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Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

356 points · 458 comments · sensanaty

  1. aliasxneo · · focus · HN ↗
    I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.

    The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.

    1. cyanydeez · · focus · HN ↗
      it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.
      1. hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
        LinkedIn CV says 8 Years working for google as a Data Center Facilities Technician, so. Yeah.

        Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.

        1. gspr · · focus · HN ↗
          Also outright dishonest to not add that as a disclaimer!
          1. Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
            The use of the word "we" seems pretty clear to me.
          2. williamtell · · focus · HN ↗
            >> During my career there
            1. gspr · · focus · HN ↗
              I certainly read that as "there" being the town, not the actual data center!
              1. hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
                Same, but revisiting it with context, it does seem mostly obvious enough.

                Written communication is hard

              2. tzs · · focus · HN ↗
                " I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient"

                That makes it very clear he was an employee of Google working at the data center.

          3. dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
            He specifically said he worked there. Did you think perhaps he possibly worked for the outsourced cleaning crew?
        2. david-gpu · · focus · HN ↗
          Biased, or well informed?
          1. hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
            In that specific position probably leaning more towards biased than towards well-informed, though both components likely do exist.

            It's not well-paid enough to be immune to kool-aid etc, and it's not on the sociopathic management level either, so we can expect a certain degree of very human rationalization going on.

            1. petergs · · focus · HN ↗
              How would being high paid help make you immune to kool aid? In my experience in low paid work, it’s a lot easier to hate the company…
              1. hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
                Being paid well enough gives the mind an out from cognitive dissonance that doesn't involve actually believing the company narrative.

                It offers the compelling counter-narrative of "yes, we're evil, but hell yeah this is lucrative af". That makes the ego even happier, as in that story, one is the clever mastermind playing the system, so we can reasonably assume that that path will be taken.

                If that path is unavailable, and cognitive dissonance sets in, the other path left is actually drinking the kool-aid. The corp must be nice, after all.

                (This all assumes that people do in fact want to do good and have a conscience, but for those that doesn't apply to, there's the sociopathy path as mentioned in the previous comment. Reality is slightly more murky and dynamic, but I'd argue that this rough if-ladder exists as described.)

                1. sapphicsnail · · focus · HN ↗
                  Have you ever talked to people with a low paying job?
                  1. hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
                    Yes, I find it a lot more pleasant than most of this industry.
      2. Marha01 · · focus · HN ↗
        > it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.

        It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.

        1. jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
          And who exactly would they be astroturfing for?
          1. stvltvs · · focus · HN ↗
            Big Labor j/k
          2. quietsegfault · · focus · HN ↗
            People looking for something to run against?
          3. fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
            China and Russia.
          4. ewild · · focus · HN ↗
            ignorance
          5. phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
            Future of Life Institute, Guardrails Alliance, Public First Action, PauseAI, ControlAI.

            Both sides of this issue are doing the same thing, you’d be a fool to believe otherwise.

            1. jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
              Only one side can afford astroturfers and has a large contingent of employees on HN.
          6. Marha01 · · focus · HN ↗
            China, of course. They don't like that the US is currently ahead in the AI race.
    2. bix6 · · focus · HN ↗
      Ok and? This wouldn’t be an issue if google et al would just share the numbers instead of hiding behind NDAs and whatever else.
      1. fastball · · focus · HN ↗
        Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something. Giving those people concrete numbers is not gonna change such misconceptions (and that's assuming they look at such numbers in reasonable relative terms in the first place).
        1. collingreen · · focus · HN ↗
          Seems easy enough to report multiple numbers and be clear on what water comes in (can even separate initial filling/construction from ongoing usage) vs what gets lost and what comes out as waste. I think people can understand this and it isn't a good enough reason to not share the numbers.
          1. TehCorwiz · · focus · HN ↗
            There are so many facets that numbers alone don't cover:

            Are they drawing from a flowing source or an aquifer? Is it depleting a limited resource?

            Is it evaporative or does the waste get discharged?

            Is the waste water treated for the metal that it leaches from the cooling system?

            Is it allowed to reach thermal equilibrium first or is the water discharged warm which can cause algae blooms or other problems?

