Those data centers use more power than a medium size city and city scale amounts of water. No. Just no.
But they don’t have to be water-cooled.
Until some regulation is passed and enforced that they have to be closed loop, it’s cheaper for them to fuck up the local ecosystem by using evaporative cooling or local water sources as a heat sink.
Not true. My company only builds closed loop.
Who cares? They still use the energy of a large city, all for profiting a handful of billionaire/trillionaire oligarchs.
You can believe that if you want. It is true for some (cough-Musk-cough), but not all.
Our customers are often what are considered socially “good”, like medical research. Our company is employee-forward with extraordinary benefits of all kinds. The executives are very down-to-earth.
How about employee owned? The fuck employee forward mean?
Unlimited PTO.
Generous 401 program.
Parental leave.
Adoption coverage.
2SLGBTQIA+ supportive.
Fully neurodivergent friendly.
Mental & Emotional well being programs.
Aggressive promotion schedules.
And more I forget.
The industry is moving very fast, so we cannot afford any employee-owned committee dithering. To make up for that, there are generous stock grants.
The execs take risks and own up to their mistakes. Everyone is aware that what we are working on won’t be invented until tomorrow. So mistakes are all learning opportunities for the entire organization.
However, cultural mismatches to not stay with us long. If you bring nothing but a cya attitude, you don’t go far.
Employee surveys are always fully honest and issues raised are always addressed.
We. Are. Happy.
That’s employee-forward.
I’ve worked at a lot of companies from startups to Fortune 10. This place is unique.
Our customers are often what are considered socially “good”, like medical research.
I feel like this right here is where discussion is breaking down.
The arguments around data centers are interesting. I think, collectively and socially, we’re hitting a language barrier around it. Like “AI” is a marketing term, language to a standard nontechnical person is fuzzy around AI, LLM, and ML.
On the surface, I’m pro data center. Astronomy, bio-med, weather prediction, the internet itself, better ML models and more compute has been a net benefit to all of society. But the current rush to build out? The holding companies building these won’t even say explicitly what the data centers are being built for, the news insinuates they’re for LLMs, but the local governments are under NDAs, and the general population aren’t allowed to know anything and have to vote with their gut.
The opposition groups to data centers are split apart and can’t coordinate well, because they’re focusing on smaller facets of a larger problem. I think the general population has an intrinsic gut feeling that something is wrong, almost like 50 years of unpaid taxes is coming back to fuck everything over, but they don’t have the technical knowledge to put it into a concise reason why they feel the way they feel, and it just comes out as “they’re gonna drain out the entire Mississippi River.”
Yes. “AI” has become a catch-all for this current generation of GPU- based computing. The public doesn’t know or care about ML vs LLM vs VLM vs GenAI etc.
We can’t speak due to very harsh NDAs.
The “Bill Cosby didn’t do anything to me” of Big Tech defense
And yours is the “my asshole neighbor is black, so I hate all black people” defense.
You have bought into the sensationalist outrage press about the worst offenders. Yes, they are bad. But as we don’t pass judgement based on news of a sensational crime in a quiet neighborhood, we need to rise above the media noise to see the entire picture.
Trillionaires’ toys are not a systemically oppressed minority. But the data centers are disproportionately harming historically black neighborhoods.
The bulk of the industry agrees that Musk is doing all the wrongest possible things.
He is not the industry. He just gets the press attention.
Are all electric cars bad? No, just his.
Yeah without telling us the companies’ name this has major ‘trust me bro’ energy.
Edit: I get why you haven’t, I’m not saying you should doxx yourself.
My industry is ruled by trade secrets during this phase. That’s part of the explanation for the complete lack of pushback on the “bad press” we get. Thanks for understanding.
Where does the heat go in your systems?
Same place as any NYC skyscraper - the air on the roof.
They don’t have to exist.
They also don’t have to exist
Neither do airplanes.
Whataboutism fallacy.
I disagree.
I see your viewpoint more like “I got mugged once by a dude with an accent so now I hate all foreigners”. The data centers I work with don’t fit your narrative. The bad actors are on our shitlist, too.
We agree data centers don’t have to exist
I do not. Not for modern society.
Like to use credit cards? Online banking? eBay? All done in data centers.
We were talking about AI data centers, which you and I agreed don’t have to exist.
Don’t Motte-and-Bailey me
Every CC company is now using advanced “AI” algorithms to approve transaction speed.
The current state of medical research requires “AI” systems to run the simulations.
What you see as “AI” is the leftover dregs of the capacity. Used for cat videos and the like. The current buildout is NOT being paid for by memesters. It is the folks that have finally found the real promise that the digital revolution has promised since the 70s. As an outsider, I do not blame you for being misinformed. But - as you would be open to learning how big science is done today if a particle physics researcher explained it - I would hope that you would be open to my lives experience.
AFAIK most water gets used in construction, and constructing city-sized facilities uses a LOT of resources. Now guess which side gets favored if there’s a resource conflict between a datacenter and the local population.
It’s not NIMBY if you don’t want new datacenters elsewhere, either.
“Yeah, that’s right. I’m a NOOP!”
Not On Our Planet
Diatomaceous Earth
High speed wind
Intakes
Fuel contamination on gas turbines is a really interesting subject.
One I need to study more
In 2025, about 48 datacenter projects worth an estimated $156bn were blocked or stalled by local opposition.
By the way, i believe these numbers to be completely useless.
Say a company wants to build a datacenter at location A, but it gets blocked. So it goes to B, but it also gets blocked. Finally it builds the same datacenter at location C. Now, two datacenters got blocked, but the amount of datacenters that ended up being built is still the same.
The article is partially a response to this article from jacobin which makes some good points, chief of which the author doesn’t really address in that they’ll just be built somewhere else. There will always be some city or state or country that will allow them being built and this sort of NIMBY activism only really protects the better off people who have the free time to attend city hall meetings.
Also the author seems to equate the means with the end. The jacobin article is criticizing the end goal being a blanket moratorium instead of regulation targeting the harms. It doesn’t say anything about the means, but the author of this one equates there criticism of the movements aims to be an elitist criticism of the grassroots organizing of the movement, which I assume the jacobin author would be more then fine with as long as it’s directed towards reasonable goals.
You can’t use “it isn’t ____, it’s ____” anymore! That’s LLM talk!
I get the frustration — AI-generated texts are pervasive, they’re everywhere these days. 🤦♂️
Here are three ways to phrase this in a way that does not scream LLM. 👍
1 …
