The more Americans hear about datacenters, the less they like them

Americans are growing more and more wary of datacenters, with a Pew Research Center survey finding sharp rises since January in those who view the effect on the environment, energy bills, and nearby communities negatively. Pew surveyed 10,548 US adults between July 20 and August 9. Fifty-four percent said datacenters were mostly …

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

I'm really tired of the big corporate media pushing the propaganda of datacenters "bad". Especially since it's being generated by the PRC to slow down the development of AI so the PRC can surpass the United States. The ideas that they consume or pollute the water supply is FALSE as new datacenters have moved away from water chillers for cooling. As for the power consumption, it's up to the localities to negotiate terms to make the developers to generate their own power and connect it to the grid (which makes the US power grid more resilient). If the localities don't negotiate this, it's their own fault.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

I'm really tired of hearing the arguments above from increasingly desperate AI boosters..

There IS one common media mistake that irks me though - that is to conflate all Datacentres with AI datacentres. There is nothing wrong with a datacentre that powers ordinary Internet services like El Reg. A datacentre running thousands if not tens of thousands of sites like this one would only need a couple of Megawatts at most. Whereas the behemoth SuperSlopSheds need Gigawatts - i.e. every time an AI datacentre is cancelled, it's a nuclear power plant's worth of load that we don't have to support.

AI datacentres and AI itself are IMHO universally bad. It's not true that closed-loop cooled datacentres use no water, because so much water is used for power generation. In the UK, over half of water extracted from rivers and aquifers goes to the cooling towers of power stations - mostly CCGTs - where it evaporates - and 90% of which subsequently falls into the sea. SuperSlop-mongers say they want to add double or more of our peak Winter electricity demand. It's just gobsmackingly stupid. We don't have enough gas, and we don't have enough water.

I also vehemently disagree that they make the grid more resilient. If anything, they do the opposite. A large grid-powered datacentre can suddenly trip over to onsite backup power for very little reason - e.g. when the input voltage or frequency goes out of accepted bounds. If a 1GW monster AI datacentre does this, it can cause a cascade failure taking down the grid for potentially hundreds of miles around. For example, if the grid was experiencing a "modest" over-voltage condition (as seen in Spain a while back, before their nationwide blackout) then an AI datacentre could trip to backup, shedding 1GW of load from the grid and further compounding the over-voltage condition, which could cause other datacentres in the area to trip, leading to a cascade effect.

As for "AI skeptics and Datacentre NIMBYS are puppets of Chinese state propaganda", this is the most desperate piece of AI booster counterfactual I have ever heard. I've never seen any of this supposed propaganda, and the case against AI doesn't need any help from the Chinese.

[Jason Bloomberg]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

"AI skeptics and Datacentre NIMBYS are puppets of Chinese state propaganda" - It seems "were bought and paid for by George Soros" got worn out. But I'm sure that will make a comeback some day.

[NoneSuch]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

Soon AI datacenters will be treated the same as nuclear waste disposal sites.

"Yes, we need them, but not here."

Mines the one with the environmental research papers in the pocket.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

Well, unlike nuclear waste disposal sites, AI datacentres don't need to exist anywhere at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

Although I agree with your premise, power stations cooling towers in the UK is a bit or a hark back and would have peaked in the 80’s (until Thatcher) and started to turn the tide when one ‘dash for gas’.

CCGT much more water efficient than the old coal burners of the past…. and aren’t the only game in town. Esp. Where used at AI DC’s.

Still far-far worse than the green self-sufficiency for electricity like Scotland:

[cyberdemon]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

CCGTs still have "cooling towers". They just have gert big fans in them now, which makes them physically MUCH smaller, and with less visible vapour - I guess because the vapour exits at higher temperature, and you only see it when it is condensing. I saw them on a school trip to Didcot Power Station in 2003. The plant manager told us they were -less- efficient than the old convection ones, but he was probably talking about energy, rather than water.

They may be a -little- more water efficient (the latent heat of evaporation is the same, so i'm not sure if they are), but the stat referenced by the guardian came from something called the Ends Report (which is paywalled, I can't check it). Per the Graun: Analysis by the Ends Report revealed 47bn kilolitres (kl) of water was extracted from the environment in England in 2023. Electricity generation took 26bn kl, public water supply took 9.2bn kl and agriculture took 2bn kl.

I.e. currently over 50% of water abstraction apparently goes on power generation - five times as much as is used by the public water supply. If AI wants to add 50GW say of baseload to our overloaded grid (baseload about 25GW currently), that would mean more than doubling the amount of CCGTs (or building ten times as many Nuclear plants as we have) meaning something like another 50bn kilolitres (aka tonnes) of water use per year, pretty much doubling the country's water use.

BTW, Did you mean to add something at the end of your post? It ended with a colon.

Yes, green self-sufficiency would be great, but it can't support baseload (i.e. 24/7 load) because long-duration storage past a few hours is infeasible at Gigawatt scales. The best LDES technology we have is pumped hydro, but unless you are prepared to cut the top off Ben Nevis to build a giant lake in the sky, it's not going to happen. And to do all that just for the sake of AI slop would be a travesty. We're better off without it.

[Paul Herber]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

As I understand it these data centres create their own new water supply and remove pollution from the atmosphere. They could easily become the largest employer in the area with hi-tech well-paid jobs. In fact if the whole of the US was covered in data centres then all the problems of humanity, the world and the entire universe could be solved.

42.

/sarcasm

[Paul Herber]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

s/was/were/

I hang my head in shame.

[IGotOut]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

@A/C.

You're Jensen Huang and I claim my $5

[Rich 2]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

Ooooo good guess. I was going for The Orange Fuckwit myself

[Paul Herber]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

The Orange Fuckwit is related but to the Huang-Kerr side of the family.