        2. bix6 · · focus · HN ↗
          Fair point. But if I had initially learned that google was putting data centers in and it recycled water and it was a minor amount I would be more receptive than hearing that google is bullying communities and hiding details behind NDAs.
        3. Lanktion · · focus · HN ↗
          It is consumed because they evaporate it away and remove it from the local environment.

          They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city

          1. fastball · · focus · HN ↗
            Evaporated water stays in the water cycle though. It comes back down as rain, and returns to the water sources that were depleted (assuming these data centers are generally not using underground aquifers, which I think is true).
            1. phatfish · · focus · HN ↗
              You can't control the water cycle over a datacenter and its water source, it is a global system.
            2. kube-system · · focus · HN ↗
              The issue for most (well, at least those who are informed and not just bandwagoning) is that it raises the prices of utilities, in which case it doesn't really matter that it stays in the water cycle. If your local municipal water authority has to expand operations to keep up with demand, that is going to incur capital costs which will either raise rates or require tax dollars.

              While this water usage might be not a big deal in places with abundant water, it could be problematic in some areas of the US.

          2. timschmidt · · focus · HN ↗
            > They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city

            Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas fired steam turbine. And one such installation was proposed for this city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.

            Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.

        4. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
          > Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something.

          Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.

        5. tzs · · focus · HN ↗
          The majority of current large data centers use open-loop evaporative water cooling which does in fact consume water.

          Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.

          This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.

          Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].

          [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fwpcoa.org&#x2F;content.aspx?page_id=5&amp;club_id=859275&amp;item_id=130961" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fwpcoa.org&#x2F;content.aspx?page_id=5&amp;club_id=859275...

      2. anigbrowl · · focus · HN ↗
        Not sure why this is being downvoted. If you noticeably distort the local economy then people are naturally going to want to know what resources you&#x27;re consuming.

        but trade secrets

        I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.

        1. bluecheese452 · · focus · HN ↗
          You have some very motivated people with deep pockets who do not like negative press. Say anything negative and the downvotes will roll in.
          1. WarmWash · · focus · HN ↗
            Surely the people who have worked in tech, with datacenters or even in them for decades are wrong, and the people who learned the word &quot;datacenter&quot; 6 months ago are right.
            1. phatfish · · focus · HN ↗
              Facts and experience mean nothing when everyone knows you are a liar.
              1. WarmWash · · focus · HN ↗
                Anti-vaxxers favorite line...
        2. WarmWash · · focus · HN ↗
          The irony is that it is unlikely datacenters would hit that &quot;above a certain size&quot;

          The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.

          1. jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
            People do just that.
          2. pooploop64 · · focus · HN ↗

            [dead]

        3. bix6 · · focus · HN ↗
          Industrial use should never get to hide. It’s such impactful use so every aspect should be scrutinized.
    3. PunchyHamster · · focus · HN ↗
      It is worth remembering that it heavily depends on cooling system involved.

      Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude

      But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north

      1. taotau · · focus · HN ↗
        I&#x27;ve been spending some time in Tasmania, Aus for the last few weeks and have been following the local debate regarding 3 data centres Firmus is planning on building here.

        While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.

        Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.

        The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].

        When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.

        However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.

        Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.

        [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tasmaniancountry.com&#x2F;newspaper&#x2F;tasmanian-country&#x2F;firmus-technologies-accidently-reveals-it-wanted-use-tasmanian" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tasmaniancountry.com&#x2F;newspaper&#x2F;tasmanian-country...

    4. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

      [deleted]

    5. michaelt · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water&#x2F;power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.

      It&#x27;d be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.

      1. minimaxir · · focus · HN ↗
        That would not be good PR because a) it would be seen as flippant and b) no one would believe Google.

        Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.

      2. Ancapistani · · focus · HN ↗
        Google has some custom hardware, so directly reporting it could be an issue.

        Now that it has been, though…

      3. therealpygon · · focus · HN ↗
        Data centers tend to be higher security facilities for a reason. Publicizing any of their technical specs isn’t really beneficial, especially when any numbers that are provided will be dismissed unless even more information is provided to back them up.

        Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.

        1. bluealienpie · · focus · HN ↗
          It’s not high security if everyone is mandated to do it. Power consumption, energy sources, water usage for coolant, waste water treatment plan, etc.

          I think the disinformation is people thinking that data centers directly use vast quantities of water. What happens is the power use stresses water supplies in local areas.

