That's populism for ya, and it's sadly extremely effective.

Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1].

Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3].

It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the exact same way.

Edit: can't reply

> AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid

Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.

You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on.

Same with nuclear power in Germany and GreenTech in much of the America.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-tech...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-gives-20-year-tax-...

[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afr...

[3] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...

Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats. AI is currently driving yet another extreme wealth inequality inflection point. Founded just five years ago, Anthropic is going to be a trillion dollar private company maybe this year! This is a staggering outcome and will further divide the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.

So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.

AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid...

> Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.

Sure but we are talking about whether the enormous investment into AI infrastructure is prudent or not. Also I reckon most people on here made a living just fine before everything moved to remote data centers, and many if not most HNers workloads could run on individual machines... But that's another conversation.

I suspect soon young learners of the future may tilt their heads in curiosity when finding that Obama was a "Democrat" in the same way they did in the past when finding that Lincoln was a "Republican".

you're arguing against things that have no material effect. "oh won't you think about adversarial discourse about the most well funded industry in recent history"