I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ...

*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?

We’re building data centers in the U.S. at an unprecedented and increasing rate [1]. Is it so hard to imagine that something which was fine at one scale may begin to cause issues at some massively higher scale?

If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen...

Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.

It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.

[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.

Well they say

*As high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m"

"As high as", combined with "up to" show two upper limits, but you can be sure if they were simultaneous they would have said so, especially when considering their prhasing of downwind being warmer comes after mentioning the upper limit. It really seems like you are supposed to overlook that it's an upper limit and subconsciously add another 0.7-0.9 on top.

What they are saying is you can feel the warm breeze coming off the hot thing if you stand near enough.

A comparison to other industrial sites would put it in perspective. As would a distinction between localised warming which is what is happening here compared to global warming where small temperature differences at a global scale are far more significant. The publicity about global warming risk has put a lot of effort attuning people to the significance of those small temperature shifts, to co-opt that education to make people fear a situation where it doesn't apply is undermining their work. That puts us at more risk than any one data centre. People can observe a local increase of 2 degrees in relative comfort and think that it won't be catastrophic at a global scLe.

I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.

It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."

As measured by power consumption, the scale of data centres is a lot bigger now than they used to be. A typical large data centre is on the order of several hundred megawatts sustained consumption, up to a gigawatt on the high end. The economic pressures are entirely in favour of building larger because of latency and also permitting (one large facility is still just one facility to get through zoning), so we should expect the size to only be constrained by external factors like availability of land, energy and water.

This energy is all turned into heat, which means a 1GW data centre facility will dump 1GW of heat energy into the environment, into some combination of air, water and ground. For comparison, the average energy use for the whole city of Toronto, Canada, is 2.7GW, so just three large data centres has roughly the same heating impact as all the air conditioners, baseboard heaters, toasters and ovens of a large city.

That's a lot of energy to dissipate in a small area, so it should absolutely not be surprising that it'll create a local heat island downwind or downstream in the same way cities do.

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?

Latest popular panic, yes, but also physical size relative to the whole planet isn't the relevant factor even for things which have very low power or energy densities like solar power and hydroelectric dams. Local impact on various resources (electricity, water for cooling, noise/thermal/particulate pollution between the compute and any on-site power supply) is somewhat more important.

  Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters.

AI inference and training GPUs require way, way more power than anything manufactured before. Like, between 2020 and 2026 we went from ~400W for an A100 to ~1400W for an NVIDIA B300. And you cannot make that happen without changing the datacenter itself. More noise, way more complicated cooling setup, new power sources, etc. Not all datacenters are created equal.

The financing for datacenters is also very shady and its own can of worms

Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.

Part of the problem is AI datacenters make bad neighbors. Because they are in such a rush to become operational they cut corners.

Instead of AC they use swamp coolers draining aquifers and thus wells of the neighbors.

Instead of using new power plants (AKA using renewables as most new plants do, and all old datacenters did). They either hook up to the grid and jack up everyones electric prices or use generators because they can't be bothered to wait for a grid connection.

All of which is to say while on the grand scale they may be fine. Locally they can be unpleasant to have in your back yard.

If the LLM datacenter builders and operators weren't cutting corners and rushing and doing everything they can to be good neighbors. There would be much less push back.

I say this as someone with 2 huge pre-AI datacenters in my town that have been fine.

Almost all major public debate is both legit and trumped up, and has nation-state and political entities (both domestic and foreign) working to shape the debate to their ends.

The question to ask is why this one's caught on so strongly and with such unusual demographics. The answer probably has a lot more to do with what aggressive data center buildout represents than who's working behind the scenes to drive the discussion or how the facts in debate today happen to compare.

So what does it represent?

You have a very troubled consumer economy. Inflation is happening at rates most US adults have never seen before. People are struggling to find jobs. Commercial districts are sitting vacant. Small business owners and sales-line workers are struggling to generate the revenue to keep the lights on and make payroll.

And then somebody's coming to town saying "WE have money and we're going to build this $XXXM automated facility that employs almost nobody, siphons resources from your infrastructure, and pays as little as possible in tax while we do it. It doesn't solve any of the problems you're thinking about right now, but we think it will someday. Probably. We're very excited about it. In the meantime, did you know you can ask it to draw a pelican on a bicycle and it can kind of do an okay job? Hah! Isn't that cool?!"

It's not really about water or noise or anything like that, nor about sneaky political agents trying to manipulate people. It's simply about the arrogance of the speculators in the tech community and their strangehold on what little capital is still flowing through the economy.

People are sick of it and this has become their opportunity to drive a stake in the ground and push back against them.

That's just a non sequitur.

Compare the scale of datacenter construction in the past decades vs the pace post 2022.

