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shipman05 3 hours ago [-]
I'm dismayed by the current political discourse on this topic. Seems like the two camps are 1) let mega corps build data centers with impunity or 2) use NIMBY tactics to oppose them in all cases.
I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protections in place to limit impacts on aquifers and other water sources.
Democracies don't handle nuance well.
palmotea 2 hours ago [-]
I am pro-AI datacenters. I just think they should all be built in Atherton and the Hamptons, with the stipulation they're only allowed to be built adjacent to the most expensive residential property in the area, in the way of its most impressive view.
jagged-chisel 2 hours ago [-]
"In the way of"? How about ... as an enhancement of the most impressive views.
palmotea 43 minutes ago [-]
> How about ... as an enhancement of the most impressive views.
I like it!
thegrim33 2 hours ago [-]
It's less a fault of "democracy" and more a fault of partisan extremism where all dimensionality and nuance is removed, it's intentionally made into an "us" vs "them" issue with only two extreme sides, where either you're fully with "us" and everything we believe, or you're evil/horrible/etc. If you dare to fall in the middle somewhere, that's not allowed by the extremists on one side; you're lumped in with and seen as no different than the opposite extreme.
reticulates 2 hours ago [-]
Democracy isn't to blame, capitalism is. The mega corps have every incentive to dodge the costs of their negative externalities and they have them money to lobby for that. The "reasonable" citizen supporting growth with caveats will be drowned out by the mega corp and their mega wallets. The loud NIMBYs are the only group that have any chance of stopping the negative externalities which they achieve by blocking the growth. Your enemy isn't the NIMBY, your enemy is the mega corp, the NIMBY is your ally, they are the backstop.
barbazoo 2 hours ago [-]
> the two camps are
Or are those just the two ends of the spectrum? I don't know anyone on either extreme of the spectrum.
jjulius 3 hours ago [-]
>Democracies don't handle nuance well.
Especially when modern discourse revolves around 140-character hot takes.
bakies 2 hours ago [-]
And Instagram reels. Mine is so full of anti-green-energy propaganda I uninstalled the app.
runarberg 2 hours ago [-]
One of the camps has all the money, hold all the power, and does indeed behave with impunity. The other camp has no power, has no way to affect anything, holds no political relevance, and NIMBY tactics is one of very few ways they can even hope to have at least some tiny chance of a minor change in their favor.
I think it does the discourse a disservice to take these two as equal.
fellowmartian 2 hours ago [-]
There’s the pro-growth Abundance faction, but they’re captured by special interests, so they’re predictably advocating for supply-side YIMBYism and relaxed regulation, without addressing the political economy that led us to the current situation.
bakies 2 hours ago [-]
Seriously, it can't be that hard to build a datacenter and not piss people off. The economics demanded scale so fast that the capitalists don't care enough to thoughtfully plan this stuff out.
thereisnospork 2 hours ago [-]
This is America, anything you do pisses people off[0]. The problem is that the rest of us listen to them because it is easier to understand one person's complaint than the distributed pain of electricity being a penny per kwh more expensive.
[0]I've seen people whinging about building solar plants in the desert, windmills off shore, data centers in silicon valley...
Abh1Works 2 hours ago [-]
Something I havent heard alot of people talk about is meat. I dont think you can be against data centers, but also buy cheap meat. I understand food != compute, and thats a fact. BUT the same people who are protesting against AI data centers are the same people who fly every year, eat steak in every other dinner, and generally indulge in activities that are bad for the planet (and theres no acknowledgement).
barbazoo 2 hours ago [-]
> The people that... are the same people that...
Just stop. If you fund yourself starting a sentence that way, just close the browser.
DWe1 2 hours ago [-]
If you make such claims please back this up with evidence? I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying. Your comment sounds a lot like whataboutism to me.
RetroTechie 56 minutes ago [-]
> I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying.
And then you'd be equally wrong as the commenter you replied to. Without data it's just speculation.
cagenut 2 hours ago [-]
and flying. beef and flying are the two most impactful personal choices you can make (nearly everything else has a 'over a decade'/difficult-life-tradeoff factor). beef and flying are easy.
DenisM 3 hours ago [-]
Select quote:
* 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.*
I think it’s massive.
gruez 3 hours ago [-]
>I think it’s massive.
So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.
dundarious 3 hours ago [-]
If it was 2% for VOD streaming, and 3% for every other service that is delivered by a networked computer, I would think "wow, streaming is huge". 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all, versus 3% for everything else on the computer, is still a remarkable statistic. I'm not making any value judgment in order to say that.
