alt Hacker NewsHere's an interesting coincidence. During 2010-2023, data centers growth was all in crypto farms, a truly ridiculous massive waste of energy. However, that growth played against the West. It diverted capital into ruinous tulip bubbles. It created an alternative to the Western-led financial system and trivialized bypassing sanctions. Yet it got fairly little mainstream coverage.
Now there's a tech race. Data centers are a necessary evil for the West to win it. And suddenly they're getting massive negative coverage. Just today I saw articles about both the far left and far right prioritizing the issue.
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The fact that made up issues like water use or waste heat, complete with faked research papers, are being used to push the issue? It does make one suspicious.
There is a lot of the broader anti-AI sentiment, so it's possible that the entire thing is just "people want to hear AI bad, so there's market in saying AI bad" - with media and politicians both recognizing the opportunity. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of it turned out to be coordinated influence campaigns.
At first blush I'd say the difference in data center growth is significant between the two events, plus there's a much more massive capital inflow to AI datacenters, plus crypto has obvious other things to rail against before you get to noise and water impact.
I'd want to see a lot more evidence for an actual conspiracy than this.