Thread

1. stingraycharles · 1790769649 · focus · HN ↗

   Playing the devil’s advocate: don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies? If so, why would a private company provide this information?

   I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that.

   Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.

   1. NDlurker · 1790772273 · focus · HN ↗

      >And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.

      They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.

      1. dansquizsoft · 1790773505 · focus · HN ↗

         Not sure why you think your finger-in-the-wind wind understanding of future AI compute demand should trump the projections of companies who actually operate in this area?

         But if you do end up being correct, then the data centers in question will just sit partially or fully idle, using no / a tiny fraction of the electricity and water they could use (which as others have said on this forum, water usage concerns are massively overblown in most data center builds anyway)

         1. NDlurker · 1790775400 · focus · HN ↗

            My biggest problem is that this is surveillance state infrastructure

            1. MC995 · 1790775708 · focus · HN ↗

               That's a perfectly valid concern, but isn't specific to data centers or their construction. That's like being mad at a factory that produces pens because you don't like what people are writing with them.

               1. NDlurker · 1790788308 · focus · HN ↗

                  If they're building pen factories specifically to satisfy the demand of people buying pens to log the daily lives of the public, yeah, I'm mad at the factory.

                  1. dansquizsoft · 1790806988 · focus · HN ↗

                     Got any credible sources that data centers are being built with exactly this objective in mind?

                     Instead of, you know, people who just want to talk to ChatGPT or use Claude models for their software engineering work... I.e. the vast majority of grass-roots AI demand...

         2. streetfighter64 · 1790776038 · focus · HN ↗

            Not sure why you think the interests of companies who operate in this area, should trump environmental concerns for the people who live next to where they plan to build the data centers? I for one prefer quality of life for actual people over speculative profits for tech billionaires.

            I'm also not sure why you think it's a good thing to produce a bunch of electronics using conflict minerals and let them sit idle? Surely you must see the negative "externalities" of this?

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