Americans don't know how to fight AI so they're fighting data centers
vox.comWell realistically both are bad. Right now our government is purely dysfunctional, so I'm not sure anyone knows how to fight anything. We have a eunuch Congress, and in response each party just tries to push executive power as far as possible, never once considering that someone they dislike could get elected in the future and use that expanded power in a negative way.
I'm sure that right at this moment at least some people are thinking "if only we had a different executive, then we could rein in this AI problem." That is wrong at best. You could rein it in for ~4 years until you lost the next election. With a completely feckless Congress, very little can get done.
We do not have a eunuch congress - but we do have a Congress that believes their balls have been removed despite being there the whole time. This is a solvable problem, happily. It does, however, require some will and for folks to remember they actually have some power as elected representatives to the highest legislative body in the land.
Remember? ... Memories have a price. Nothing's changing any time soon while the elected represent money, and paid-for interests.
Of the dollar, by the dollar, for the dollar ...
The only power congress theoretically has to impact the administration is that of the purse.
But the admin has repeatedly ignored such restrictions. This check on power also loses it's teeth when the oligarchs align themselves behind the executive branch.
That's not true at all, they could:
- impeach
- pass new laws / revise old laws
- hold real hearings
- amend the constitution
Now practically will this congress do so? No, but in principle they wield more power than the executive.
In the context of the current admin:
- They have impeached already, multiple times.
- Congress has no means of enforcing any laws they pass aside from trying to withhold funding.
- Hearings are political circus at best with no real consequences. See: 0 US based Epstein abusers in any form of incarceration.
- ah yes, amending the constitution. a very realistic and responsive option
Since none of these are practical, then congress wields no practical power. In principle and technicalities are useless. Even if the dems were able to take a progressive super majority, unless they passed a law granting congress law enforcement powers w/ funding they're declawed.
I don't disagree with you, and I think you might have misunderstood me. I think Congress could start clawing these back, but I agree, right now they have no effective power, which is why I called them a "eunuch congress."
Perhaps that's where we would disagree. I don't think congress has the means to claw anything back at this point or in the future. We're essentially well into a self-coup
They can also impeach
They have impeached already, multiple times.
During his last term yes, during this term no they haven't. They could at least be pushing for this, there's a few republicans on the out of Trumps circle, maybe they could make some movement. Instead they sit around and do nothing, letting the crimes take place with no attempt to even declare it as wrong.
Every day is an endless stream of media and commentary on the illegal things he's doing with no accountability. Even in the highly unlikely event of an impeachment conviction, I don't see how that changes anything from a practical standpoint. The DoJ isn't going to enforce the conviction, and military leadership has steadily been replaced with yes-people since the admin took office.
The framing that congressional politicians have "forgotten" that they have power is a silly and dishonest trope. They absolutely know that they have power, but they also just watched multiple incumbents (Cornyn, Cassidy, Massie just to name a few) who didn't get Trump's endorsement lose their respective primaries, effectively ending their political careers.
Members of Congress, just like everyone else, act in their own self-interest. And unfortunately for pretty much everyone else, their best method of self-preservation is to do nothing, hence the "eunuch" Congress.
The well-actually testicle TED talk misses the point. Representatives have power, and sometimes that power is for sale. And that position to represent was also for sale. As was the attention of the electorate.
Honestly, calling Congress castrated is fine because it is healthy venting about how ineffective they seem at their charter.
Even though it's really charming and compelling to believe, there is no one solvable problem simply requiring elbow grease, voting harder, proprioception of comically vulnerable reproductive organs, etc.
What reigning in would you do if you had the power to do it for the US?
I'm no expert, but I'd have a few prerogatives:
- Look into ways to restricting executive power, or more rightly revert it to its previous state as described by the constitution.
- Repeal the pardon power (or at least seriously amend it)
- Find a way to limit the use or impact of executive orders. I'm honestly not sure of the best way to do this, but executive orders have exploded basically at the same rate that congress has receded. At the moment they are really just "very weak laws" due to the fact that no one can pass a real law anymore.
- A friend of mind suggested that you prohibit naming the political party of a candidate on a ballot. This has a few legal problems (eg: the states individually control their election process) but the spirit of his comment is that the two party system is broken. The founding fathers imaged that the speaker of the house would jealously guard his power against the presidency. ie, they did not imagine that being the same party the speaker of the house would just do whatever the president wanted. So like the other suggestions, I'm not sure of the best solution here, but the party system is at odds with our current system of government, and seems to be doing an even worse job in these polarized times
Some things you cannot fix with laws or reforms. Congress has power right now. The president never enforced the TikTok law, never sought war powers for Iran, etc. A healthy Congress would do something about this. A new law or regulation here might not necessarily fix this problem. This is something of a cultural rot.
I realize these answers might not have been super satisfying. I'm not a political expert, and I'm sure smarter people than me have been working on these problems for a while.
Oh sorry I just mean: with respect to AI
Oh, I'm not sure the government can fix this sort of problem. I'd still like to prevent any data centers in my state, which is a bit more tangible.
A major challenge of the past ~30 years is that new technologies can totally transform society, and really no company cares whatsoever if that transformation is for the worse. If a company poisons my products with PFAS and I'm not even aware of it, there is little I can do but find out eventually and just avoid those products when possible. If social media and smart phones destroy societal cohesion, we seem to be powerless to stop it and most people don't even want to stop it.
If the worst / greatest predictions of LLMs come to pass, then I imagine we'll be in a similar state.
> We have a eunuch Congress,
no, we don't. we have a Congress where the majority party members are cowed into submission by the threat of vehement attacks by the President that are likely to torpedo their re-election if you defy him (Massie being the latest casualty)
that's very different than a powerless Congress; having said that, it's clear that the founders did not see the inherent weakness in their system and what could happen if a president decided to ignore the rules and "sue me"
but to be fair, the constitution was written before the civil war, at which time the powers and reach of the federal government was greatly reduced compared to the present
You gotta stop saying each party like they’re both the same
At the end it's a facility that costs the locals and benefits non-locals. Even if AI is the truly greatest productivity booster, the benefits are still distributed over all its customers, and the environmental impacts are mostly local.
It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.
The reason these data centers are getting built in place people don’t want them is because the towns are broke.
The city councils know it, but the residents don’t.
The entire point of the last 10 years of Strong Towns was talking about municipal finance, infrastructure costs, and the insolvency of the American suburban town.
Bullshit. The proposed data center in Utah is projected to use more electricity that what the entire state already uses, on an area larger than Manhattan.
The entire state of Utah is not broke. Box Elder County is largely a rural community but it is also not broke.