I also don't think it's particularly conclusive about anything though. It doesn't on its face make me think anything like "it must be stopped", but it's remarkable.
gruez 2 hours ago [-]
>that most people hardly use at all
Speak for yourself. For "most people", "streaming" is basically TV for them, and the average american watches 2.6 hours per day[1]. It's probably safe to say that at least half of that is "streaming" of some sort, even more if you include other types of "streaming" like music streaming. Moreover nowadays even if they're not plopped in front of a TV, they're watching short form videos.
I was referring to AI in that statement, I wrote it somewhat poorly.
gruez 2 hours ago [-]
The "hardly use" comparison quickly runs into issues, though. If I use AI and it completes a job that would have taken an hour in 1 minute, should that be counted as a factor against AI, because I'm "hardly" using it (1 minute) compared to the alternative (1 hour)?
dundarious 2 hours ago [-]
It was written in a specific context:
> [AI] that most people hardly use at all
and while ambiguous, I meant that quantifying the number of people that use it, results in a not large number. I've had discussions in other threads about how to talk about transitive use, etc., so as with everything at all times, there are certainly ways to skin the cat that justify or invalidate the statement. One has to rely upon good judgment to decide which way is best, and reasonable people may disagree.
sroussey 2 hours ago [-]
> 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all
AI is hardly used at all? Basically every company and consumer in the country is using it, transitively if not directly.
dundarious 2 hours ago [-]
Every company is using it? The deli and the laundromat too? Every consumer? Maybe transitively because they use Google or what have you, but most people I know still don't really know what AI is, never mind have a puritan revulsion over using it (some people are quite performative about this on here), but they just don't use it themselves, except transitively on occasion.
sroussey 2 hours ago [-]
Everyone using Google. Watching Netflix. Listening to Spotify. Shopping at Amazon or a Shopify store.
Or reading almost anything these days. :(
Advertising they see. Using a credit card, writing a check.
Beam forming wireless signals.
It’s everywhere. Not all AI is an LLM.
dundarious 2 hours ago [-]
Was the 2% figure counting all those things? I don't think so. This is changing the grounds of the discussion. Ridiculously so. Do you take me for some zealot who hates tensors or matrices or something? I don't even hate LLMs, though I have huge issues with how data has been gathered. I feel like this discussion is useless.
sroussey 1 hours ago [-]
Look at Meta’s capital budget and tell me people aren’t using AI. People use Facebook, Instagram, etc. I’d say the same for Google, but with Google Cloud it’s hard to know where the dollars are going and for whom.
Who exactly is the 2% figure? Can’t all be HN people on side projects using Claude code.
dundarious 1 hours ago [-]
A lot of it is training, not inference, right? I really do think the vast majority of use is HN Claude Code, with some lawyers, etc., preparing initial draft emails that they rewrite, sprinkled on top.
As for capex implying high usage, look at xAI's capex and how it turns out most of it is now being rented out to Google, etc. High capex does not imply capex that has already found its customers and margins. Meta is an extraordinarily bad example to use, given the failure of the whole metaverse/VR thing that is now their name, but is completely vestigial.
Have a good afternoon.
everdrive 2 hours ago [-]
By all means, cull them all. I'm sure the remaining 3% support (in one way or another) terrible web apps that use 150 MB of javascript and data brokers.
DenisM 2 hours ago [-]
> So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI?
How did you read that in my comment?
lopis 3 hours ago [-]
The author claims it's surprising that AI uses less electricity than the rest of data centers. Why?? Data centers do a million different things other than AI
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
It's surprising because that's all anyone hears about right now.
Many are surprised to learn that data centers use much less water than golf courses or pools. We hear about it so much in the news it sounds like it's the overwhelming largest consumption problem around.
axus 3 hours ago [-]
If they use so little water and power, why aren't they being built in the empty office buildings? Seems like commercial real estate was made for ... commercial activity.
fxwin 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody is saying that they use "so little water and power", just that the average person has no clue about the orders of magnitude at which anything outside of a private household uses these things, including things they previously didn't really have a problem with (like golf courses or almond farms)
Most people just hear <gigantic number of m³ or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"
sroussey 2 hours ago [-]
Water usage for a data center is nowhere near any agricultural use (which is subsidized in California so they aren’t incentivized to change much). Data centers don’t need water at all. It’s just the municipality offering cheaper way to cool by offering water cheaper than power for cooling.
paulhebert 2 hours ago [-]
Yes but people need food in order to live
(I think golf courses - and some pools - are quite wasteful and would support tax incentives around them.)
sroussey 2 hours ago [-]
Then subsidize food directly rather than via water.
paulhebert 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rick_dalton 3 hours ago [-]
This makes no sense? How is one even correlated with the other? Data centers obviously have much different requirements than office buildings for people. On a very small scale this works but not on a larger scale.
vidarh 2 hours ago [-]
Traditionally they have been. Several data centres in London are colocated in office buildings for example. I used to manage servers in one that most tenants wouldn't even have known about.
