I am pro-AI datacenters. I just think they should all be built in Atherton and the Hamptons, with the stipulation they're only allowed to be built adjacent to the most expensive residential property in the area, in the way of its most impressive view.

It's less a fault of "democracy" and more a fault of partisan extremism where all dimensionality and nuance is removed, it's intentionally made into an "us" vs "them" issue with only two extreme sides, where either you're fully with "us" and everything we believe, or you're evil/horrible/etc. If you dare to fall in the middle somewhere, that's not allowed by the extremists on one side; you're lumped in with and seen as no different than the opposite extreme.

> the two camps are

Or are those just the two ends of the spectrum? I don't know anyone on either extreme of the spectrum.

Democracy isn't to blame, capitalism is. The mega corps have every incentive to dodge the costs of their negative externalities and they have them money to lobby for that. The "reasonable" citizen supporting growth with caveats will be drowned out by the mega corp and their mega wallets. The loud NIMBYs are the only group that have any chance of stopping the negative externalities which they achieve by blocking the growth. Your enemy isn't the NIMBY, your enemy is the mega corp, the NIMBY is your ally, they are the backstop.

>Democracies don't handle nuance well.

Especially when modern discourse revolves around 140-character hot takes.

One of the camps has all the money, hold all the power, and does indeed behave with impunity. The other camp has no power, has no way to affect anything, holds no political relevance, and NIMBY tactics is one of very few ways they can even hope to have at least some tiny chance of a minor change in their favor.

I think it does the discourse a disservice to take these two as equal.

There’s the pro-growth Abundance faction, but they’re captured by special interests, so they’re predictably advocating for supply-side YIMBYism and relaxed regulation, without addressing the political economy that led us to the current situation.

Seriously, it can't be that hard to build a datacenter and not piss people off. The economics demanded scale so fast that the capitalists don't care enough to thoughtfully plan this stuff out.

> The people that... are the same people that...

Just stop. If you fund yourself starting a sentence that way, just close the browser.

If you make such claims please back this up with evidence? I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying. Your comment sounds a lot like whataboutism to me.

and flying. beef and flying are the two most impactful personal choices you can make (nearly everything else has a 'over a decade'/difficult-life-tradeoff factor). beef and flying are easy.

>I think it’s massive.

So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.

It's surprising because that's all anyone hears about right now.

Many are surprised to learn that data centers use much less water than golf courses or pools. We hear about it so much in the news it sounds like it's the overwhelming largest consumption problem around.

AI hardware is much, much more powerhungry than traditional processors though. I can understand their reasoning.

With the new Ultracode modes in Claude Code and Codex it's been taken to the next level. I mean, multi agent systems have been available for a long time, but the newest models seem to be much more RL'd for them.

Both GPT-5.6 and Fable will happily run 3+ hours straight off a relatively simple goal in that mode, burn through millions of tokens in the process.

Not saying it's great bang for your buck, but just that those modes are there and being pushed by the companies.

Where did the tokens go?

The talk about AI water usage exists because in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, she got water usage wrong by three orders of magnitude.[1] For data centers that use water cooling, it's almost always non-potable water, and it's usually returned to the body of water it was pumped out of (though slightly warmer).

If you're worried about water consumption, things like golf courses and farm subsidies for water-intensive crops are much bigger issues.

1. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

Increasing global electricity production by 1.5% (or 500 terawatt-hours) would also be a solution. Production from solar power increased by 600TWh from 2024-2025 and its rate of adoption is increasing as costs go down, so this doesn't seem like a problem worth worrying about.

Yes. They're likely referring to on-demand electric heating units that are installed near the shower head.

Our World in Data is based in the UK. Electric showers like this one https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-shower... are more common there than they are in the US.