The proposed Box Elder County data center would double the county's tax revenue, even with the tax breaks. There's a clear incentive for the county to approve it.
I'm not here to fight about one mega-data center where they are circumventing local control. I'm talking about the dozens and dozens of data centers being proposed and accepted by city councils all over the United States: https://www.datacentermap.com/
There will be some obvious bad deals. I think you're wrong to assume that the county is not broke from a municipal finance perspective. Nibley, Utah residents had their town evaluate by Strong Towns, they were in a fairly tough financial position until about 2015. The idea that you have residents that are even doing these reports mean that you have an electorate that actually cares at all.
How is this different than a cornfield? A data center is probably a better neighbor because it doesn't kick up dirt, pesticides, and fertilizer into the air.
Generally people enjoy being around them, looking at them, and eating what they produce.
How does HN feel about ai written blogs? Who wants to go stand next to a 30' warehouse?
Most corn is not for eating.
Okay - people like eating popcorn, beef, and driving too.
Water consumption and localized atmospheric heating have been cited elsewhere as drawbacks. There have been some articles citing noise/vibration pollution (subsonic?) but I'm not completely convinced on that front. Personally, I would add electric grid load to the list.
In the worst case, if your local municipality sides with business over the little guy, that means potential brownouts and water shortages for you.
Farming consumes more water than datacenters. Infrasound is pseudoscience. The biggest issue imo is that they use a ton of electricity and this country has forgotten how to expand electricity supply so prices go up. The solution to that is to create more electricity though, not ban datacenters
> Farming consumes more water than datacenters.
But you don't see center-pivot or linear-movement farmland built up in areas with high population density, nor do you see them using the municipal, potable water supply for irrigation. That is where datacenters are being built and what datacenters are doing, however, and it is why datacenters are blamed for the exacerbation of municipal water systems in these communities. Groundwater, surface water, harvested rainwater, and reclaimed wastewater are the major sources used by farms. Dasani is the major source of water for datacenters, and it makes a massive difference on the water use math.
Make the companies constructing a DC pay a bond or whatever for the new power plant, and don't give them tax subsidies. Easy enough?
The companies building data centers have made it clear they're willing to pay to build out the grid. The problem isn't money, it's bureaucracy.
There's a lot of ways a datacenter in your backyard might be less desirable than a corn-field.
Most data center cooling works by evaporation. Hot air or hot water from the servers passes through cooling towers, and water is deliberately evaporated into the atmosphere to carry heat away. That water vapor rises, disperses, and eventually falls as precipitation, but not locally, and not on any useful timescale for the watershed it was drawn from. So the water still exists, but it's been removed from the local hydrological system
Then, there's the ecological angle. Even when companies claim green credentials, locals often scrutinize the actual power mix feeding the facility. If the regional grid is coal or gas-heavy, a data center's carbon footprint can be substantial. There are also concerns about diesel backup generators, potential groundwater contamination, and heat discharge.
Then there's an increased power bills for locals situation, although this one is not as clear and is often disputed. The argument typically goes something like this: utilities operate on cost-recovery models. If a massive new load comes onto the grid and requires infrastructure upgrades like new substations, transmission lines, grid hardening. Those capital costs get socialized across all ratepayers. The data center pays for its energy consumption, but not necessarily for the full cost of the infrastructure built to serve it. That gap gets spread to everyone else's bills.
Except datacenters are actually very low environmental impact. As long as they provide their own power, they have MUCH lower impact than most farms would.
> As long as they provide their own power
Key point doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Do all these data center buildouts include providing their own power? Seems like the answer is largely no. These companies expect power infrastructure to be supplied by the government, but also want lower taxes.
The mega-scale ones almost all have power as part of the ramp-up process. They are also a massive tax benefit.
Looking at the controversial Stratos data center in Box Elder County:
Box Elder County baseline (before Stratos): 2026 General Fund revenue: $36.1M 2026 General Fund tax revenue: $21.1M 2026 Municipal Service Fund: $18.8M
Stratos (Phase 1): Power: 3 GW Revenue expected: $30M/year Revenue as % of existing county tax rev: 142%
Stratos (Full Buildout): Power: ~9 GW Revenue expected: $108M/year Revenue as % of existing county tax rev: 512%
Planned power details: - Box Elder says it will use natural gas from the nearby Ruby Pipeline. - MIDA describes it as dedicated on-site generation designed to limit demand on the existing grid. - The project ramps from ~3 GW in Phase 1 to ~9 GW at full buildout.
I'll acknowledge that the MIDA structure is not a normal county tax bill and comes with explicit energy-rate discounts, but given that the county could hit 500%+ of its previous tax revenue, I think that's a very easy deal for the county to make.
Data sourced from: https://www.midaut.org/stratos
I drove around the Stargate datacenter construction site in Abilene TX late April. They have maybe 5 or 6 of these large gas fired plants being built near the power substation. I'm not 100% sure what they are but i've seen the same things out in Midland/Odessa for power generation. I'm assuming they'll be generating electricity.
/the scale of that site is like nothing i've ever seen. 100s of those giant cooling units lined up and enough piping that my wife said it reminder her of the refineries on the TX coast.
First of all I didn't say that we should ban datacenters. The point is that they should benefit the locals one way or another. Requiring them to invest in energy and other infra is a good first step.
Like producing more tax revenue for a county than the rest of the county combined? That payoff allows for insane levels of infrastructure improvement at literally no cost to locals.
> As long as they provide their own power
How is running local gas turbines more efficient than relying on centralised power generation?
Even the transport costs of getting kerosene to them is considerable.
In the case of the Stratos / Box Elder County mega-datacenter, they are planning to use gas turbines to run off of the nearby Ruby Pipeline. It's a pretty tidy solution, if you ask me.
Well the data centers around me certainly don't provide their own power and water, so your point seems moot
Let them eat tokens.
But the farms! is the new but her emails!
Even unprofitable farms can produce edible food. A datacenter is a machine that uses electricity to make heat and no other physical prouducts. That's a tough justification to make to people who live near one.
How many existing data centers do you think you rely on each day? Almonds do not realistically improve my life in nearly the way the internet does, but also who am I to say whether you should be allowed to farm almonds or build a datacenter?
I really dont get this. The US is nowhere close to facing a food shortage. If all the desert farms in the west closed beef and a few vegetables would get a tiny bit more expensive. People act like if we didnt do destructive desert farming we'd have to implement rationing.
Food prices rising has been a political hot topic for the last few years. Voters would have your head for any obvious action that made beef get more expensive, especially NIMBY groups and current ranchers.
