alt Hacker NewsUsing energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas.
But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
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> But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment
The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.
The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.
Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.
1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.
Not necessarily; a building satisfied by its own rooftop solar should be roughly heat neutral since that energy was already there. The problem is with the power density these buildings imply, requiring energy movement. Everyone could run Qwen 3.8 27B at home with a solar panel and it'd make no difference. Companies could run their traditional servers on-site at their offices, etc.