Technology

Honestly that doesn't really need a datacenter, a single solar panel and a low power computer or couple of PIs.

I think the scale of these AI datacenter build out is part of the problem, that level of compute is really only useful for AI and Ai-adjacent loads like mass surveillance!

This is what libraries should evolve into.

Your town definitely hosts services for your local population, just not an entire datacenter's worth. No single town needs an entire datacenter.

Digital Oil Rig is such a great analogy for multiple reasons.

its all dedicated to peddling AI, google, metal PALANTIR, openai, claude.

Horrifyingly, I just got done reading Surface Detail and there are huge datacenters that are low-energy, running slow in the grounds of a stately home.

Nice right?

Only issue is it runs the virtual environment for a different species VR Hell. Because it was outsourced here. Because they didn't like the icky situation of running their own hells.

*here is their data center

It takes a surprisingly small data center to serve a single house. I run a more reliable streaming service than Netflix from my basement.

With all the tax breaks and investor money that might be cheaper than buying a gaming PC at this point.

Groups like the ones pushing data centers can and do literally hire people to figure out how to get in the politicians' good graces, convince the politicians it is not only a good idea but the best idea, stoke the politicians' ego(s) such that they think they know best/better than the people they supposedly represent, and then literally train the politicians on how they can do an end run around their constituents to get things passed by the letter of the law but clearly not the intent of the law.

I know Louis Rossman can be a controversial figure due to how he communicates things, but he's been doing a good job exposing how Flock surveillance cameras are getting passed/governmentally funded in shady ways in numerous jurisdictions where they have negative public support. It would be silly to expect that the tactics they are using are also not in use by the much larger forces with deeper pockets behind all these data center pushes.

I absolutely have less than zero respect for politicians, but I seriously cannot imagine living a life almost entirely surrounded by people deeply trained to manipulate my emotions, sense of self, and self validation towards corporate ends. Beyond all the obvious life experience/world view differences due to wealth and socioeconomic strata, that's fucking terrifying.

They're called data centers because they... do actually have lots of meaningful data. Tons of it. A lot of it is stolen, most of it has no business being in these corporations' hands, and none of it is available to you unless you can cut a big enough check, but it is real data. Why do you think palantir has been worming its way into every government agency? Its because they want valuable data, and they process that data in data centers.

you're vastly underestimating how destructive a typical oil field is, and overestimating nuclear.

An average oil field will produce tens of millions of barrels of oil per year which releases tens of millions of tons of CO2 per year.

Assuming a worst case datacenter pulling few hundred MW continuously on a coal power grid, it would be a few million tons of CO2 per year, like an order of magnitude less. But most of the time datacenters are running on natural gas which is slightly cleaner and more efficient than coal. And most datacenters are not using hundreds of MW.

As for nuclear, it's pretty much 100% clean energy after its initial facility construction. Incidentally, they are working on building datacetners with small modular reactors. The benefit there is they can skip connections to the power grid which is the main bottleneck for getting datacenters operational now.

The distinction is that NIMBYs only object to the infrastructure when it's in their back yard. I think the majority of people object to these data centers anywhere, but only have voting power to directly oppose them in their back yards, so that's where their effort is spent. I haven't seen anyone say "I definitely want another massive datacenter to go up, just not here."

NIMBY is usually more to do with perceived loss in value though no?

People don't want AI datacenters because they are directly offloading energy costs to neighborhoods via substantially higher power bills. Which is happening because the demand is so high, they can't compensate by building more power sources in the same time frame.

That and the poor reception to the AI market, which is wrecking jobs, the economy, etc.

Otherwise, datacenters were pretty well known for being built with very little resistance before this, especially since lots of providers, like Google, would fund geopower sources to power their datacenters which would add power to the grid with surplus.