I’m sorry but I’d like specifics - there are too many environmentalists hand-waving.
This is a well established playbook - it was used with nuclear. It’s being used with oil transport.
It’s literally the same script.
If you fight either of those things in the US, you should do so carefully, as it may get you to be targeted by FBI and DHS as an extremist actor as per current government's policy as of approximately a week ago.
This is a wall of text but genuinely worth skimming: https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
All the more reason for everyone who can speak up to do so.
This is one way you know billionaires have too much sway over the government.
Only C-suite members and billionaires have political representation in the US.
Data centers are easy to fight against because there is no constituency really pulling for them. They create only a handful of jobs. Ultimately the entire thing is a waste of time, data centers can be built basically anywhere, and that's why a lot of them are moving to rural red states where they welcome the construction.
The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage. We should also tax the hell out of anyone using AI as an excuse for layoffs. It's far past time to ban buybacks and dividends for any company doing layoffs. We also should have a requirement, you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.
> rural red states where they welcome the construction
The state legislatures might be all for it, but I can say as someone who lives in South Texas, the actual communities are up in arms against datacenters. Of course there's lots of irony in that one of the reasons the datacenters like the area is that there is a gas pipeline that the locals welcomed that can be used to run turbines.
Yea well thats the thing about red states. Local opposition doesnt mean shit in the face of business interests.
> data centers can be built basically anywhere, and that's why a lot of them are moving to rural red states where they welcome the construction.
There’s no such thing as a red state or blue state, these are fictions created to generate political fighting for no value to society.
Second - many states such as Ohio have begun pushing back strongly against data centers. In Ohio we had been offering tax breaks for construction because we welcomed the economic activity, but thankfully the government here after seeing a lot of pushback across the state has realized providing tax incentives or subsidies is economically and politically stupid relative the benefits of the new data centers.
To your point, they can be built anywhere. So many folks are saying yep, let’s build them somewhere else and drain water and raise energy prices there instead of here.
Smart politics in a state like Ohio would require data centers to relocate corporate jobs to the state or face full or perhaps even surcharges for utility rates because why not?
Banning buybacks and taxing dividends like earned income (or at least with higher tax brackets for higher dividend income, just like earned income) is basically the same thing as taxing tokens. I'd go even further and reduce income taxes by the same amount that is raised by taxing dividends.
As far as I can work out, tokens aren't fungible which makes them a pretty poor thing to tax instead of just taxing the profits of the companies behind the models.
> tokens aren't fungible
Not again...
> data centers can be built basically anywhere
this is especially true for AI use cases, where compute is hugely more important than latency / bandwidth
> you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.
So, reallocate some exec comp to a pool that gets bigger when you give shareholders back money?
Would be great to balance the market better between labor and capital, but there's no easy button...
> The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage.
What about self-hosted models?
You would purchase an AI tax stamp! Just make sure you’re being honest about your token usage. Or maybe we can have AI licenses! Sky’s the limit when you can just make up policy on the internet for free.
Finally, a viable future career path for the poor TV license inspectors!
It should be illegal to lay workers off for AI like it is in China, where sensible policy exists.
I have long said that AI is an excuse, but in reality people are not laid off for AI. People are laid off for the economy or "restructuring", and they use the fad of the day - which is AI these days - as a reason.
If it was AI they would take those extra people to get more done. I know of no company that doesn't have more work than they have people. (but they lack the funds/ROI to pay more people)
how is AI an excuse when it can replace team of 10 people to 3? It is very efficient in doing menial jobs for sure.
So put those 7 "extra" people to work on something else.
A big question is whose responsibility that is.
The way it works in capitalist societies is that their employer fires them when it no longer needs them, and it's up to the individuals to find something else to work on. The doctrine claims that "the market" will find something for them. Which is true in a sense, although the specifics can be extremely dystopian.
If you want to put that responsibility for finding work on someone else, you have quite a lot of political work to do to convince people that it should be the way you propose.
You just lay them off for another reason
I mean if AI is really powerful the reason is "profitability as our competitor steals our contracts at a fraction of the price". Your competitor just doesn't hire in the first place of course.
I think its a mistake to fight datacenters and AI.
Taking a step back, if the US unilaterally stops producing AI will other countries stop? The answer is clearly no.
Datacenters and ai can be built and trained anywhere. If you want control over AI you should want it to be built in your own country where you have political representation.
All preventing datacenter buildout will do is ensure that the price remains high and only really rich organizations can access it.
You're starting with an assumption that AI is, on the whole, a net positive for society. A lot of people would disagree.
Nuclear bombs and ICBMs aren’t a net positive for society either, but not pursuing them is bad geopolitical strategy.
Maybe I'm a big idiot, but I think nuclear disarmament is a good geopolitical strategy. The USA has treaties in place pursuing that end on a global scale.
There is currently a war (largest since WW2) in europe that is a direct result of nuclear disarmament.
It’s great for society. It may not be working for you, but don’t project that on the rest of the world.
That’s so far from obvious. The most concerning possibilities for me — like kids not learning how to struggle or problem solve on their own — won’t be resolved for many years.
Of course and a lot of people disagree that vaccines work, why does this negate any hard evidence?
Is the hard evidence of AI being a net improvement for society in the room with us now?
If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and engineering. These improvements get drowned out by the AI Cheerleaders, but they're there.
I like this argument/reasoning more than any I've encountered so far. Thank you! Enabling the disabled is definitely a positive and this is a strong argument for the "pro AI" column.
I think another argument for AI is that it can help pull out patterns and information that are normally hidden from human cognition because we can't encompass that information and keep it in mind.
I think one place we should apply this is to the financial system. Use it to detect fraud, tax manipulation games and Other b**** pulled by the 1%ers.
With luck, it might even help us find methods of reducing their influence and power.
> helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
I keep seeing this and I'm pretty envious! You must have a different form of ADHD than I do. For me, trying to use AI to build anything is terrible for my attention, it turns everything into a miserable slog because it's so hands off.
I miss getting into flow.
I hear you.
AI helps me get into flow state because I can have a rambling conversation with a chatbot and work through ideas and what abouts. eventually it helps me forget to a place where flow is easier to maintain.
Depends, is the net improvement of the internet, electricity, agriculture, steam engine also in the room?
Asbestos is the miracle material it is advertised as. It really is great insulation, and really is absolutely fireproof. Thousands of industrial uses are readily apparent.
Despite this, because of its other effects, the cost to clean up and stop using asbestos is greater than the sum total of any benefit from all mined asbestos worldwide.
