It's not so hard to imagine that something which was fine at the old scale may cause issues at the new. At the same time, it's also not so hard to imagine that the new scale still isn't particularly large and that there are about a million more important things to worry about.

The question isn't whether it's possible for something to become problematic past a certain scale. The question is whether data centers are at that point, or will be anytime soon.

The actual facts and figures that are presented in opposition tend to be stripped of the larger context, which makes me skeptical. The graph you linked looks wild, but in a country that spends two trillion dollars per year on all construction, is the jump from $1 billion/month to $4 billion/month very important?

I feel like this has to be reiterated every single AI discussion. Anytime someone points out something it enables, someone has to go “well that existed before” as if the scale is somehow 1) irrelevant and 2) not orders of magnitude larger.

If you gave me one night, a pot of coffee, and few scruples, I could probably dump hundreds if not thousands of fake posts on the internet. Hundreds would easily break through and who knows, a handful might even go viral on Twitter. Yeah I could do that 5 years ago, but not nearly at the same scale. Maybe a few dozen?

Back to DCs: it’s like saying “well we had coal fire plants years ago.” Ok…well there are more now generating way more power and spewing way more pollution. It’s not the same situation anymore. This DC build out is massive.