| > Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere. Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace. > because someone failed to do PR They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion. |
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| ▲ | perpetuallunch an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I don’t understand why entry of a large consumer of electric in to an area should result in higher residential electricity prices. The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer. What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve? If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer My understanding is this wasn't done. > What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? The most understandable explanations I've heard had to do with grid upgrades. Crap the utility owns and controls and has to change to accomodate the new power flows. More often, however, it looks like local and state government engaging in industrial policy by trying to get residents to subsidise the new datacenters. | | |
| ▲ | dividedbyzero 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Upgrades also take time and may not be a good idea seeing how the current AI buildout is financed. There is a certain amount of capacity right now and AI behemoths have the financial muscle to take what's there. If that leaves too little for everyone else, prices will reflect that as soon as existing contracts allow. |
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| ▲ | kulahan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve heard there’s misinformation regarding water use. As far as I’ve heard, these data centers use quite a bit. I imagine they just use them for cooking and spit it back out warmer (though if we’re going to do that, I’d prefer we do it cooling a nuclear power plant, personally…) Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Construction Physics [1] and Hank Green [2] have done good takes. Broadly speaking, most general-use datacenters use evaporative cooling (i.e. open loop) because it's cheap [3]. AI datacenters reject so much heat, however, that even absent public pressure they pretty much need closed loops [4]. The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.) Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem. [1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=240s [3] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275... [4] https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-liquid-cooling-sta... | |
| ▲ | DaSHacka 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I haven't heard of many open-loop cooling systems like that in HPC datacenters. The majority I've seen use closed loop, where the water never leaves the system. Similar to most watercooled gaming PC rigs. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The reality is that there are two approaches for water: open loop and closed loop, and you can guess correctly at what they mean. The problem is that's subtle and we can't have subtle conversations about things. | | |
| ▲ | dividedbyzero 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The problem is not that subtle, the only somewhat subtle point is that people don't differentiate between the datacenters of yore that were built sort of well and sustainably and the ones built in the current mad gold rush AI construction frenzy. The former aren't very problematic, often pretty good neighbors even, while the latter are nightmare fuel and will purposely not be built to be quiet and safe and stay within available energy capacity and not deplete struggling water tables, and they have the financial and political clout behind them to get away with pretty much anything. Small wonder no one wants them anywhere near them. Traditional DCs might be able to not be a nuisance despite using evaporative cooling, but no one would build that anywhere where there is a shortage of water, and the amount of heat to be dissipated by such a DC is way smaller. But giving up a local water table might even be seen as an acceptable sacrifice, it's done for agriculture all the time, if only it wasn't done by and for the immense profit of corporations that aim to destroy all entry level jobs
and profess to be scared by what havoc their own creation will wreak, all while creating an unprecedented financing bubble. Like, that's not very subtle at all. You can pick out some detail and try to make it about subtleties, but the larger context is very much not about subtleties. |
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