Also the general computing datacenters of the past are vastly different in societal utility vs the GPU only AI datacenters, which do just one thing

One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.

Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it.

I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.

It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.

I did some digging and lots of anti data center accounts were from India.

I imagine China bought the accounts or pay $20 for a post.

I served two terms on my town's planning commission.

It becomes very difficult to foster conversations about how to do something in a way that minimizes negative externalities when both sides come into the room only seeking a "approve" or "deny" outcome. In that regard, data centers aren't different than new housing developments, public services, zoning changes, or anything else that gets a hearing in local governments.

In reality, the NIMBY attitude just means the thing gets built in somebody else's back yard. Unfortunately, for some people, this is an acceptable outcome, and the underlying societal issues don't actually get addressed.

Small scale natural gas turbine plants are bad for local human air due to NOx emissions.

Seems to me that the problem isn't that the data centres are being built. It's that the people building them aren't paying for their full cost. Despite the organisations building them being some of the richest in the world that can absolutely afford to do so.

(externalities in terms of environmental impact and resource usage (water, electricity, etc) usage driving up costs for everyone else).

The article isn't about warming the planet. So you're the one trumping up something that isn't there.

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth.

Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with.

What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth! Global warming must be just the latest popular panic, amirite?

Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok -inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns…

It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.

People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.

Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…

> There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area.

This is the trumped up rhetoric you speak of.

The outrage is real to the individual, but manufactured. Media (e.g. 404media, Ed Zitron) promotes anything that engages for clicks, views, and subscriptions. Other parties do it to hinder competition, weaken the US, or distract from much worse polluters.

There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.

Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.

> This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?

Yes, but most people will tell you otherwise.

Using fossil aquifer for evaporative cooling is bad. Using groundwater in a place that gets 40” of precipitation a year for evaporative cooling is perfectly fine.

Unfortunately, large data center operators shop around for lightly regulated areas or areas with sympathetic politicians that will allow a fleet of trailer mounted gas turbine generators to operate outside of the law. That would never fly in my state, but in TN it’s perfectly fine, judging by xAI’s Memphis data center.

It seems like some water utilities might be connecting data centers to their distribution network without having the actual water delivery capacity needed to do so, but electrical grid operators generally don’t (and can’t) overprovision without brown/blackouts or load shedding customers.

If you live in a municipality with regulations and a state with regulations, you probably won’t find a data center in your backyard. If you live in a lightly regulated area, you may not be so lucky.

> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.

That is using FUD to avoid accountability. In this case is the last one "doubt". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt

4 degrees is real, it is data, and you ignore it an go in a tangent.

> My skeptic meter

Mine says that capital is on the data-center side and is protected in the same way that fossil fuel companies are protected from climate change discussions: FUD

It's like literally any other change to society:

You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.

At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.

It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.

Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.

The data centers went up in rural areas that voted people in that allowed the deregulation. I really did not care about their plight. I use the LLM models all the time and hoped prices would go down.

But then the data centers did not pay for their electricity infrastructure and made everyone's electric bills go up. I made my home more energy efficient and am using less electricity than last year but my bill is higher. I am now against them. As far as I can tell this is happening in every state that has allowed them.

If they fix this and my electric bill goes back down, they can buzz all they want in the country side.

>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up.

It's both.

As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.

You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.

The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.

It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)

I've done a bit of research into it, and I think it's a mix.

The energy thing is exaggerated. Want to compensate for a week of heavy AI coding usage? If you drive to work, telecommute for one day. Skip one long-distance DoorDash order. Cars use tons of energy, a lot more per-user than the fraction of data center capacity you're using with your AI stuff. A burrito on DoorDash delivered using an average MPG gas car uses something like a week's worth of heavy AI usage in energy.

The water thing is region-specific and where is a problem it's due to incompetent or corrupt goveranance. Bottom line is that if a data center is using too much water, it means they're not paying enough for that water. Make them pay more for their water and they'll magically discover closed cycle cooling.

The noise thing is in some cases real, and needs to be fixed with local regulation or a class action suit by neighbors to force them to deal with the noise problem.

I am a little puzzled though by where these things are being built. Phoenix? Other than cheap solar power I can't tell why you'd want a data center there given the energy needed for cooling.

Why are we not putting them up in the Arctic circle? Build run-of-the-river hydro in northern Canada and put them way up there. Free cooling, especially in winter. AI is not a very latency-sensitive load so an extra 50ms doesn't mean much.

I suspect state incentives are a reason. The giant Amazon data center proposal in Texas with the giant natural gas power plant sounds a lot like "taxpayer funded indirect fossil fuel industry subsidy." Offer some kind of big state incentive to get a huge natural gas customer with long-term locked-in demand.

You may have underestimated the degree to which normal, non-software people detest and hate AI, for whom it has little or no value, making the overall return fully negative.

