even just the most casual familiarity with all the rules and processes makes it obvious why this is the way it is. You could find more than eno…
I enjoy reminding people the land acquisition history behind building Disney World.
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data centers require lots of technicians to install, maintain, and decommission servers. Who do you think installs those video cards?
How many technicians? And from where? Its unclear to me how often this stuff actually needs to be done. And how resilient the overall system is to failure. Is it imperative to swap out one point of failure immediately or can you let them batch up and send Joe from California out qaurterly?
Technicians are constantly behind in work. Many data centers are pulling 24/7/365 shifts to keep up with demand. Larger data centers have hundreds of full time employees.
Yes many servers are left in fail over states for long periods of time, but that can only be done because new capacity is actively being deployed to make up for that fail over. Modern data centers are far too big for a single person to be repairing things every once in a while. Stuff is breaking every hour of every day
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're conflating AI and AI Data centres. What kind of "jobs" does AI data centre creates? More jobs for factory workers who assemble video cards to be shipped and installed in a rack?
Data centers require lots of technicians to install, maintain, and decommission servers. Who do you think installs those video cards?
I worked for a company that ran a pretty big, high-security data center--75,000 square feet serving thousands of customers. There was a team of 6-8 technicians and a couple dozen security guards. None of them were particularly great or high-paying jobs.
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#89What is the advantage to not keeping them a secret? The populist movement against AI is growing rapidly, and is supported by bunk science which affirms people's pre-existing biases (like the idea that data centers suck up all the water in a community, or raise the ambient temperature by a single-double digit number of degrees F). AI is a genuine source of economic growth. I can understand wanting to curtail it, but i…
The US has deindustrialized and since the rise of NIMBY politics hasn't built new industry in any scale at all. The first freeway revolts happened in 1959. In the meantime, basically everyone has agreed that industrial growth and manufacturing as an abstract concept is Good (TM) but definitely not in my backyard. For a long time these kinds of things were just being built in neighborhoods where the residents were too…
I think it's good to remind people that the industrial revolution was very close to never happening.
This is from Dud Dudley writing in 1665, whose own ventures to manufacture steel en masse before Abraham Darby succeeded.
> "I have been opposed by many adversaries, as by wood colliers, mine owners, and others who, being poor men, did, by misguided advice, throw down and destroy two of my furnaces and my works, and caused much of my pigs and bar iron to be carried away."
There were plenty of examples through history of "near-misses" where establishment land/wealth holders suppressed nascent steel industries. It was almost an accidental series of coincidences that the industrial revolution happened - the Glorious Revolution in England and Abraham Darby's secret financing network.
Re: If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
#90And what happened to Climate Change? Seems that they don't care about it anymore, they rather have their data centers which give them more control over society