The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?

>but it's all people seem to care about.

This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:

>Why is that?

The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.

So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?

Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.

It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.

The impact is highly geography dependent.

For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.

Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers.

All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.

> it's all people seem to care about.

You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.

When you have no arguments on your side you have to make them up.

Pretty sure everyone cares about their power bills and water bills going up. The people living next to them care about this other stuff.

It's much more tangible for your average person than circular financing deals or chip supply constraints. And unfortunately social media is an amplifier for tangible misinformation.

People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons.

That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.

Industry build-out in the USA? It's raising our energy and water costs.

Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese.

Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!

There's a certain group of people (the kind of people who used to spend a lot of time on twitter and now spend a lot of time on bluesky) that's convinced that their environmental activism is what defeated NFT and are trying to repeat that to defeat AI because it's the same "tech bros we hate".

Because they are hitting people's water and electricity bills (and or ability to get either at all) RIGHT NOW