Even a miracle technology can still be a net disaster.
It's a good point I have to say
I don't understand that this argument. Why does the net improvement of the technologies listed imply that AI will also have a net improvement? Are you just arguing that there's no such thing as technology that is harmful on net?
I am unsure what you mean by hard evidence in the context of AI then, what is the evidence we are negating in your view?
We could have had this same argument about social media 15 years ago before hard evidence showed it's not quite the net benefit to society it was touted as.
What is the hard evidence that you speak of?
Are you really comparing LLMs to vaccines? Jesus
You presume there is hard evidence that AI is good for society. In reality, the inverse is true.
Now you understand why anti-vaxxers ignore evidence. Because it doesn't fit with your worldview and you're too narrow-minded and selfish to consider that your viewpoint might actually be wrong and bad for others.
For people worried about their livelihoods, there's value in slowing AI adoption to give our economy time to transition rather than just throwing a lot of people out of work all at the same time.
Did slowing down factory build-outs stop globalization from gutting the midwest? I think there are direct parallels here. We either automate ourselves or someone else will automate us and we will have no control.
Why should I think that I "own" or control a datacenter built in my town compared to one built in another country? It's pretty unlikely anything I do will have any effect on what goes on inside one even if I work there.
The greatest control I have is probably to have it not get built, though even that is minimal as it has failed to stop the one that is indeed being built in my town.
Even if you do want datacenters built in your country, you probably don't want them built at the maximally explotative locations that their developers pursue.
They don't provide appreciable community value and they effectively mine limited local resources (power, grid capacity, land, water) and sell it as compute, immediately diverting the profit back out of the local economy and into very distant business accounts instead.
Builders choose their targets specifically by how well they can strong-arm weak/vulnerable communities into letting them build these mines through political influence and misrepresentation. It's bad.
What you probably want is to leverage their global market value to establish new power and grid capacity in undeveloped areas, perhaps to someday become a seed for new communities that grow around the infrastructure development work.
But that's much more expensive than bullying and seducing a weak city council so it won't happen with regional/state/federal regulatory protections or incentives that push them away from the exploitative opportunities and towards the constructive ones.
Yes, it is vital to create more slop and Anime figures. We need to win that race at all costs.
So urgent that Andreesen has a Super PAC to push the dangerous China narrative.
Counterpoint: Only C-suite members and billionaires have political representation in the US.
There's no such thing as 'control over AI'; that goes double for someone who is a complete nobody plebian with a little baby stock portfolio. You know, basically everyone except for a select few.
The industry can be regulated and taxed like anything else.
Yeah, and it should be. But the USA, at least in this current moment, builds regulations catering to corporations and the rich over people's general needs. So the regulations that are on the table at the national level are ineffective.
It's easier for normal people to influence local regulations, but local regulations just push the problem somewhere else. However disdain for AI is so widespread that this is actually kind of effective.
disdain for dumping industrial sludge into rivers is quite high too. if you don’t demand regulated domestic production it will just get moved to the least regulated place with the best underlying economics, I imagine you know this though…
Yeah, I agree with you! Regulation of that kind of environmental problem works better the more land is covered. National is best, statewide is meaningful (if you are in a geographically large state). Local is better than doing literally nothing, but it does have the nasty side effect of pushing the problem out of people's sight :(
You could say the same of human intelligence and competence and social trust.
I think it's a mistake to stop producing those things.
Fair point, but you dont produce intelligence, competence and social trust. Essentially a society earns it.
Is the reason that competence and social trust are declining because of AI? Maybe, but not only that.
Uh yes you could but what's your point. If we make ourselves dumber, it doesn't make China dumber, human intelligence will just leave us behind.
Isn't "data centers are using all the electricity" the same as "we're not pricing electricity correctly"?
Instead of a ban just make sure they pay what's needed to keep capacity where it needs to be.
On this note, I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs. Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?
Your house goes through different approval processes than large infrastructure processes. You also pay a different rate than commercial customers.
Energy hungry infrastructure projects pay something called a "large-load tariff" to try to contain their second-order costs from leaking into residential rate payers pay for. It's not perfect, so a datacenter project could trigger some upgrades that cause rates to go up.
The situation is confusing everyone right now because it's impossible for the average person to tell why rates are going up. A lot of utilities are doing things like finally addressing old fire-prone infrastructure (see the California fires) and dealing with inflation for everything from their generation input costs to inflated costs for infrastructure to putting straight of Hormuz-inflated gas in the tanks of their fleet. Customers only see that their rates are going up and AI datacenters are on the news, so they put them together and assume datacenters are to blame for everything. Yet rates are spiking even in places with zero datacenters.
The topic has entered the domain of emotionally charged topics so nuance is hard to come by. Many of the anti-datacenter people are against datacenters as a proxy for their hatred of AI and the electricity and water arguments are just convenient justifications. This is how we arrive at the article.
> rates are spiking even in places with zero datacenters.
The energy grid is largely interconnected in the US. Just because there arent any datacenters in your state doesnt mean anything because the ones in the next state over could be on the same grid. End of the day prices are about supply and demand, same as always. When a huge amount of demand is added and supply is unchanged prices will go up.
> Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
In some states (like Oregon and Virginia) they do, but in a lot of states the regulations for rate structures are flat among all users so when there's a large surge in new demand the utility will build out new capacity and spread the cost of that new capacity to all rate payers with no regard for the fact that the new capacity would not have been needed without the new demand (from data centers). So everyone who was already using the electricity pays the new higher rates along with the new large-load user.
These companies building data centers will often make a lot of PR statements about how they are fine paying the extra cost for extra use while at the same time lobbying behind the scenes to actually avoid that happening and fighting against changes to utility rate structures that would raise their costs. By and large they can't be trusted.
>I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs
electrical supply is not infinite. datacenters have high electrical demand. more demand + same supply = increase prices.
>Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
the problem is that added infrastructure is not built instantaneously. it lags behind. so costs will be high until more supply-side infrastructure is in place.
i agree that there should be some sort of stipulation that when you build your mega datacenter that you also have to build out electrical infrastructure at the same time. but unfortunately, that is not how it is.
Thanks, that's really useful. I guess in my head I had the impression that costs could potentially be static. eg: if you had 10 customers total, each needed to pay $1 to generate electricity to serve their needs. So when you scale up to 100 customers, you can still have everyone pay $1 and come out to the same place.
I totally get the general principle that not everything scales linearly like that. But, I also know very little about electricity generation, so I have no idea where the breakpoints are. (I would also guess that if the demand dips low enough, there could be a case where after decreasing costs for a while, costs actually start to rise again as there is some minimum infrastructure needed but fewer customers to bear the cost.)
