alt Hacker NewsErin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country
Comments
Do real people genuinely care about this more than CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) (for example)?
The Erin Brockovich page itself repeats the canard, on the front page, that these sites endanger ecosystems with their water consumption.
What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
It's poetically beautiful that the tool was very very clearly built mostly if not entirely using AI
It’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?
Is there a map of munitions plants and spy centers and other facilities whose sole purpose is to active oppress, harm and outright kill people?
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
People have gotten so intense with the anti-AI sentiment that I hope this doesn't end up guiding people to places where they can exercise violence "for a just cause".
I saw a comment from another site that a lot of the data center locations on this map aren’t accurate. Is there any truth to that?
what's funny is the website looks AI generated though that's just the style of the time i guess.
There’s lots of anti ai and anti tech coming from hn and in general lately. I guess this is start of the hit list.
Opposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?
I love this. Yeah there's some FUD out there about water usage and whatnot, but using the internet to spread actual awareness about local concerns is a fine demonstration of free speech at work.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
I don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.
is there one to store bunker locations?
AI compute is a major emerging export industry that the U.S. could become the global leader in. Strong First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control also make the U.S. uniquely well-suited for AI, unlike, let's say, manufacturing, where authoritarian states seem to have an advantage.
the money being talked about is so large that eventually the lobbyists will get their checks and the politicians will pass laws forbidding local scrutiny of data centers
"Erin Brockovich uses AI to make a map to track data centers around the country."
"...investigating data centers is quickly becoming its own beat"
ie it is in the economic interest of the writers to tap into (and foment) the FUD around "data centers."
AI is good, but the impact of data centers on the environment cannot be ignored. Over a longer time scale, AI is just one wave, while the environment will take much longer to recover.
I love these new modern-day AI-hating Luddites.
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
Why go through the effort when such work has already been done?
https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/
Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?