          <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2026&#x2F;jun&#x2F;08&#x2F;datacenter-ai-drought-water" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2026&#x2F;jun&#x2F;08&#x2F;datacenter-a...

        2. bliteben · · focus · HN ↗
          Absurd! every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.

          If they are using over a certain percent of any public utility (and yes ALL utilities are public) the utility should force it to be disclosed.

          1. dspillett · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.

            Correct. But they can&#x27;t so easily without Google&#x27;s (or other big tech companies) big legal departments to make challenging the excuses difficult.

          2. skyberrys · · focus · HN ↗
            How do you see all utilities as public? What if a commercial building has rooftop solar?
        3. bix6 · · focus · HN ↗
          How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?
          1. dekhn · · focus · HN ↗
            The big hyperscalers always knew that eventually the tide would turn against them (for example when local towns noticed that the DCs didn&#x27;t actually need very many locals to run the facilities).

            They carefully hid things so they could expand for as long as possible, knowing that having the necessary footprint for services, cloud, and AI would be key to winning the race. When I worked at Google, our leaders were always &quot;proud&quot; they had built such a huge fleet (originally for search + ads but rapidly growing to a wide range of products and research) without competitors knowing just how large, because they figured eventually AWS and MSFT would realize they had to build out massively to handle the coming loads.

            So they hide these things to stave off complaints for as long as possible.

      4. Eyas · · focus · HN ↗
        Worth considering in the current climate. My impression a while ago is that the exact water and power usage of any large company&#x27;s data center is seen as a trade secret of sorts; if a large company invested to become XX% efficient, it might not want competitors to know it hit a certain efficiency target.
        1. bix6 · · focus · HN ↗

          [dead]

          1. junofan · · focus · HN ↗
            It’s already permitted and operating. Presumably they want the $XX million tax rebates, which haven’t yet been paid out according to this article. Maybe that’s the case in other places too.

            Why not get people riled up over water under the bridge and not unpaid rebates? What can anybody do about it? Send the sheriff to lock out the facility?

            1. bix6 · · focus · HN ↗
              Sorry but large companies forcing NDAs with public servants does not fly.
              1. forgetfreeman · · focus · HN ↗
                Absolutely. That shouldn&#x27;t even be legally possible outside of very narrowly scoped defense contracts.
      5. vmg12 · · focus · HN ↗
        Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it&#x27;s low) and people don&#x27;t believe him.
        1. bluecheese452 · · focus · HN ↗

          [dead]

          1. vmg12 · · focus · HN ↗
            Exactly my point
        2. dspillett · · focus · HN ↗
          Largely because of how many times it could have been stated prior, given it had been a talking point for some time, and the lack of actual evidence (him saying something is not often taken at face value…).

          Of course, they&#x27;d like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won&#x27;t get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.

        3. jamiek88 · · focus · HN ↗
          That’s because he’s a known liar. Like he’s famous for his sociopathic lying even amongst sociopathic lying billionaires. Impressive almost.
          1. tredre3 · · focus · HN ↗
            That may be true, but I have a feeling that even a third party audit wouldn&#x27;t appease you. If they confirm Sam&#x27;s numbers, you&#x27;ll claim that they were bribed. So how can we solve this problem? Can we trust government officials? Are there any non-biased organizations that could do the audit?
            1. cindyllm · · focus · HN ↗

              [dead]

        4. shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
          Honestly, the water usage isn&#x27;t the real issue - the electricity use during a climate crisis is. It&#x27;s also a huge climate opportunity, because datacenter growth is basically gluing a giant pipe of financer money straight into datacenter and support buildout, and if we passed laws requiring the new electrical capacity be 100% renewable... They&#x27;d still spend the money, they&#x27;re convinced this is the future so no cost is too high (an assertion I feel confident making because we&#x27;re literally experimenting with putting datacenters in space right now).

          Water use has locally been an issue in places where municipalities were taken advantage of and their local water supply management laws weren&#x27;t set up to account for a giant consumer to just roll up and start pulling past replenishment rate. But there&#x27;s nothing about datacenters that demand that be the case; those places were cheap to build in (and why they were cheap to build in should probably be its own graduate political theory thesis &#x2F; series of fraud and mismanagement investigations and prosecutions).

      6. jonas21 · · focus · HN ↗
        They do! In great detail:

        <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sustainability.google&#x2F;files&#x2F;1699a2e19277e478b38a659f00cb38398a836e8c&#x2F;download-1699a2e1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sustainability.google&#x2F;files&#x2F;1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...