Generally, electric networks benefit from economies of scale. So more customers will _lower_ prices per-customer in the long term.
This is basically just the normal dynamic with American tax law where tax jurisdictions are terrible at coordinating, so they end up approving things and agreeing to tax things at a very low level in order to win the competition. Even when states/counties try to work together on this stuff there's a huge defector problem, like "hey I can back out of this multistate tax compact agreement and get 500 new jobs which will let me win local reelection".
I suppose you can reduce a lot of both good at bad things about the country to "because federalism".
Yes. That is a central problem with power distribution in California.
The cities are paying exorbitant prices for electricity to pay for safer infrastructure for rural customers (undergrounding).
Some cities have divested from PG&E and enjoy much lower electricity prices as a result.
But it's a circular problem. The price wouldn't be exorbitant if these rural areas were left to their own devices. But their utility build outs must be done per rules passed at the behest of the richer urban areas.
We're dealing with this bullshit in my own city in another state. From the parks to the roads to the sidewalks to the library every goddamn thing we touch gets driven up to the point of "can't actually do what we wanted" in cost because some rich assholes 100mi away in the vicinity of the capitol have taken a "build it fancy and rich or don't build it at all" attitude and enshrined that in state law and rules.
Sometimes they'll be so kind as to eat part of the cost with state grants, as long as we sell our freedom away in other ways.
Rural power was always expensive, but now due to wildfire risk, it needs to be ruinously expensive. It's not for the benefit of the cities, and driven by corporate risk management.
>Rural power was always expensive,
But not ruinously so? What changed? The rules (both public and private).
> It's not for the benefit of the cities, and driven by corporate risk management.
Which is driven by laws and courts and precedents and best practices and recommendations and beurocratic rules that come from where?
Regardless this has nothing to do with city and everything to do with rich and out of touch.
I'm sure PG&E would be happy to build worse stuff if they weren't sticking their neck out by doing so.
Kind of like how my city would be happy to simply replace it's infrastructure but the state will take a bunch of money away elsewhere if we did that. Of course, if we weren't paying the state taxes we could afford it from scratch ourselves but I digress.
> If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers?
In some sense, sure, any time you buy something you apply some upward price pressure. Of course, whether the resulting price changes measurably depends on many things, like the scale of your purchase relative to the scale of the market, the price elasticity of demand, who the marginal buyers and producers are, etc.
In many cases, I'm sure they are paying the cost of the added infrastructure. However, the increase in electricity costs come from having overall more electricity demand than before the data center was built. An increase in demand raises the cost for everyone.
In many places there is little excess capacity. Many protesters know that their electricity prices, like gas prices, will soar and price them out of AC.
Well, no.
First, increased demand drives increased prices. This is the least controversial axiom of modern economic theory. So if you add a huge power consumer to a market, all consumers in that market will have to pay more. You can mitigate that some if that new, big consumer builds their own power facility, but the fact still remains that the local price in fuel (oil, coal, etc) or materials for renewable generators (turbins, solar panels, etc) will increase. Again, because demand increased.
Second, its one thing for things to cost more in a market that has a booming economy and plenty of high paying jobs. Home prices in the Bay Area are horrifying, but the poverty line for a family of 4 is $80k, which sort of grounds things. If energy costs go up by $100/year in the Bay Area, nobody notices. But if energy costs suddenly skyrocket in Great Falls, Montana (poverty line for 4: $33k) or similar that lacks a vibrant economy, the residents don't have much choice but to tighten their belts over the suddenly larger electric bill that has done basically nothing to actually revitalize their economy.
Politicians are bribed by these companies, so why would they price electricity correctly?
> How can technology be used to make our society freer and more equal, and to augment human agency rather than diminish it?
The past 20 years of surveillance capitalism and the general deployment of technology against consumers should make everyone question whether this could ever be possible.
Yeah whenever I hear someone say this I can’t help but think they are delusional. Like, have you looked around? What rational person could possibly believe this tech will lead to MORE freedom.
You know what the largest cost of any goods are? The energy cost. You know what these datacenters are demanding massive amounts of? Energy.
Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. But I can't afford to tack on 30% more costs onto ever material object I need as someone not earning 6 figures doing tech work.
There is a reason the US doesn't process tons of aluminum or supply the world with fertilizer, we don't have all that cheap of energy. Go to Canada and build a hydroplant, or build a solar field.
And that is before we get into the fact that many people think the LLM boom is a massive crash waiting to happen when it inevitably doesn't change the world overnight to justify the trillions in investments.
I would definitely agree that data center investments would need to be coupled with energy investments. If this could act as a catalyst for more (sustainable) energy production that would be a net win for all IMO.
> Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good.
Hear hear.
LLMs can generate a lot of great value. But the pouring of resources like gasoline on a wildfire is dumb. Continuing the analogy, fire is great when controlled and terrible when let loose without regard for impact.
I think a Doctorow-style setup of domain-specific AI and edge compute are where real value with AI will exist in ways our grandchildren may enjoy -- and it happens to be antithetical to the ridiculous overvaluation we in the "hyperscalers" (which seem to just want to pump and dump the market by extracting cash from US 401ks via indexes and IPOs).
Poison Fountain on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
Do you feel poison fountain is actually effective? To me it seems like free chaos engineering for ingestion platforms. Wouldn't it paradoxically harden data ingestion?
Not sure about flawed code logic, but it is embarassingly easy to plant false information into models. Make a few static sites with random info, crosslink them, reference them on reddit a few times, then plant the payload there.
I know it because i tried ...
This article is bullshit. It downplays the real, valid concerns people have about data centers themselves as more "ahh, poor uniformed populace" BS:
1. Electricity costs in Maryland jumped 89% over the past year, much more than anywhere else, largely due to an AWS data center expansion: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-electricity-pr...
2. At their heart, data centers are extractive. Their boosters always overstate the jobs they will create, but they basically take land and resources from one place and create the vast majority of the wealth somewhere else. They are giant windowless boxes, they don't support their community in any way, and in fact with AI they basically add to more job destruction in their communities.
While I agree that some downsides of AI are overstated (like water usage), this whole article smacks of paternalistic "the peons just don't understand what's really going on" nonsense. The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works.
> The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works.
The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally.
It should be noted that modern globalization (post 1945), with Bretton Woods, GATT/WTO, container shipping, and eventually the internet creating the integrated global economy we have today, is but the latest milestone in a long history.
Industrial wave of 1829 - 1914 radically reduced the cost of moving goods and information.
