How is it that Meta is worth a trillion dollars?
They don’t make anything or directly help somebody else make something.
they provide a platform that can maybe sometimes nudges an individual purchasing decisions in one direction.
$200bn annual revenue with a 5x sales multiple gets you to a trillion dollars.
The audacity of public officials these days is astounding.
If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all.
If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman.
I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.
If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months.
On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water.
Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.
I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People have been committing suicide off google searches for years. There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems like a fragile argument made by people who dislike LLMs for other reasons
Compared to a factory of the same square footage that might employ 500+ people, the 'jobs per megawatt' ratio is terrible. It's essentially renting out the local power grid to a remote entity, not creating a local economy.
Are you NIMBYing for our AI overlords which will replace all the work we do and give us unlimited prosperity at the push of a button?
This incident will be reported. /s
On a more serious note, when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, we will realize that humans cannot eat money (or silicon for that matter).
https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...
No. It's currently a fantasy. Even if the cost of getting payloads to orbit decreased another x100, you still have the issues of radiation and heat dissipation.
This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them.
I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive?
All so that the same guy who is already quite rich can continue to run his funny-up money roll-up machine, re-capitalize on a bunch of froth and leave other people holding the bag.
i keep seeing this same repeated trope again and again.
Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".
Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed.
Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.
Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times.
> I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?
Sounds like it’s not something new or reserved for data enter projects only but I agree it sure seems a shady practice.
I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article:
> If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.
I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice?
Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".
There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.
The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying
But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power.
Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.
This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a small town named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in the city.
So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.
* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick
* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials
* rising electricity bills
* rising water bills
Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions.
They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.
It’s a pretty unique time we live in where economic growth is seen as negative.
bell-cot•1h ago
> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.
Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government really needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do in secret.
rayiner•1h ago
nemo•1h ago
hallway_monitor•1h ago
hrimfaxi•53m ago
throwhn1232•49m ago
newsclues•1h ago
hrimfaxi•54m ago
bloak•46m ago
9dev•37m ago
hrimfaxi•32m ago
petcat•32m ago
Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
buellerbueller•4m ago
bell-cot•25m ago
But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.
buellerbueller•3m ago
imglorp•55m ago
Secret deals with corporations is corruption.