        The data tables start on p. 90.

    6. cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
      Did your datacenter consume 9GW?

      I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.

      The reason for the &quot;craze&quot; is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.

      1. T-A · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt; Did your datacenter consume 9GW?

        I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.

        <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.enconnex.com&#x2F;data-center-energy-consumption-and-power-sources&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.enconnex.com&#x2F;data-center-energy-consumption-and-...

        <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techplustrends.com&#x2F;1gw-data-center-power-consumption-guide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techplustrends.com&#x2F;1gw-data-center-power-consumption...

        1. cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt; I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.

          The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I&#x27;m referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]

          Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.

          But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there&#x27;s about 8 of them in the US.

          1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.

          [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;tech-industry&#x2F;kevin-o-learys-9-gw-utah-data-center-campus-approved" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;tech-industry&#x2F;kevin-o-learys-9-...

          1. LaurensBER · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; 1GW of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi&#x2F;Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.

            I haven&#x27;t done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it&#x27;s pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.

            This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we&#x27;re really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).

            1. rocqua · · focus · HN ↗
              It’s not ‘spare goes to training’. These data centres are training first. Inference is really rather efficient, so not why datacenters are so big.
          2. verdverm · · focus · HN ↗
            If we printed electricity like China, this would not be an issue, we can have more electricity at lower prices when we&#x27;re ready

            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pv-magazine.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;09&#x2F;03&#x2F;chinas-solar-capacity-hits-1-28-tw-accounts-for-31-5-of-total-power-capacity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pv-magazine.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;09&#x2F;03&#x2F;chinas-solar-capacity...

          3. timr · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use

            Not even close to a true statement.

            EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].

            According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1&#x2F;1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.

            For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. Robert Moses dam in Niagara Falls does about 2,700MW.

            [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;state&#x2F;seds&#x2F;data.php?incfile=&#x2F;state&#x2F;seds&#x2F;sep_sum&#x2F;html&#x2F;rank_es_capita.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;state&#x2F;seds&#x2F;data.php?incfile=&#x2F;state&#x2F;seds&#x2F;...

            [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;energyexplained&#x2F;electricity&#x2F;electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;energyexplained&#x2F;electricity&#x2F;electricity-...

            1. cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
              Fine, an exaggeration but not off by much.

              If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it&#x27;d rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh).

              It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.

              1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

                [deleted]

              2. timr · · focus · HN ↗
                Okay. And? Data centers are aggregating the demand of nationwide consumption. They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.

                Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.

                1. crtified · · focus · HN ↗
                  It seems like the size criticism is one of proportionality-of-effect (in various domains such as energy usage, utility costs to citizens, and environmental effects upon water supplies and quality, land usage, noise pollution etc) upon the given locales in which they are proposed to be centralised.
                  1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

                    [deleted]

                2. cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
                  &gt; They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.

                  Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it&#x27;s not efficient in terms of time to transport.

                  &gt; Attacking them for size

                  I didn&#x27;t attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that&#x27;s 9GW worth of physical gas that&#x27;s been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.

                  I don&#x27;t care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don&#x27;t care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.

                  1. timr · · focus · HN ↗
                    &gt; Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached.

                    <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacenters.google&#x2F;efficiency&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacenters.google&#x2F;efficiency&#x2F;

      2. lokar · · focus · HN ↗
        There were certainly 1GW DCs in the US 10+ years ago.
        1. cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
          Do you have any in mind? How many?

          Given the current power consumption of states, I find it hard to believe.

          1. lokar · · focus · HN ↗
            I remember one in the Midwest was growing past that.

            Even for smaller sites, 1-2 MW would have been very small.

            1. epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
              1-2MW is like one or two rows of older non-GPU machines, it can&#x27;t be called a DC.
              1. kube-system · · focus · HN ↗
                That&#x27;s what many data centers look like for a mid&#x2F;large non-tech company that in-houses their datacenter operations. They&#x27;re often otherwise a &quot;real&quot; datacenter with UPS, backup generators, multiple tier-1 carriers, chillers, raised floors &#x2F;w hot&#x2F;cold aisles, etc.

                You see it less now since the shift to the cloud, but in the 00s this stuff was everywhere.

