When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result.

Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...

>Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money,

In what country do you not have an electric bill?

Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?

You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy.

One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.

Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.

We could do all of that before the most recent datacenter build outs.

Existing datacenters at the scale we were used to were just fine for what was expected of them.

All of those are the old, smaller scale.

In my experience, there's not a ton of overlap between people who say this and people who use AI for everything they do... but most people who say this do use social media, cloud storage, on-demand video streaming, and plenty of other things that rely on data centers :)

Not for nothing that YouTube alone is responsible for a double-digit amount of all internet traffic.

I think this is just projection.

Consider that there may be large populations doing both, but the overlap might be less than the internet jockey concludes via finger-in-the-wind hypocrisy check.

The interesting thing is: they don't. Most people not on HN could give two shits about an AI generated overview on Google search, in fact if you asked most people of age they'd rather have a Google Search that worked vs what we have now.

Just because the bubble here uses AI doesn't mean it's even remotely valuable for the 80%. But they've done a great job convincing a specific group of people this.

You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy.

One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.

Listen, I am no meat advocate. I just see a very clear link between the resources required to make meat and the benefit to the person eating the meat. Where data centers cause local and global harm, while not benefitting the locale or the globe. Which is why people don’t like them.

And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc.

We have a finite budget for water usage, and i’d allocate that to non-meat food > virtually anything else > meat > data centers > golf courses.

> No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers

I’m not entirely sure of the scale of pornhub’s operations, but i feel like one large ai data center uses more resources than all of pornhub’s data center usage around the globe. But maybe i’m wrong there, and the hub was just flying under the radar.

> AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful.

It's actually significantly more environmentally friendly than heating to above 68F in the winter in most cases, since most AC is done with heat pumps but most heating is oil/gas (100% fossil fuel consumption) or resistive electric heaters (dramatically less efficient than heat pumps). On top of that AC use aligns strongly with solar generation output while heating load does the opposite, which means that even when heating is done with electricity it comes disproportionately from gas turbines at natural gas peaker plants.

Data centers also enable the NSA to store the metadata and contents of every phone call you make and police to (without a warrant) to track anyone who's walked in front of your doorbell or many street corners in your city. They also store all the location data your phone collects for Google or Apple, nearly your entire internet history collected surreptitiously because many sites automatically use your GMail or Facebook logins, and your entire purchase history collected via Visa or MasterCard.

And even better: all of that data is aggregated together and stored in its entirety several times over across multiple data centers because everyone shares your data with everyone else, such that if any single of more than a dozen data centers is ever compromised, it all gets leaked to whomever compromised it.