AI focused data centres also could, but require a higher amount of power and cooling per rack, so it's less practical. The point is not that they don't use more than a typical office, but that they don't use the world-ending amounts people assume they use.
The operators should still be made to pay for the externalities, and regulated to ensure they don't make life miserable for people around them.
But that doesn't mean we need to stop building them.
sroussey 2 hours ago [-]
The data centers in L.A. are in old bank buildings. I used to locate my servers at One Wilshire.
Water is too expensive and wasteful to just run through pipes and send out to the ocean just for cooling. Power though… the reason bank buildings are loved for data centers is that they are on two power lines so if one goes out the other is available.
raychis 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder if we made tech billionaires choose between keeping their golf courses or building more AI data centres what they would go for.
StrauXX 3 hours ago [-]
AI hardware is much, much more powerhungry than traditional processors though. I can understand their reasoning.
lopis 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but it's still surprising that 1/3 of all data centers in the whole world are dedicated to that one use.
ch4s3 3 hours ago [-]
I think its easy to forget how much energy is required to boil a liter of water, and these charts are a great reminder of the mundane things like that which escape our attention.
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
> For longer queries or requests that rely on AI agents or reasoning, the footprint is higher. Epoch AI estimated that a long query (7,500 words of input) could consume about 2.5 Wh, and a very long one (75,000 words) could consume 40 Wh. Those are far higher than the simple text query.
One thing that's missing from almost all of these energy estimates is the impact of "agentic" queries, which were rare a year ago and increasingly common today.
I've asked questions of GPT-5.6 Pro that take 19 minutes to return an answer, as the model runs hundreds of search and site navigation tool calls (and a bit of executed Python code too) trying to get to a credible answer.
I'm confident that 19 minutes involves a lot more than 75,000 words worth of tokens.
With coding agents we can at least get an accurate token count. I'm already at 204,000 tokens of GPT-5.6 Sol today and I haven't started work yet.
helloplanets 2 hours ago [-]
With the new Ultracode modes in Claude Code and Codex it's been taken to the next level. I mean, multi agent systems have been available for a long time, but the newest models seem to be much more RL'd for them.
Both GPT-5.6 and Fable will happily run 3+ hours straight off a relatively simple goal in that mode, burn through millions of tokens in the process.
Not saying it's great bang for your buck, but just that those modes are there and being pushed by the companies.
DenisM 2 hours ago [-]
Where did the tokens go?
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
I ran a couple of prompts to reverse-engineer my ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/*/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4" file - Codex figured out how to lz4 decompress the file, then I had it interpret some base64 encoded binary data in the JSON, that session is here: https://gisthost.github.io/?986cb066dd8502cf0200a5cc6fdeb4c6
DenisM 2 hours ago [-]
Remarkably, it took non-AI workloads 25 years to grow from zero to 3%, and it took AI only ~ 2.5 years to get to 2%.
This puts a number to my intuitive feeling that things move an order of magnitude faster this time.
chrisgd 3 hours ago [-]
We all just look at energy as a price. I think more people are concerned if our prices will go up, not how much energy it uses. The bigger question is water.
How much water do they use? Is it potable to begin with? Is it usable after? Will they drive prices up. These are one time builds with minimal jobs created after for a tech that could end my career. If I lose my job, I don’t also want to have no water and higher bills.
ggreer 2 hours ago [-]
The talk about AI water usage exists because in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, she got water usage wrong by three orders of magnitude.[1] For data centers that use water cooling, it's almost always non-potable water, and it's usually returned to the body of water it was pumped out of (though slightly warmer).
If you're worried about water consumption, things like golf courses and farm subsidies for water-intensive crops are much bigger issues.
Our World in Data is great, but this article would've been improved if it offered a chart that offered a comparison to it's leading "1.5% of global electricity number".
For example: 7% to 10% of all global electricity is consumed by air conditioning. It's not hard to think of relatively small interventions that could save 1.5% of global energy use annually.
ggreer 2 hours ago [-]
Increasing global electricity production by 1.5% (or 500 terawatt-hours) would also be a solution. Production from solar power increased by 600TWh from 2024-2025 and its rate of adoption is increasing as costs go down, so this doesn't seem like a problem worth worrying about.
RetroTechie 16 minutes ago [-]
Going by those figures, would mean that AI datacenters built so far, consume enough energy to undo almost a year of solar power buildout. AND growing like crazy. That's running costs. Not energy going into a building's construction or fabrication of the gear going in there.
Does seem like a problem worth worrying about.
paulhebert 2 hours ago [-]
The problem is we need to be reducing our use of highly polluting energy sources and shifting to renewable sources.