      3. aftbit · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt;However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that Agate LLC is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.

        The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.

      4. dipierro · · focus · HN ↗
        I don’t think that 1MW is something older datacenters consumed. Unless you are talking about a single rack in a corporate server room.

        It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24&#x2F;7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.

        Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.

        1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

          [deleted]

        2. crote · · focus · HN ↗
          You&#x27;re confusing MW with MWh. Older DCs did indeed consume on the order of 1MW of continuous power, like the one at [0]. The 2012-dated DC at [1] has a redundant 22kW power feed per 42U rack, so that&#x27;s ~500W per RU - which for most pre-AI servers was plenty.

          With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would&#x27;ve been considered huge.

          [0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.northcdatacenters.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;northc-datacenters&#x2F;delft&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.northcdatacenters.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;northc-datacenters&#x2F;delf...

          [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eurofiber.com&#x2F;en-nl&#x2F;data-centers-netherlands&#x2F;data-center-utrecht-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eurofiber.com&#x2F;en-nl&#x2F;data-centers-netherlands&#x2F;dat...

        3. cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
          You are confusing MW with MWh and apparently kWh.

          A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.

          1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.

          A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.

    7. pj_mukh · · focus · HN ↗
      Along those lines just a reminder folks, China is installing about 1GW equivalent of Solar power per day [1]. Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries [2]. These are not zero-regulation, socialist wastelands.

      All this whinging about &quot;is this project using too much power or not&quot; is pointless scarcity that we&#x27;ve chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?

      [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reneweconomy.com.au&#x2F;just-staggering-china-installs-100-solar-panels-a-second-as-total-pv-capacity-tops-1-terawatt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reneweconomy.com.au&#x2F;just-staggering-china-installs-1...

      [2]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov.au&#x2F;rebates&#x2F;solar-sharer-offer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov.au&#x2F;rebates&#x2F;solar-sharer-offer

      1. stogot · · focus · HN ↗
        What about water usage?
        1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

          [deleted]

        2. dgacmu · · focus · HN ↗
          For most datacenters the actual largest source of water use is indirectly from power generation (coal, nat gas). Solar reduces that a lot also.
        3. adastra22 · · focus · HN ↗
          The water isn’t actually used. It is slightly warmed.
          1. LaurensBER · · focus · HN ↗
            In some cases chemicals are added to the water to increase cooling efficiency.

            This is a choice, alternative approaches do exist but we should definitely not assume that datacenter water usage is _always_ benign.

            1. shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
              In the Nebraska system, the water goes into the municipal waste channels and is treated like any other municipal wastewater, so the chemical additives are handled.
              1. stogot · · focus · HN ↗
                what does handled mean?
        4. carefree-bob · · focus · HN ↗
          Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.

          You understand, the water isn&#x27;t used up? It&#x27;s not even used up in agriculture. Even when you drink a glass of water, the water doesn&#x27;t actually disappear, soon someone else will be drinking it. The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today. No need to panic about someone using water.

          The only reason to be concerned is if someone is mixing the water with other chemicals at a rate faster than the natural filtration and then not paying for the treatment to purify the water again. But that is not an issue with data centers. Merely using water is a concern only for people who don&#x27;t understand how matter is preserved, but a school physics book should dispel those concerns.

          1. adzm · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; It&#x27;s not even used up in agriculture.

            However, the source of the water can be &quot;used up&quot; faster than it can be replenished, such as in the case of some aquifers

          2. mik1998 · · focus · HN ↗
            That’s not entirely correct. Overall water is preserved but local sources of freshwater can be depleted or contaminated, which raises the cost of water.
          3. alpaca128 · · focus · HN ↗
            Sure the water is still somewhere, but its location is important for future use. US water reservoirs are at problematically low levels already.

            &gt; Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.

            The linked article talks about &gt;500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It&#x27;s nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it&#x27;s such a common thing to do then why isn&#x27;t it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?

            1. jeffbee · · focus · HN ↗
              &quot;Recirculating&quot; water isn&#x27;t thermodynamically the same. Evaporating the water is THE POINT of the system. You can make closed-loop coolers but they use more energy.
          4. tbrownaw · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today.

            Nope. Plants turn water into oxygen and (the H part of) hydrocarbons, and animals turn those back into water. And after that, the result is different water than the cycle started with.

