Sooner or later the need for energy will become crucial. If it comes to war, then the US can build but if it comes to anything short of that, environmental concerns will dominate and probably make things unlikely.
It’s no wonder they want to put datacenters in space, calculating that it’s easier to solve the problems there than to solve the problems here. Though I’m surprised: are there no allied nations where we could put these things? The Trump admin has only been here since 2025 but opposition to these projects has existed locally for years. But universally? I imagine Japan or Korea, countries with less superstition around nuclear reactors, would have been happy to have done this.
Public opinion on nuclear power in Japan is not great, particularly after Fukushima. They just don't have a lot of other good options - as it is, the country relies heavily on imported coal and gas.
You could easily describe this trend positively rather than negatively, like:
"Google has built an incredible amount of datacenters in the past few years, which makes sense since Google Cloud revenue has tripled since 2021. But they are trying to grow even faster and add more revenue."
goda90•52m ago
Maybe if they did those things, there would be fewer permitting fights.
bayarearefugee•45m ago
The people making those deals are physiologically incapable of not attempting to benefit from socialized externalities to make obscene levels of private profit.
You might as well be asking them to voluntarily stop breathing or pay a fair amount of taxes, they just can't do it.
jmward01•26m ago
explodes•36m ago
The new Utah data center is building new gas pipelines to generate 9GW instead of requiring ANY percentage of green energy, while also giving massive tax breaks that the families living nearby and statewide will have to cover.
For actionable information on this specific project, see:
https://www.breatheutah.org/news/the-stratos-project-questio...
protocolture•20m ago
Just clean and scale the grid.
>closed loop cooling
Just clean and scale your water supply. Remove all the lead that's clearly in there while you are at it.
>noise and light pollution mitigation
NextDC B2 has its phase 2 under construction right now, after the construction workers have all gone home theres no external noise from Phase 1. You can stand outside Equinix SY1 2 or 3 and you cant hear anything but road noise. Its a solved engineering problem. Any deviance from this can be interrogated locally. Its not a pertinent issue with Datacenters as a class.