I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.
I'm sure that right at this moment at least some people are thinking "if only we had a different executive, then we could rein in this AI problem." That is wrong at best. You could rein it in for ~4 years until you lost the next election. With a completely feckless Congress, very little can get done.
are they? whats been done to solve the infrasound pollution?
governments haven't even managed to get datacenters to follow clean air regulation
1. About 25% of data centers use close water cycle systems [1]. This could be part of the approval process. It costs more, but these companies are flush with cash.
2. Where they go matters for water table impact and energy generation mix, both geographically and per zoning laws. There are good and bad places to put data centers.
3. Energy shouldn't be a problem, but we have under/mis-invested. A world with limitless energy is possible, what happened to that vision for massive renewables to realize that?
4. A responsive government is required, which seems to be what is happening (as evidenced by the significant pushback). We should be more reasonable (the middle path), but that seems not within the politics of our times.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?
If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.
Sure but you can say this about everything. Where are the protests about the wine industry in California? 500,000 acres of land for vineyards, far more water used for growing grapes than cooling data centers, all so a handful of people can make fortunes selling empty calories to the rich?
If you want to focus purely on utilitarian "optimal land use for essentials only" arguments there's way worse offenders than datacenters, the anti-DC sentiment is purely part of the anti-AI wave.
1. They get massive tax breaks;
2. Everyone else pays for the electricity infrastructure that they need to suppor tthem;
3. They pollute water supplies;
4. Everybody's electricity prices go up while the DC has a sweetheart deal that, again, everyone else is paying for;
5. There are no jobs unlike, say, if someone used that same money to buuild an auto plant; and
6. They tend to very far noiser than you might think, such that they probably violate noise ordinances when built near residential property but nobody enforces that. We have industrial areas for this reason but that zoning just gets completely ignored.
AI is a whole separate debate. That one, too, is pretty simple. AI is selling labor displacement and wage suppression. That's the only product. Getting rid of the data centers won't get rid of that. The DCs are just going where it's cheapest, where local officials don't have the resources to fight it and where people can be bullied or bribed into approving it. Move them somewhere else slightly more expensive and it'll still be displacing labor.
1. got no tax breaks
2. self-generated electricity with greenest of green generation
3. did not pollute water supplies
4. made electricity prices go down somehow
5. (can't figure out a theoretical version where there are lots of jobs, sorry)
6. was extremely quiet
Would people still be mad about them?
I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. Or if it's really more about "AI bad."
1. Electricity costs in Maryland jumped 89% over the past year, much more than anywhere else, largely due to an AWS data center expansion: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-electricity-pr...
2. At their heart, data centers are extractive. Their boosters always overstate the jobs they will create, but they basically take land and resources from one place and create the vast majority of the wealth somewhere else. They are giant windowless boxes, they don't support their community in any way, and in fact with AI they basically add to more job destruction in their communities.
While I agree that some downsides of AI are overstated (like water usage), this whole article smacks of paternalistic "the peons just don't understand what's really going on" nonsense. The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works.
Blocking them should be a priority until rates are negotiated with your G&T / major provider (PJM and FERC in Maryland and many other states)
RE blaming the peon reader: you’re talking about Vox so that is expected unfortunately.
But yes this article is absolutely the "usual sort" of paternalistic garbage.
No, AI is partly rejected as mind numbing, it produces SEO slop, it produces bad code, it steals IP. Is this author living under a rock?
She then proceeds to parrot the industry that we'll have arrangements that go in the direction of UBI. This whole article sounds like a trojan horse for Vox readers to distract them from the real issues.
EDIT: The pre-IPO downvotes get aggressive again. Mentioning how the press works is strictly forbidden.
It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.
The past 20 years of surveillance capitalism and the general deployment of technology against consumers should make everyone question whether this could ever be possible.
Instead of a ban just make sure they pay what's needed to keep capacity where it needs to be.
If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?
electrical supply is not infinite. datacenters have high electrical demand. more demand + same supply = increase prices.
>Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
the problem is that added infrastructure is not built instantaneously. it lags behind. so costs will be high until more supply-side infrastructure is in place.
i agree that there should be some sort of stipulation that when you build your mega datacenter that you also have to build out electrical infrastructure at the same time. but unfortunately, that is not how it is.
The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage. We should also tax the hell out of anyone using AI as an excuse for layoffs. It's far past time to ban buybacks and dividends for any company doing layoffs. We also should have a requirement, you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.
(I mean if AI is really powerful the reason is "profitability as our competitor steals our contracts at a fraction of the price")
This is a wall of text but genuinely worth skimming: https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
Taking a step back, if the US unilaterally stops producing AI will other countries stop? The answer is clearly no.
Datacenters and ai can be built and trained anywhere. If you want control over AI you should want it to be built in your own country where you have political representation.
All preventing datacenter buildout will do is ensure that the price remains high and only really rich organizations can access it.
I think it's a mistake to stop producing those things.
What won't work is something like "it'll be better for the economy in the entire country, so put up with some disruption for a while." No one likes higher electricity bills while a power plant is being constructed, a new building going up too close to their homes that doesn't create jobs they can apply for, etc. It's a losing message to promise the payoff only years later or indirectly.
The list is long and includes things like people not being able to afford AC anymore; why are you trying to figure this out?
The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally.
It should be noted that modern globalization (post 1945), with Bretton Woods, GATT/WTO, container shipping, and eventually the internet creating the integrated global economy we have today, is but the latest milestone in a long history.
Industrial wave of 1829 - 1914 radically reduced the cost of moving goods and information.
The first globalization happened 1490s - 1800s, when Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 route to India created the first truly intercontinental trade and migration networks, linking the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe for the first time.
AngryData•29m ago
Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. But I can't afford to tack on 30% more costs onto ever material object I need as someone not earning 6 figures doing tech work.
There is a reason the US doesn't process tons of aluminum or supply the world with fertilizer, we don't have all that cheap of energy. Go to Canada and build a hydroplant, or build a solar field.
And that is before we get into the fact that many people think the LLM boom is a massive crash waiting to happen when it inevitably doesn't change the world overnight to justify the trillions in investments.
tomrod•24m ago
Hear hear.
LLMs can generate a lot of great value. But the pouring of resources like gasoline on a wildfire is dumb. Continuing the analogy, fire is great when controlled and terrible when let loose without regard for impact.
I think a Doctorow-style setup of domain-specific AI and edge compute are where real value with AI will exist in ways our grandchildren may enjoy -- and it happens to be antithetical to the ridiculous overvaluation we in the "hyperscalers" (which seem to just want to pump and dump the market by extracting cash from US 401ks via indexes and IPOs).