alt Hacker News99% of data center space has nothing to do with AI and is just the consequence of the long trend of flight from corporate data closets to central facilities and clouds.
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No way. DCs and DC expansion existed before AI but they were inconsequential. What's new is the massive ones being built by the lowest bidder solely for AI. For a working template look at the xAI one that gave an entire town asthma, but luckily most of them overrun cost and get abandoned.
You would reasonably ask how a datacenter, of all things - one of the cleanest industrial buildings - can give an entire town asthma. And the answer is that there wasn't enough electricity available in the region so Elon rented all the temporary gas turbines he could, and set them up in the parking lot to run 24/7. Since they're designed to run one at a time and only in emergencies they don't meet ordinary NOx pollution regulations, and a whole bunch of them in one place emits enough NOx gas to severely hurt people. Elon doesn't care.
Yeah no. Almost everything people are pushing back against is branded as AI data center expansion. Moving to the cloud doesn’t need net new data centers being build… that’s just workloads moving from one data center to another.