It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right?

Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are finding out that things like social safety nets, socialized healthcare, income equality, etc. aren't just important for humanitarian reasons; they are also prerequisites for people to trust society enough to be willing to coordinate around major projects.

> BUT, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth

We've never had datacenters with the power density and size of the ones we've been building for ~5yr now. Each datacenter is like 10x 2010s datacenters.

My great-granddad was unconcerned about the deforestation of the Amazon during the 1970s until the little forest on the way out of his small town was cut down for a new subdivision.

It’s not so binary

Basically, anything people decide not to like is targeted for its climate impact

Some of that targeting is valid and points out optimizations that can be done

They want you to ignore their air conditioning and fridge’s greater relative impact, because the thing they dont like has “no use” in comparison to the thing they do like. They also believe that any power use is easily transportable to the use they do like, which is usually false.

But there are configurations of data centers with less environmental impact, which should become ubiquitous

AI datacenters are a completely different beast than the "normal" cloud ones.

They use order of magnitudes more resources.

Honestly the fact that someone as “business friendly” as Abbott in Texas is halting construction is alarming to me. Nothing stops businesses in Texas, let alone the government.

One HUGE issue is that datacenters don't have an afterlife in the communities where they're located.

They add to the Rust Belt once their lifetimes end, contrast this with old brick warehouses which were eventually repurposed as homes and offices.

If they were built with a bit of thought around what happens once they depreciate completely and they're abandoned/sold for residual value they wouldn't be as despised.

Current construction completely ignores the nearby communities present and future development.

TikTok and social media

It is real but it's about the unaccountability, dishonesty, and misanthropy of corporate overlords, rather than about the externalities of data centers per se. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901

It was already a huge problem that powerful people in this world work to enrich themselves with no regard to regular people's wellbeing. The rage about data centers is because it suddenly started happening in everyone's backyard, making the abstract problem into a physically palpable one.

Imo their anger is completely justified. This only gets any better when there is an actual imperical shift towards behaving prosocially and away from mindless profiteering, and people have every right to want that from people in power. I fully expect the path we're on to end in some kind of revolution if nothing changes and there seems to be no sign of anything changing.

In particular, shame on anyone who uses arguments of the form: "it's these company's jobs to maximize profit, therefore they should not be beholden to behaving prosocially; the abstract force of economic growth justifies all iniquities because it will miraculously benefit everyone eventually". This argument is a lie on every count: it's only their job because we've chosen for it to be their job; the force of economic growth famously hurts people all the time; there is no evidence that it will fix everything versus just accelerate burning everything down (quite literally in this case); and finally, people's happiness is proportional more to their ability to trust those in power to care about them and their communities than to their material wealth per se, so trust is the thing they want maximized, not profit--and they are presently starved of it, because the people with power behave like lying manipulative scumbags at every possible opportunity.

> I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up

What recent mass-media panics have been legit?

For example, I think crypto is dumb. But I was also not dumb enough to fall for the articles like 6-8 years ago about how it was going to use more energy than half the countries in the world by 2025.

It is 100% deranged nonsense. These people have absolutely lost their minds.

These days there always seems to be panic regardless. I find it better to look at the merits of individual claims rather than try to group everything together into a binary answer like a possible conspiracy on one thing means nothing else needs to be considered.

Zoning, grid strain (->pricing), and chip strain (->pricing) seem to be pretty legit most of the time I look into them. Noise seems to have a lot of "they opened a 5G tower in the town and now I get nightmares" type panic but also some legitimate problems which, ultimately, relate to zoning. I try to reserve NIMBY for "things I want in someone's back yard, just not mine". The reality is data centers don't fit that because there is no reason they need to be in anyone's back yard. They are perfectly happy to be built in the middle of other industry/commercial blocks or even in the middle of nowhere.

I think if the grid had been better prepared for massive demand growth with cleaner sources than before and things came in slow enough that zoning didn't feel rushed people wouldn't really make as much of a stink around it. Unfortunately, the US spent many years with flat grid demand and companies want to cram these DCs in as fast as possible because their demand was for last year already.

For some large factor, it's also a reason to really hate on AI. Which there may well be valid reasons for, I just also wonder how many of these people actually care about the environment and how many are just saying it because it's another con to list. I say this as someone who has traditionally voted for environmentally conscious options/representatives - my previously existing circle doesn't spend that much time talking about AI compared to other causes.

Degrowth has always been a big part of Anglophone culture. This is just the latest part of that. If you see the various parties as those downwardly mobile vs those succeeding you can automatically place people predictably into where they’ll land on various issues.

It’s all principally a tribal association. They uncritically pass around water use numbers three orders of magnitude higher than anything else and suddenly start caring about things that are a fraction of alfalfa shipments to Saudi Arabia.