I think there's room for win-win solutions here; the cost of placating the locals is a rounding error compared to the cost of these data centers. 1. Local governments can require that if the data center peak load is 1.0GW, they must provision transmission and generation capacity for the local region of 1.2GW; the extra power can be given to the neighbors at substantial discount. 2. Construct a public swimming complex…
The engineer style snap to solution with no interest in the actual reasons many Americans are opposed to AI is one of the reasons Americans are opposed to AI
Spoken like someone that will not have a data center built near them at their expense in the near future
Literally have lived within 1500 feet of a datacenter. Zero of my my non techie friends ever knew. It’s a non-issue. It’s like complaining about a vacant but well maintained warehouse next door. If you mean living next door to a power plant? Absolutely. But that is a different topic.
Well, because of lack of infrastructure a lot of these data centers are power plants as well, and will continue to be without larger scale buildout of energy infrastructure.
A few things you might want to consider: 1) your example pays very substantial tax. (property taxes, plus, recently, tax on electricity use) 2) your example primarily used undesirable land. 3) your example grew slowly, allowing the power company to add capacity without a big challenge matching demand. 4) your example is in a heavily connected part of the grid, so it didn't need all of that added power generation to b…
The only reason Loudon county became datacenter alley is due to where the transatlantic cables landed. And Washington DC being next door. It’s basically the OG networking effect. You put equipment there because everyone else had equipment there. The rest just grew with it. It had nothing to do with power infrastructure. If anything, datacenters created the power infrastructure in the area. Agreed on the tax abatement…
I agree that datacenters showed up because a ton of fibre was already there.
I was talking about reasons that the general public of Loudon County has had a positive view toward datacenters -- not why datacenters chose the county (that's a different list entirely).
Notably, that the datacenters showed up in a way that offered almost no material downsides to the locals... and that this differs markedly from what many towns face today.
It's the gas turbine generators at the massive DCs causing the big issue. There are dozens of them. Not your typical historical DC/colo or even 5yr ago hyperscaler DC.
These sorts of things done remotely close to residential areas are very rare in the grand scheme. And I agree these specific projects are a major problem. It’s just not representative of the bigger picture when there are a dozen horrible projects against say 1000 total. The hyperbole is what gets my mom terrified of moving to a city that might allow a datacenter to be built 8 miles away from the place she was looking…
> These sorts of things done remotely close to residential areas are very rare in the grand scheme.
I'm sure that will be a great consolation to the thousands of people who have to live near them. "Don't worry, your situation is very rare! That's why we don't have to do anything about it."
Data centers use miniscular amount of water. Data center water use is a fake issue.
This is a great data-backed resource to refute made-up claims about data centers: https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/
Nobody's gonna change their mind about AI wastefulness from an obviously AI-generated infographic. The author should have realized this with about 5 seconds of thought.
All of the above are false, except for 3 which has actually happened in a few cases, though is definitely the outlier as I have been near data centers and couldn't hear a thing. And they provide a lot more jobs than the 0 jobs that were provided by the undeveloped land they are built on.
I wonder what fallacy you’re going to use to justify GPU-heavy data centers using zero water: are you going to take the “they’re closed loop” path, and conveniently ignore that they need to be continually topped off, and that effectively makes them open loop anyway (or that they heat exchange with a separate loop that is evaporated?) Or maybe you’ll just say “sure the water evaporates, but it’ll rain down somewhere s…
Well you'll need to keep waiting because I never made such a claim and therefore I have no need to justify it.
I suspect rather foreign actors seed some of the anti data center narrative in order to try and reduce American capability to compete in the space, just like the Soviets did with nuclear in the 60-80s.
If they wanted to do that, they'd pick stronger arguments for starters. But either way, social media updoots and shares aren't going to change anything with capital's plans, so it'd be weird for a foreign power to think that it would.
I think there's room for win-win solutions here; the cost of placating the locals is a rounding error compared to the cost of these data centers. 1. Local governments can require that if the data center peak load is 1.0GW, they must provision transmission and generation capacity for the local region of 1.2GW; the extra power can be given to the neighbors at substantial discount. 2. Construct a public swimming complex…
I've personally had a friend with misophonia (about subsonics) commit suicide (making it difficult to find out from them what was cause or correlation).
I think there's room for win-win solutions here; the cost of placating the locals is a rounding error compared to the cost of these data centers. 1. Local governments can require that if the data center peak load is 1.0GW, they must provision transmission and generation capacity for the local region of 1.2GW; the extra power can be given to the neighbors at substantial discount. 2. Construct a public swimming complex…
None of these mitigations (although they’re good ideas) address what I think is the real issue here, which is that people don’t like AI. And why would they, when the dish being served by AI CEOs is job loss with a side of extinction risk. I think many data centre opponents understand that being opposed to AI is not sufficient to halt a local project, so it is noise, water use and power consumption that they latch ont…
Maybe it's semantics, but I feel like local QoL concerns (mainly noise and electric bills, plus an overblown focus on water) are the primary driver for in-community resistance. Shoving AI into everything is annoying, and there's real ideological opposition amongst a lot of online tastemakers, but not enough to motivate John Q. Public to show up to county zoning meetings. If hyperscalers were tactful enough to limit impacts on their neighbors, I think opposition would be a much more niche issue.
> but is anyone actually willing to do anything about it? They did. They elected Trump. > no major populist uprising against the dismantling of the institution of the presidency Some people view the president as the only directly-elected person powerful enough to fight for them in dismantling the rest of a government that isn't working (or even actively working against them). So they implicitly want a strong presiden…
> They did. They elected Trump. I would say that speaks more to apathy than activism. > Some people view the president as the only directly-elected person powerful enough to fight for them in dismantling the rest of a government that isn't working I think consciously verbalizing a position even that nuanced and esoteric is niche, but there is certainly something to be said for peoples' susceptibility to a type of "st…
>I would say that speaks more to apathy than activism.
Whatever else you'd want to say about Trump supporters, I wouldn't call them apathetic. Maybe I'm reading your comment wrong, but I can't see how anyone could characterize Trump's base as "apathetic."