The first globalization happened 1490s - 1800s, when Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 route to India created the first truly intercontinental trade and migration networks, linking the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe for the first time.
> The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally.
That's moving the goalposts. While economists acknowledged there would be some disruptions, in the 90s the vast majority of them downplayed what turned out to be prolonged negative effects to huge populations in richer Western countries. And, ironically, it was those negative effects that led to the rise of nationalism and the dismantling of globalization that we see today. I understand folks' objections to some of the opinions and writings of Paul Krugman, but I give him credit for admitting he was wrong: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-10/inequa...
Sure, there aren't many people who deny that globalization lifted millions out of poverty in East Asia. That's not really comforting to folks in the Rust Belt whose communities have been hollowed out and devastated.
This. 100% this. Data centers drive up our energy costs and are external to the local economy for the most part.
Blocking them should be a priority until rates are negotiated with your G&T / major provider (PJM and FERC in Maryland and many other states)
RE blaming the peon reader: you’re talking about Vox so that is expected unfortunately.
I think a lot of the cost increases come from utilities being in bed with government and both going "aha we've found our scapegoat" more than the demands of the data centers themselves.
But yes this article is absolutely the "usual sort" of paternalistic garbage.
> 2. At their heart, data centers are extractive. Their boosters always overstate the jobs they will create, but they basically take land and resources from one place and create the vast majority of the wealth somewhere else. They are giant windowless boxes, they don't support their community in any way, and in fact with AI they basically add to more job destruction in their communities.
Best part is when they figure out how to take their $10-20k donations to the local community as "doing good" and turn it into positive PR spin to the local yokels that don't know any better that they're getting robbed blind daily. They have a full playbook to rob local communities and get them to fall for it and it sucks.
I've watched it happen in Upstate NY and we certainly aren't seeing any benefits of any of it.
They're fighting the centralization of the means of production, surveillance, and control*
"Yet widespread cynicism about AI, I think, doesn’t stem from any inherent property of the technology itself, but rather from our politics."
No, AI is partly rejected as mind numbing, it produces SEO slop, it produces bad code, it steals IP. Is this author living under a rock?
She then proceeds to parrot the industry that we'll have arrangements that go in the direction of UBI. This whole article sounds like a trojan horse for Vox readers to distract them from the real issues.
EDIT: The pre-IPO downvotes get aggressive again. Mentioning how the press works is strictly forbidden.
Backblaze increased the price per TB (we should be getting emails "ten times the storage for the same price"). Reliable VPS for 5EUR/month are basically gone. Affordability of assembling own PC is back to maybe late 1990s.
Tear it all down.
I agree with the datacenter hate in spirit, but the thing that always bothers me is that most of us working in tech have been telling John Q. Public for DECADES not to trust big tech. Don't put all your data in the cloud, switch to open source alternatives, keep your physical media (or copy it) and don't rely on streaming, etc. I personally have offered my time and knowledge on numerous occasions to help someone make the switch from say, Windows to Linux, Google Drive to a NAS, etc. I've always tried to be as helpful as I can, avoiding jargon, breaking everything down into simple terms, making it easy to understand, being excited to teach people a way to interact with technology without being abused by a corporation.
You know what I learned? Nobody wants to. People will always choose the more convenient option no matter how bad it is in the long run, even when the far more ethical option is only just slightly less convenient. They choose instant gratification every time. They'll whine about it, they'll swear each new enshittified update or price hike is the last straw, but they will keep paying the bill.
And don't even get me started on trying to get people to donate money to open source projects.
So maybe it counts as victim blaming, and the sociopathic techbros that run these companies are certainly responsible for their own behavior, but, at a certain point... it's hard to blame the lion when the tourists keep walking into its den.
Ya'll wanted the cloud, you wanted Ring doorbells, you wanted Alexas, you wanted Kindles, you wanted ChatGPT to write your emails for you, you wanted iPhones... We've been telling you for years: It's just someone else's computer.
It's easy everyone needs to stop using AI, yet the response is "China....." Let them destroy themselves maybe or they thrive more. A double edge sword we (U.S.) created!
When a right wing party pushes a new tech really hard, it's usually a bad thing.
It’s actually insane they call themselves conservatives when the whole platform has been instituting sweeping social changes and embracing new technologies.
Electricity costs make the headlines, but I have also heard that the datacenters apparently make a loud perpetual buzzing noise that is audible from a large distance. That sounds like reason enough to oppose one being built near me.
Data centre noise is a mix of low- and high-frequency intake and exhaust fan noise at the structure level, diesel or turbine generators for the centres supplementing their own power or running backups (sometimes with cooling towers), and no real investment in sound damping.
Combine them with the tendency to build them in open, flat rural areas that have few or no trees or other buildings to baffle the sound, then run them 24/7, and it becomes a chronic issue for people who live nearby (even miles away, if the acoustics are just right).
That shouldn't have been as much of a problem in the US as it's become, but data centre projects get built near where people live because the infrastructure is already there. That naturally raised it as an issue in the UK, where there's less unpopulated space, before data centres of that scale were built: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/31/data-centre-...
Data centers behave as acoustic weapons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
This video is pseudoscience https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
The article you linked doesn't do much to refute "data centres are acoustic weapons", just insists that symptoms are explainable by audible noise pollution. Sure, that makes it better?
It's simple. Noise based nuisances from datacenters fall in one of two categories:
A) don't exist, therefore not a concern
B) known to exist, therefore not a concern
No, it's not a proxy fight about AI. The data centers are just bad, for several, easy-to-explain reasons:
1. They get massive tax breaks;
2. Everyone else pays for the electricity infrastructure that they need to suppor tthem;
3. They pollute water supplies;
4. Everybody's electricity prices go up while the DC has a sweetheart deal that, again, everyone else is paying for;
5. There are no jobs unlike, say, if someone used that same money to buuild an auto plant; and
6. They tend to very far noiser than you might think, such that they probably violate noise ordinances when built near residential property but nobody enforces that. We have industrial areas for this reason but that zoning just gets completely ignored.
AI is a whole separate debate. That one, too, is pretty simple. AI is selling labor displacement and wage suppression. That's the only product. Getting rid of the data centers won't get rid of that. The DCs are just going where it's cheapest, where local officials don't have the resources to fight it and where people can be bullied or bribed into approving it. Move them somewhere else slightly more expensive and it'll still be displacing labor.
In theory, let's say that a data center was proposed that:
1. got no tax breaks
2. self-generated electricity with greenest of green generation
3. did not pollute water supplies
4. made electricity prices go down somehow
5. (can't figure out a theoretical version where there are lots of jobs, sorry)
6. was extremely quiet
Would people still be mad about them?
