We’re building data centers in the U.S. at an unprecedented and increasing rate [1]. Is it so hard to imagine that something which was fine at one scale may begin to cause issues at some massively higher scale?

If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen...

Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.

It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.

[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.

Well they say

*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"

"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.

What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.

A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.

I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.

It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."

As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end for planned facilities. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water.

This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.

That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.

AI inference and training GPUs require way, way more power than anything manufactured before. Like, between 2020 and 2026 we went from ~400W for an A100 to ~1400W for an NVIDIA B300. And you cannot make that happen without changing the datacenter itself. More noise, way more complicated cooling setup, new power sources, etc. Not all datacenters are created equal.

The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms

I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else.

Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.

Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors. Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners.

Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.

Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.

All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.

If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.

I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.

Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?

Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.

  Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters.

It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.

That's just a non sequitur.

Compare the scale of datacenter construction in the past decades vs the pace post 2022.

Also the general computing datacenters of the past are vastly different in societal utility vs the GPU only AI datacenters, which do just one thing

One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.

I served two terms on my town's planning commission.

It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.

In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.

There is a lot of conflicting information out there, partly because the resources / environmental consequences of the current rollouts are incredibly multi-dimensional, and most articles only focus on a subset of them - and there seems to be rapid innovation happening in some of the infrastructure that can void an article from a year ago.

The "panic" is also largely connected to a strong communal feeling (for legitimate reasons) that democratic processes are being skipped for big money and backroom deals.

I suspect - like with a lot of AI issues - if the companies building these took more time to have proper conversation with the impacted parties, there wouldn't be nearly the same backlash.

Amongst other issues, it is a proxy for the angst over AI.

Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it.

I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.

Small scale natural gas turbine plants are bad for local human air due to NOx emissions.

It's new, noticeable, memorable, and the companies involved (tech) are uniquely unlikable. Incumbents that use more resources in ways that create unwanted externalities are better about doing things more stealthily, and look rather boring. Also they've been there the entire time, so easier to accept.

It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.

Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so.

(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).

Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok -inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns…

It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.

People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.

Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…

> There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area.

This is the trumped up rhetoric you speak of.

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth.

Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.

What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?

This post is quite hilarious to read, it has to be satire

Step 1: Convince the public (voters) that Data Centers are the evil boogeyman

Step 2: Pass laws that will make owning/operating a data center so expensive (regulatory capture…) that only the big players can remain (companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc - who are already in bed with US Intelligence agencies).

General public won’t make a fuss since Data Centers = EVIL. They are destroying the earth. We need more regulations!

Step 3: The big players buy all smaller/independent data centers since they can afford to stick around.

Step 4: Pass laws that ban personal VPN usage.

Step 5: The big players disallow self hosted privacy tools to be run on their infrastructure.

Step 6: CGNAT is made mandatory for all new installations by residential ISPs. The reason?

“Pedophiles are hosting tunneling software from their home! We can’t let them go undetected. Think of the children!”

Step 7: Any hosting will be under the eyes of the big players.

Step 8: The Digital ID system being rolled out on all iPhones (that has a nearly 90% market share for young adults in the USA) will now be required to “Prove you’re not a robot”.

i2p = dead Hyphanet = dead TOR = dead [insert self hosted service] = dead

I’m not saying this will happen overnight. It will take time. This could take years. But I think it can happen. And I’m not happy about it, either.

The article isn't about warming the planet. So you're the one trumping up something that isn't there.

> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.

That is using FUD to avoid accountability. In this case is the last one "doubt". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt

4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.

> My skeptic meter

Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD

> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?

Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.

Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.

Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center.

It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers.

If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.

>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.

It's both.

As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.

You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.

The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.

It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)

It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right?

Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.

I've done a bit of research into it, and I think it's a mix.

The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.

The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.

The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem.

I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.

Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much.

I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.

The outrage is real to the individual, but manufactured. Media (e.g. 404media, Ed Zitron) promotes anything that engages for clicks, views, and subscriptions. Other parties do it to hinder competition, weaken the US, or distract from much worse polluters.

You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.

One HUGE issue is that datacenters don't have an afterlife in the communities where they're located.

They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices.

If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised.

Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.

From my research, data centers and - more importantly - the electricity required to run data centers, are consuming a lot of water.

Sure you can argue that it's less than other industries, but that ignores the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure in the US. Any statistic you use right now is obsolete in 18-36 months when X times more data centers are running.

Also on a local level the water use can even be significant. I don't think you can rightfully tell residents who are seeing an outsized amount of their water going to data centers that they're "panicking" over nothing.

It is real but it's about the unaccountability, dishonesty, and misanthropy of corporate overlords, rather than about the externalities of data centers per se. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901

It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one.

Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing.

In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.

The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down.

But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.

If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth

We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.

My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.

It’s not so binary

Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact

Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done

They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.

But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous

AI datacenters are a completely different beast than the "normal" cloud ones.

They use order of magnitudes more resources.

TikTok and social media

Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.

There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.

Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.

Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.

It's like literally any other change to society:

You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.

At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.

It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.

Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.

> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up

What recent mass-media panics have been legit?

For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.

It is 100% deranged nonsense. These people have absolutely lost their minds.