What's not to like?
Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.
This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters. I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in
"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!
The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.
They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.
[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
The question is do we want to be a Petrostate or an Electrostate
https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?is=CHj3J-ARp0iBq_NB (Adam Tooze prezi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
2020 - 79 : 20 (renewables : fossil fuel)
2026 - 57 : 42
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2026/04/03/americans-shi...
As a side note, I wish we could muster this kind of vigor for just about any other type of public infrastructure project… nuclear/wind/solar power, fiberoptic internet, public high speed rail, new cities built around human-centric principles… you know, the things that the better part of the population stands to benefit from so at least the initial unrest is somewhat justified.
Future Illinois data center tax breaks on hold - https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/future-data-center-tax-br... - June 25th, 2026
State Data Center Policy Shifts as Governors Impose New Restrictions - https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/6/22/state-data-cente... - June 22nd, 2026
Gov. JB Pritzker suspends tax breaks for data centers, urges more discussion - https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/gov-jb-pritzker-to-susp... - June 5th, 2026
Which States Are Banning Data Centers? - https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-ce... - June 2nd, 2026
US tax incentives for data centers by state - https://knowledge.sdialliance.org/8d367baa340046029912b1e04c...
Tax Incentives for Data Centers 50 State Survey - https://hbfiles.blob.core.windows.net/webfiles/TaxIncentives... [pdf]
Regardless of what they are used for, we do not need more "data centers." This is true even outside of AI.
Putting so much of us into "the cloud" is generally harmful; encouraging people to learn about, and to do more "computing" at home -- on local machines they, or someone who cares about them, control, is better.
Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.
I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.
But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is inequality. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.
The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.
They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."
People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.
When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.
I've been an indie filmmaker since I was a teenager. Seedance 2.0 and all of the image and video models are such an amazing gift to use. The things you can push these models to do are incredible. I have a full VFX workbench. I can rotoscope, I can pull off effects shots. I can even use these things to articulate non-shotlist things for meetings. It's incredible. The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.
I've professionally been a systems engineer. Five/six nines reliable services that move billions of dollars, etc. I have fallen in love with coding models. I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling. The job we're all in is to provide value - these models are the next generation of compilers. We're working at higher and higher levels of abstraction, and it's brilliant. For those of us who can operate at all of the levels, it's a super power.
I will not go back to pre-AI times. I want to see what things are like in 10, 20 years. When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs, where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast, where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
This is the most excited about tech I've ever been. This is so much better than smartphone incrementalism and stupid web platforms.
Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds. This is literally the jetpack future we were promised growing up. It's the coolest thing since the internet.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-a...
https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover
https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companie...
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trill...
https://www.bok.or.kr/eng/bbs/B0000354/view.do?nttId=1009840...
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/ai-intensifies-work/
AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955703 - February 2026 (306 comments)
https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...
AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 - February 2026 (172 comments)
AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337253 - September 2025 (171 comments)
Seven Myths about AI and Productivity: What the Evidence Really Says - https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr... - October 16th, 2025 ("Despite widespread enthusiasm for generative AI, empirical evidence reveals inconsistent productivity impacts contradicting popular assumptions. Based on recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews, we debunk seven pervasive myths about AI's workplace benefits. AI's productivity gains are highly context-dependent, varying significantly by user skill level and task complexity. Contrary to expectations, human-AI collaboration often underperforms either agent working independently, except in creative tasks. While AI can accelerate individual work, meta-analytic evidence finds no robust relationship between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains. We call for research on context-specific organizational deployment strategies to capture genuine value.")
The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 - https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploa... - July 2025
("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence")
Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.
I can afford the hardware I already have. And I can run jobs on it as I see fit. Sure, its slower than the corpo LLMs, but we're already seeing lying, silent downgrading, and advertisements, even when paying for tokens.
When your systems goes tits up or priced out, mine will still work.
Released only 10 months later, a tiny open-weights model outperforms what was once SOTA. Fable and 5.6 Sol will be outperformed by laptop-class models next year.
I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.
I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.
Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.
> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.
Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."
Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.
> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs
Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.
> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast
This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.
> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.
But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.
I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.
The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.
Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.
It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.
randycupertino•1h ago
> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.