I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. Or if it's really more about "AI bad."
I think at least it would be hard to get a nimby protest movement going with those conditions. Maybe add in building it somewhere people can't see it?
A lot less people would be mad, yeah. In my own area, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to galvanize activity and get write-ups in the local news. The focus, generally, was on how it would raise electricity costs for the county and use up variable water resources right as we are facing water shortages here.
A lot of people here are in precarious financial situations, they do not want to see any costs go up. Inflation at the grocery store, high gas prices, high mortgages/rent, and a lousy job market have people on edge. I don't know if the average Joe is worried about AI leading to a dystopian hellscape, but he at least doesn't see AI providing any benefit to making ends meet.
Turned out not be a data center, but just the possibility caused a stir.
Yes, people were mad about them due to the tax breaks here in Sweden long before LLMs were a thing.
Personally if your 6 points were true, I would not be mad about them.
> I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers.
The list is long and includes things like people not being able to afford AC anymore; why are you trying to figure this out?
What you seem to be asking asking is if this is just NIMBYism or not. And it's not. At least, I'm not a NIMBY. As an example, just recently I commented on how NIMBYism added billions of points to the UK's HS2 project by building a completely unnecessary tunnel to protect the views of some of the UK's wealthiest landowners [1].
Tax breaks for business have always been ontroversial. I think it's always been a false economy and businesses have effectively played 50 states off of each other to get tax breaks they don't need and they don't pay tor themselves. Some of the examples of this are almost comical. A great example of the hundreds of millions spent to entice businesses back and forth between Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO, which are literally right next to each other [2].
Oh, and the tax breaks given to stadiums are particularly disgusting unless th emncipality owns the team in question in part or in whole and AFAIK in any top tier sports league, there's only one example of that (ie the Green Bay Packers) and the NFL has made that ownership structure illegal.
But anyway, data centers don't create employment so the usual arguments of "they'll go elsewhere" that were used at the time it was a factory or an auto plant don't apply. Yet they get pedlled out anyway. Residents don't want them and it still happens.
Two points I want to comment on from your list.
The first is you qualified self-generated electricity as green. this is a good and important qualifier. The alternative is what Elon did in Memphis [3], which should be illegal regardless.
The second is the water. That's going to be difficult no matter where you build these things. The big issue there is that data centers add pollutants to the water to keep their pipes clean. That too should be illegal. If you were just, for example, using cold sea or river or lake water for cooling then it wouldn't be a big deal. But data centers don't want that. It might corrode their precious pipes. They might need maintenance more often. Or you could use a heat exchange system where water is used for cooling and you can add what you want to it but it's in a closed loop and external water is used to cool it. This is what nucleaer reactors do. But that too is more expensive.
Now if someone was going to build one of these things out in New Mexico or Arizona that have large stretches of uninhabited land and plentiful sunshine (for solar) it would be a different conversation. Of course, water would be an issue there.
Data centers are a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy. That's really the crux of the problem.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350761
[2]: https://www.mackinac.org/the-left-and-right-agree-to-end-tax...
[3]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/22/epa-thwarts-musks-d...
It's also absurd how few jobs or income they provide to the community that is expected to host htem
AI the technology isn't the problem. It's just a tool like anything else. Corporate persons as legal persons and the shielding of the people within that corporation from the consequences of their crimes and malicious actions are the problem. The ability to control elections by dumping unlimited amounts of money is a problem. We need states to change their articles of incorporation to make them accountable. We need states to start revoking corporate charters. Hawaii is leading the way on this. Of course this doesn't help that much when most corporations incorporate in states which are already co-opted and controlled totally by these non-human persons; like Delaware, which is now even given corporations the right to vote in state and local elections.
This is why we have a federal government. Too bad it's been gutted by decades of neoliberalism and corporate lobbying
This is paywalled. Without reading the article, I don't think Americans are fighting data centers because of AI.
I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.
Exactly. There are many costs associated with data centers regardless of the type of data processing they do.
The term "data center" was not even in the typical person's consciousness before the current AI era.
Well to be fair AI scaling and large compute are the real problem. It's just another enshittification scheme. And data centers are the black holes that suck the industry dry like a vacuum.
I realized that the belief that datacenters are bad for the water supply (either evaporating it or polluting it) is weaponized self-delusion. People don't care if it's true or not, because it gives people a way to fight back against (perceived) AI job losses.
AI if fucking awesome and a small minority that’s fighting is not all Americans .. either way, postmen were fighting emails and weavers were fighting power looms .. no one cares .. what a ba article
The politics of anti-* is tiring. Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision? The issues with data centers are manageable. It's quite hard to bring X back to America if Americans oppose the buildings we need (factories, power gen, data centers). I wonder how much of this is the powerful and adversarial poisoning the discourse so America continues to stumble and fall from hegemony?
If you want people to support anything, show them how it benefits them. Do it as directly as possible - new jobs in their town, lower energy bills from a new plant, etc. People will generally follow the money.
What won't work is something like "it'll be better for the economy in the entire country, so put up with some disruption for a while." No one likes higher electricity bills while a power plant is being constructed, a new building going up too close to their homes that doesn't create jobs they can apply for, etc. It's a losing message to promise the payoff only years later or indirectly.
Especially when the payoff is "AI will create exciting new jobs" and no one can come up with any jobs that are not just "AI Accountant" where the AI Accountant is just an existing Accountant replacing one of his colleagues.
For sure, a couple of those arguments I've heard recently
1. The taxes can offset the federal cuts so local taxes do not need to be raised. Requires the local gov't officials signing onto the deal in this way, which seems more likely given the massive pushback nation wide.
2. The data centers should be forced to build the energy generation they require. Excess (during off peak) can be fed back into the local grid and lower prices. It's quite likely the energy deficit will be the primary limiting factor to build out. We can also force the data center to pay premium prices, this is within the capability of regulations.
> The issues with data centers are manageable.
are they? whats been done to solve the infrasound pollution?
governments haven't even managed to get datacenters to follow clean air regulation
Yes, a few issues / approaches, largely around politics and regulation. The discourse mainly focuses around the bad cases and extrapolates to all data centers (incorrectly). I run our company workloads in a data center that is 95% renewables (mainly wind).
1. About 25% of data centers use close water cycle systems [1]. This could be part of the approval process. It costs more, but these companies are flush with cash.
2. Where they go matters for water table impact and energy generation mix, both geographically and per zoning laws. There are good and bad places to put data centers.
