People dislike secretive bureaucrats more than they dislike slow or overstaffed ones.

Good luck with this attitude homie!

The thinking on display in this thread is something like,

"I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."

The ability to improve their data centers, of course. Google is the company that launched data centers with commodity components.

> But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use

Not even close to a true statement.

EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].

According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

> 1GW of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi/Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.

I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.

This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).

If we printed electricity like China, this would not be an issue, we can have more electricity at lower prices when we're ready

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity...

Tbh this sounds perfectly normal to me. Companies often don't think it's worth defending themselves if theres no actual financial damage, and certainly don't want random employees to be doing it. It can be very frustrating, both for employees who want to defend their reputation and for the public who want the truth, but companies can be extremely conservative about chosing their public relations battles.

I think people actually do though? They are even sabotaged at times (has happened in Europe at least), to protest against their water usage.

Rather than talking in absolute numbers, ratios help relate human activities better, an example:

If we can close 1 in 3 golf courses and have all the water we need for data centers - and then some - would that be acceptable to our society?

Do we desire so much golf that we'd prefer to stress our water systems instead?

In some cases chemicals are added to the water to increase cooling efficiency.

This is a choice, alternative approaches do exist but we should definitely not assume that datacenter water usage is _always_ benign.

Sure the water is still somewhere, but its location is important for future use. US water reservoirs are at problematically low levels already.

> Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.

The linked article talks about >500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It's nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it's such a common thing to do then why isn't it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?

> It's not even used up in agriculture.

However, the source of the water can be "used up" faster than it can be replenished, such as in the case of some aquifers

That’s not entirely correct. Overall water is preserved but local sources of freshwater can be depleted or contaminated, which raises the cost of water.

There are so many facets that numbers alone don't cover:

Are they drawing from a flowing source or an aquifer? Is it depleting a limited resource?

Is it evaporative or does the waste get discharged?

Is the waste water treated for the metal that it leaches from the cooling system?

Is it allowed to reach thermal equilibrium first or is the water discharged warm which can cause algae blooms or other problems?

Evaporated water stays in the water cycle though. It comes back down as rain, and returns to the water sources that were depleted (assuming these data centers are generally not using underground aquifers, which I think is true).

People do just that.

Surely the people who have worked in tech, with datacenters or even in them for decades are wrong, and the people who learned the word "datacenter" 6 months ago are right.

It’s already permitted and operating. Presumably they want the $XX million tax rebates, which haven’t yet been paid out according to this article. Maybe that’s the case in other places too.

Why not get people riled up over water under the bridge and not unpaid rebates? What can anybody do about it? Send the sheriff to lock out the facility?

Exactly my point

> every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.

Correct. But they can't so easily without Google's (or other big tech companies) big legal departments to make challenging the excuses difficult.

The big hyperscalers always knew that eventually the tide would turn against them (for example when local towns noticed that the DCs didn't actually need very many locals to run the facilities).

They carefully hid things so they could expand for as long as possible, knowing that having the necessary footprint for services, cloud, and AI would be key to winning the race. When I worked at Google, our leaders were always "proud" they had built such a huge fleet (originally for search + ads but rapidly growing to a wide range of products and research) without competitors knowing just how large, because they figured eventually AWS and MSFT would realize they had to build out massively to handle the coming loads.

So they hide these things to stave off complaints for as long as possible.

Big Labor j/k

ignorance

China and Russia.

People looking for something to run against?

In that specific position probably leaning more towards biased than towards well-informed, though both components likely do exist.

It's not well-paid enough to be immune to kool-aid etc, and it's not on the sociopathic management level either, so we can expect a certain degree of very human rationalization going on.

>> During my career there

He specifically said he worked there. Did you think perhaps he possibly worked for the outsourced cleaning crew?

The use of the word "we" seems pretty clear to me.