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?
Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.
What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
[1] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...
You are saying they are "hardly betting on it". This is grossly false and I wonder why you would write that? Its clearly a serious bet, with lots of people working on it.
> Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers
Its surely a high risk bet but that's how Google has been operating for a while. But why would you say they are hardly betting on it?
As a counter question: do you think Google is not serious about it?
My napkin math says that, for a system at around 75°C, you would need about 13,000 square meters of radiators in space to reject 10 MW of heat.
The reason for this "data centers in space" is the same as the "sustained human colony on Mars". It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.
Just a small sampling of previous failed Musk promises: - demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York by the end of 2017 - "autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year" - “thousands” of Optimus humanoid robots working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025." - Tesla semi trucks rollout (Pepsi paid for 100 semis in 2017, and deliveries started in 2022, and now 8 years later they have received half of them.)
This trope
> It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.
Really needs to stop. This is based on a naive interpretation of how wealth gets created. Musk has an amazing reputation getting things done and making things that people like. Whether you like him as a person or not, he has done stuff in the past and that's reason enough to believe him now.
the compute is used for training, not inference. the redundancy and mesh networking means that if any of them die, it is no big deal.
and an orbit that takes them away from earth means they avoid cluttering up earth's orbital field.
They also need to be powered and connected to a network, but that seems like an easier problem.
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.
Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.
What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
Naturally the system needs energy, the sun giving radiation convertible to electricity should enable that.
Both parts are documented about ISS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_system_of_the_Inter...
Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.
There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.
I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact?
Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).
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?
In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.
Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.
Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.
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.
Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates.
Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the railroad buildout trillions of dollars?
By 1900 the united states had 215 thousand miles of railroads https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...
Depend on you value land mileage and work this could easily be north of 1T modern dollars.
> AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion since 2022. A notable chunk of this spending has been focused on information processing equipment, which spiked at a 39% annualized rate in the first half of 2025. Harvard economist Jason Furman commented that investment in information processing equipment & software is equivalent to only 4% of US GDP, but was responsible for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. If you exclude these categories, the US economy grew at only a 0.1% annual rate in the first half.
https://www.cadtm.org/The-AI-bubble-and-the-US-economy?utm_s...
Unless the residents have a strong enough chance to veto, they’re just speaking into the void as far as the company is concerned.
In the US neither of those are generally made public per se. They are made public when the thing actually passes testing or certification.
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 town (~800 ppl) 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 Harwood.
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
Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.
The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?
These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
- Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles
We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.
The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.
Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.
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.
Datacenters are asking for tax breaks because they "contribute back to the local economy". In most cases however, the added jobs are mostly temporary (construction)
In short, they're asking residents to pay for some short-term jobs and long-term utility price increases. A bad deal if you ask me
I can't wait until OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft all go belly up.
Bitcoin—>Altcoin—>NFTs—>StableCoin—>AI—>They'll just invent something new to over-hype and spend billions on.
It won't end until we reach the Shoe Event Horizon.
Also interesting that these investors could have invested in power plants to bring down people utilities but they are not interested in investing in people.
When AI crashes these plants need to be stormed and taken over by the people of the community.
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•1h ago
throwhn1232•1h ago
newsclues•1h ago
hrimfaxi•1h ago
bloak•1h ago
9dev•1h ago
hrimfaxi•1h ago
petcat•1h 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•46m ago
petcat•30m ago
bell-cot•1h ago
But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.
buellerbueller•45m ago
imglorp•1h ago
Secret deals with corporations is corruption.