3. Energy shouldn't be a problem, but we have under/mis-invested. A world with limitless energy is possible, what happened to that vision for massive renewables to realize that?
4. A responsive government is required, which seems to be what is happening (as evidenced by the significant pushback). We should be more reasonable (the middle path), but that seems not within the politics of our times.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
You might remember the current president cutting renewable subsidies and adding regulation to slow down building them?
Yup, mainly focused on wind mills because he's still butt hurt about losing in Scotland. Solar is still growing at a good clip. The economics has reversed and many renewables are now cheaper.
The US has always had reactionaries, especially around topics construed as existential threats
> Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision?
Seems like an assumption on your part that being pro-data center reflects "vision" and "optimism."
We've heard a lot of optimism about Facebook, Google, etc. and now see all those companies having too much power over us and sucking worse eeach year. So we've evolved our thinking. Sorry it's tiring.
I'm fully on board with the Big Tech / Big Ai / oligarchs having far too much power. I am involved with my local indivisible towards creating a better future. We are currently focused on getting voter turnout so we can get people elected to slow the damage the current admin is doing. It's hard to have any nuanced discussions right now.
Interestingly, the group is mixed on the Ai topic. Some are anti, some are very excited. We have had amazing discussions without it becoming heated, IRL, because people communicate differently in the flesh.
I think people are also literally fighting datacenters. As others have said the increase in energy costs is a problem for the average person. Not only is AI potentially competing for your job, it's also competing for your access to energy to power your home or your vehicle. Energy costs also affect the price you pay for basically every good and service.
Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?
Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.)
If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.
> Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?
Sure but you can say this about everything. Where are the protests about the wine industry in California? 500,000 acres of land for vineyards, far more water used for growing grapes than cooling data centers, all so a handful of people can make fortunes selling empty calories to the rich?
If you want to focus purely on utilitarian "optimal land use for essentials only" arguments there's way worse offenders than datacenters, the anti-DC sentiment is purely part of the anti-AI wave.
Please, tell how much energy an equal sized vineyard uses compared to a data center?
It takes 870 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of wine -- if people were genuinely protesting water waste it would be a good idea to start there. Almonds too.
I like wine and almonds. They are valuable commodities with a variety of uses and anyone can enjoy them for a modest price. They can be used and made into many additional valuable things, from sangria to baklava. What can LLMs do for me?
I am glad you like some things. Some people like other things, such as LLMs, or hosted server infrastructure.
Now explain to me why you are allowed to have the things you like which use a lot of water, while other people are not allowed to have the things they like which use a lot of water.
> 870 gallons
Is this based on an assumption of irrigation being used?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/wine/article/napa-mountain-...
> Napa Valley’s most contentious political battleground — winery and vineyard development — has potentially reached a significant turning point following a series of key victories for proponents of limited expansion, leaving continued growth of Napa’s prized wine region uncertain.
> While final votes were being cast in the midterm election on Nov. 8, (2022,) Napa County’s Board of Supervisors voted to revoke a permit for one of the largest winery development proposals in the region's history, the Mountain Peak winery, following nearly nine years of opposition. ... locals fiercely objected to the project’s scale, voicing concerns over water supply and quality, increased fire risks and potential environmental and biological harm.
https://www.newtimesslo.com/sucking-air-how-one-vineyard-cau...
> The first phase of Coakley Vineyards is what was the most distressing to neighbors: the construction of an irrigation reservoir—also known as an ag pond—to hold 3.3 million gallons of water when full. The pond would be filled (and replenished after depletion and evaporation) with groundwater from three wells on the property.
> To the locals surrounding the property, the plan posed a very real threat to their water supply.
> Steve and two other concerned landowners met with one of the Coakley project leaders, Randy Heinzen, the chief operating officer of local vineyard management and consulting firm Vineyard Professional Services, to discuss their qualms about the project.
> Neither Coakley nor Heinzen responded to requests for comment from New Times for this story.
> According to Steve, the meeting only exacerbated their fears about the pond’s potential stress on surrounding groundwater levels.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article306005076.html
This isn't new. 2005: https://www.almanacnews.com/morgue/2005/2005_05_04.clos04.sh...
It also isn't limited to the US. Mexico: https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/protesters-occupy-coahuila-...
> Protesters in Coahuila have occupied the winery of Mexico’s oldest winemaker since Friday night, accusing its owners of using too much water from a shared source, leaving them with too little to irrigate their crops.
> Communal landowners took over the Casa Madero winery in the town of San Lorenzo, 140 kilometers west of Saltillo, to demand that the owners reduce their water use. They first arrived at the winery on Wednesday but left when state police arrived, only to return to enter the property two days later.
> The company accused the protesters of violently installing themselves on the property and blamed municipal police for failing to take action, despite being present. The newspaper El País reported that the protesters were armed with machetes, picks and shovels.
There are also protests of entities, including Harvard's endowment, that purchase vineyards specifically to economically exploit their groundwater rights: https://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/28626-harvard-quietly-amas...
On the other end, local governments can raise excess water usage rates on farms, golf courses, and wineries, instead of giving them offsetting tax or rate breaks and subsidies to attract them: https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article...
Or incentivize water conservation: https://nypost.com/2026/05/25/us-news/napa-valley-wineries-f...
Which some wineries have proactively done for more than a decade, via wastewater irrigation and recycling post-irrigation water for cleaning casks and other surfaces: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/07/446096090/ca...
But that's also been protested, for polluting groundwater reserves: https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article306005076.html
Dry-irrigated wineries that only use rainwater or mountain runoff also exist, but unlike a data centre, they can't close up shop and move when drought hits: https://www.eenews.net/articles/water-shortages-force-a-reck..., https://triplepundit.com/2022/washington-wine-climate-change...
You could say this about anything, but it's being said about AI datacenters. People like wine! They don't like AI and the NSA. It's really not a mystery.
That's exactly my point! Everything has negative externalities, and focusing on them is the way to seem "rational" even though you don't actually care about them. It's the same as how people will protest high density residences "ruining the character of the neighborhood" when they really just don't want poor people living near them. You can't just outright say you don't want poor people in your neighborhood, so you talk about how these residences ruin neighborhood character, disrupt view cones, cause traffic problems, etc.
Here it's the same thing--the people protesting don't give a damn about water waste, electricity usage, or wasted land. If they did, there are tons of other offenders who are way worse. But they don't want to outright say they're protesting against AI because it makes them seem like luddites.
They don't want to spend resources on something that they don't like (AI), but don't care about resources spent on something they do (wine). This is rational if you assume feelings don't need to be rational, which typically is an uncontroversial statement.