Activist groups urge Congress to pause US datacenter buildouts More than 230 organizations across America have signed a letter calling for a moratorium on the construction of datacenters, claiming the current building boom represents a huge environmental and social threat. The open letter [PDF], sent to members of the US Congress by campaign group Food & Water Watch, complains that the AI …
The DC buildout is fincanced by the same sort of people who have [cough][cough] pledged $350M towards Trump's Memorial Ballroom. That means they have him and the gubbermint in their back pockets. given that, their protest is doomed to fail.
Watch out Arizona and other states. You will have water shortages and blackouts very soon and the DC builders will be to blame.
A lot of things are a threat - or at any rate a balance of harms.
- Cooking and heating with dung or wood might give you lung cancer, but it beats raw meat and hypothermia
- Migrating across an ocean so that you can exercise your manifest destiny risks drowning and angry natives, but (according to some) it beats Anglican church services (well the new vicar can drone on)
- Getting a vaccination carries risks but it sure beats polio (ask FDR)
Now, AI. It risks polluting the water, ramping up the global temperature and impoverishing us all with higher utility bills. BUT it does give us the chance to generate generic meeting notes and six-fingered "digital art". AND it offers a novel way to further enrich that most benighted of demographics, the very wealthy.
There's plenty of energy available. It simply involves accelerating the buildout of nuclear energy plants. Thankfully, the Trump Administration is working to clear the hurdles that the same group of enviropinkos have put in the way. Plenty of nuclear and plenty of data centers. There are no problems except the artifically created ones.
Except they (DCs) need all that juicy power now not in 10+ years it takes build one nuclear power plant, never mind a fleet. Which means gas and coal are king for the foreseeable future.
Funny how there's funding, incentives, tax breaks etc. and all the environmental concerns are overlooked when a DC wants power, but when the plebs need it just to keep the lights on and be able cook, clean, shower, heat their homes, charge their EVs when they want to (not when the power company says they can a.k.a "load shifting") there's no money available and the government torpedoes any suggestion of building more gas and coal power stations to meet the basic needs of the population.
"The consensus was not that the industry needs to change, more that the public should be better informed about what datacenters actually do and the applications and industries which depend upon them. The industry should get people to think of bit barns as vital utilities, like water and electricity. "
Surely that depends to a large extent on what the specific datacentres in question actually are actually used for? Some are worse than others - especially the AI ones, which are more of a gimmick than a useful utility in most* cases.
*There are some genuinely useful purposes for AI / LLMs, but they are a fraction of the purposes for which it is currently being used / imposed on users.