[DS999]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

This isn't propaganda. If you like datacenters so much (and you're an actual US citizen rather than a bot or paid foreign shill) why don't you buy a house right next door to a datacenter if you think they're so great. Lots of properties up for sale around them at below market prices, put your money where your mouth is!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

You won’t need a snowplough for the front of your truuuuck to clear your driveway in Winter as a side benefit.

[Paul Herber]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

The residents of North Dakota dream of having a climate as mild as Canada!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

Actually, I do live near a datacenter, less than 1 mile away. I worked at that datacenter for many years and was able to negotiate a higher salary because I did live so close to it. I was able to get there the quickest out of any of the senior systems admins for the times someone had to go onsite for support that the onsite operators couldn't handle.

Where I live, we have a lot of datacenters, and the value of my house has increased because of them. Due to the demand of employment at said datacenters. I spent most of my career working in some of datacenters (old and new) before I retired.

P.S. I also have a nuclear power plant that supplies power for the area. We are grateful to have it as it produces more than enough power for the existing and new datacenters. The only problem with my electric bill isn't the cost of the actual power I consume (the actual cost per kilowatt is low), it's the taxes and fees that state, county, city have tacked onto it over the last couple of years (I think you can guess what political party is in charge now).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

What a load of horseshit.

Looks like OpenAI rogue agent ‘fka as bots’ pollution of article comments.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody hates data centers and AI...

... till they want advice on taxes, how-to-do-something, the latest health care question, what to watch on TV, and .... whatever. Sure, we can remove ALL artificial intelligence (or whatever Trump has renamed it today) from the earth. Cars pollute too. Let's remove them as well. Knives can cut people. So let's get rid of them. Or, we could learn to use all of these things in a sane, responsible manner and get the benefits thereof. Will it be perfect? No. Will errors and leaks occur? Yes. But overall, will it help us survive in an increasingly complex and commercialized world? I, for one, think so.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Everybody hates data centers and AI...

> ... till they want advice on taxes, how-to-do-something, the latest health care question, what to watch on TV, and .... whatever.

All of this can be had from this magical new technology called.. the Internet, you know.

The obvious problems with using LLMs to do the above, are that the outputs are a) often false, easily manipulated by untrustworthy interested parties, and completely inscrutable. b) LLMs are not intelligent, are not sentient and do not have personalities. So if you ever get a recommendation from an LLM for what TV show to watch, where to go on holiday, or (god help us) what stock to invest in, you know that given the same context, it has told everyone else the same thing. So for travel queries you end up being one of thousands of bewildered idiots descending on the same remote beauty spot at the same time, and for stocks it promotes speculative boom-bust cycles which wreck companies and the economy.

It's about as useful as Meth or Fentanyl. It might feel good at first and your dealer has given you a great bargain, but it is absolutely certain to ruin your life and the society you live in.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Everybody hates data centers and AI...

Everybody hates everything. Especially the modern world. Especially if you are of an age with the leisure time to attend public meetings about things.

Data centres are just the only thing you can turn up at your local town council meeting and complain about. You can't complain about Facebook or Microsoft or Youtube or the way kids today are always on their phone - so you complain about data centres

Media gets a nice public outrage story that gets clicks. Politicians, or at least their media focus algorithms, see a voter concern that they can get behind.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Everybody hates everything

That's not true - I like forests. They are the one Carbon Capture and Storage tech that actually works! And I like the good kind of modern infrastructure. I'd be more than happy to have a pylon or a railway line in my back garden.

But I DO hate that we are wasting all of our resources on this thing that is worth nothing! If anything it is worth less than nothing. Even if AI had no environmental cost, it would still be worth less than nothing, because of the abundance of bad use-cases and the shortage of actual good ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Everybody hates data centers and AI...

> leisure time to attend public meetings about things

You have so little regard for what is happening in your own locality that you believe public meetings about things - any things - are only something to attend to fill the time?

No wonder you are so out of touch with reality.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: you know that given the same context, it has told everyone else the same thing

One of the basic problems with current LLMs is that this is not true; the same prompt will NOT always give the same output. :/

[Trev 2]

Re: Everybody hates data centers and AI...

There was and currently still is a thing called a search engine which provided links to pages where you could get answers and evaluate different variations.

For more serious things like taxes, you ask someone with actual verified qualifications like a bookkeeper or accountant. Not a computer repeating what it read from 2000 sources, which it regularly "misunderstands".

Cars, knives etc have a purpose and solved a problem. AI tried to create a problem to solve...failed...then has to post rubbish on here trying to mask that result.

While we're at it, all the things AI claims it discovered or solved - we used to call that an algorithm. Only difference is we didn't have billions of £ or $ and insane levels of computing power available to researchers. In most cases it doesn't actually seem to have solved anything anyway.

[Jonjonz]

Don't forget the military grade "security"

If the Ukraine and Iran have taught us anything, it is that large data centers are prime military targets, and as such require military grade defenses, Who wants to live next door to a missile target?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Don't forget the military grade "security"

>Who wants to live next door to a missile target?

Like a school ?

[hayzoos]

When the other shoe drops

People have another reason to despise AI/AI datacenters, they haven't realized it yet. The scarcity of chips (i.e. RAM, GPU, CPU, etc) because chip makers are chasing the AI spend. The cost of electronics is climbing yet.

[wofow]

The movie hopper

The sound being emitted by them alone is enough to harm all life in proximity for miles. They emit a very harmful vibration that will harm the internal workings of human bodies and all animals. All life within proximity will flee or experience internal damage.

I don't want this technology. We don't need this technology. This is only going to quicken our doom. There is no upside to this.