The more our energy use increases the harder it is to do so.
lordnacho 3 hours ago [-]
I presume running an electric shower includes heating up the water? Otherwise I don't understand how it could be so energy intensive. The energy is the mgh of the water lifted, plus the heat you put into it. Heat tends to be by far bigger in that calculation unless I've missed something.
shipman05 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. They're likely referring to on-demand electric heating units that are installed near the shower head.
I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protections in place to limit impacts on aquifers and other water sources.
Democracies don't handle nuance well.
I like it!
Or are those just the two ends of the spectrum? I don't know anyone on either extreme of the spectrum.
Especially when modern discourse revolves around 140-character hot takes.
I think it does the discourse a disservice to take these two as equal.
[0]I've seen people whinging about building solar plants in the desert, windmills off shore, data centers in silicon valley...
Just stop. If you fund yourself starting a sentence that way, just close the browser.
And then you'd be equally wrong as the commenter you replied to. Without data it's just speculation.
* 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.*
I think it’s massive.
So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.
I also don't think it's particularly conclusive about anything though. It doesn't on its face make me think anything like "it must be stopped", but it's remarkable.
Speak for yourself. For "most people", "streaming" is basically TV for them, and the average american watches 2.6 hours per day[1]. It's probably safe to say that at least half of that is "streaming" of some sort, even more if you include other types of "streaming" like music streaming. Moreover nowadays even if they're not plopped in front of a TV, they're watching short form videos.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
> [AI] that most people hardly use at all
and while ambiguous, I meant that quantifying the number of people that use it, results in a not large number. I've had discussions in other threads about how to talk about transitive use, etc., so as with everything at all times, there are certainly ways to skin the cat that justify or invalidate the statement. One has to rely upon good judgment to decide which way is best, and reasonable people may disagree.
AI is hardly used at all? Basically every company and consumer in the country is using it, transitively if not directly.
Or reading almost anything these days. :(
Advertising they see. Using a credit card, writing a check.
Beam forming wireless signals.
It’s everywhere. Not all AI is an LLM.
Who exactly is the 2% figure? Can’t all be HN people on side projects using Claude code.
As for capex implying high usage, look at xAI's capex and how it turns out most of it is now being rented out to Google, etc. High capex does not imply capex that has already found its customers and margins. Meta is an extraordinarily bad example to use, given the failure of the whole metaverse/VR thing that is now their name, but is completely vestigial.
Have a good afternoon.
How did you read that in my comment?
Many are surprised to learn that data centers use much less water than golf courses or pools. We hear about it so much in the news it sounds like it's the overwhelming largest consumption problem around.
Most people just hear <gigantic number of m³ or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"
(I think golf courses - and some pools - are quite wasteful and would support tax incentives around them.)
AI focused data centres also could, but require a higher amount of power and cooling per rack, so it's less practical. The point is not that they don't use more than a typical office, but that they don't use the world-ending amounts people assume they use.
The operators should still be made to pay for the externalities, and regulated to ensure they don't make life miserable for people around them.
But that doesn't mean we need to stop building them.
Water is too expensive and wasteful to just run through pipes and send out to the ocean just for cooling. Power though… the reason bank buildings are loved for data centers is that they are on two power lines so if one goes out the other is available.
One thing that's missing from almost all of these energy estimates is the impact of "agentic" queries, which were rare a year ago and increasingly common today.
I've asked questions of GPT-5.6 Pro that take 19 minutes to return an answer, as the model runs hundreds of search and site navigation tool calls (and a bit of executed Python code too) trying to get to a credible answer.
I'm confident that 19 minutes involves a lot more than 75,000 words worth of tokens.
With coding agents we can at least get an accurate token count. I'm already at 204,000 tokens of GPT-5.6 Sol today and I haven't started work yet.
Both GPT-5.6 and Fable will happily run 3+ hours straight off a relatively simple goal in that mode, burn through millions of tokens in the process.
Not saying it's great bang for your buck, but just that those modes are there and being pushed by the companies.
This puts a number to my intuitive feeling that things move an order of magnitude faster this time.
How much water do they use? Is it potable to begin with? Is it usable after? Will they drive prices up. These are one time builds with minimal jobs created after for a tech that could end my career. If I lose my job, I don’t also want to have no water and higher bills.
If you're worried about water consumption, things like golf courses and farm subsidies for water-intensive crops are much bigger issues.
1. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
For example: 7% to 10% of all global electricity is consumed by air conditioning. It's not hard to think of relatively small interventions that could save 1.5% of global energy use annually.
Does seem like a problem worth worrying about.
The more our energy use increases the harder it is to do so.
Our World in Data is based in the UK. Electric showers like this one https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-shower... are more common there than they are in the US.