        5. packetslave · · focus · HN ↗
          Funny how nobody asks the folks who build golf courses &quot;what about water usage?&quot;

          hint: An individual 18-hole course uses between 300,000 to 1 million gallons per day

          1. verdverm · · focus · HN ↗
            Rather than talking in absolute numbers, ratios help relate human activities better, an example:

            If we can close 1 in 3 golf courses and have all the water we need for data centers - and then some - would that be acceptable to our society?

            Do we desire so much golf that we&#x27;d prefer to stress our water systems instead?

          2. asymmetric · · focus · HN ↗
            I think people actually do though? They are even sabotaged at times (has happened in Europe at least), to protest against their water usage.
            1. lokar · · focus · HN ↗
              I’ve seen it brought up many times
          3. stogot · · focus · HN ↗
            I’ve brought this up
      2. wredcoll · · focus · HN ↗
        Hmmm, which political party is famously against solar and renewables in general?
        1. pj_mukh · · focus · HN ↗
          The same one that is paying for their support for data centers and is shifting as a response [1]. Like I said, if political capital is being spent shifting peoples&#x27; stances, how much of a waste is it to know we could move them on this and we chose not to. Generational fumble.

          [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;homenews&#x2F;senate&#x2F;6121776-gop-worried-data-center-midterms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;homenews&#x2F;senate&#x2F;6121776-gop-worried-data...

      3. FridayoLeary · · focus · HN ↗
        China are also building tons of coal plants.
      4. WatchDog · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt; Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries

        This is overstating things.

        Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.

        You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.

        A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.

        If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.

    8. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.

      I&#x27;m sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what&#x27;s the obvious reason you couldn&#x27;t dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that&#x27;d only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.

      1. jmmv · · focus · HN ↗
        Google never wanted to share details about their datacenters because they thought (think?) their power efficiency was a competitive advantage. So it&#x27;d be lower than you expect.

        Also, they didn&#x27;t want you to be able to guesstimate how many machines &#x2F; computing power they had, for similar reasons.

        1. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
          Right, they&#x27;re so power efficient they don&#x27;t want to tell the people around them how little water they consume or &quot;not consume&quot;?

          People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say &quot;No, actually we&#x27;re not, here is the numbers&quot;, because Google doesn&#x27;t want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I&#x27;m sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was &quot;obvious&quot; they couldn&#x27;t divulge how little&#x2F;much water the place uses.

          1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

            [deleted]

          2. lg5689 · · focus · HN ↗
            Tbh this sounds perfectly normal to me. Companies often don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s worth defending themselves if theres no actual financial damage, and certainly don&#x27;t want random employees to be doing it. It can be very frustrating, both for employees who want to defend their reputation and for the public who want the truth, but companies can be extremely conservative about chosing their public relations battles.
          3. lokar · · focus · HN ↗
            I worked at google as well.

            They published a lot of less specific info (PUE numbers, water efficiency, etc)

            They were very sensitive about any site specific numbers.

          4. oneplane · · focus · HN ↗
            You can assume that any company at a large scale will not want to divulge any information unless absolutely necessary. Doesn&#x27;t matter if you or I think that it might not need to be secret or might not be competitive. Unless there is both an internal push, a need and a sort of proof dat the information can be released, it will never happen. You&#x27;ll usually find thing that are simplified or aggregated for PR and marketing, or things that are required for legal reasons, but everything else stays internal.
          5. tbrownaw · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; don&#x27;t want to tell the people around them

            It&#x27;s probably more that they don&#x27;t want to tell competitors anything they don&#x27;t absolutely have to.

    9. adastra22 · · focus · HN ↗
      Those reasons aren’t obvious to me. Why not just be transparent if that’s the case?
      1. ssss11 · · focus · HN ↗
        Yep - better off redacting the great efficiencies we’re doing.
      2. monocasa · · focus · HN ↗
        Google considers pretty much everything in hwops to be a trade secret. The point is to keep the specifics unknown as much as possible from competitors; the public at large&#x27;s knowledge is just collateral damage in that fight.
        1. dietr1ch · · focus · HN ↗
          If they are so good at it, they should push to make that the bare minimum and get to hold all future datacenter permits.
        2. thayne · · focus · HN ↗
          What benefit could competitors get from that information?
          1. esafak · · focus · HN ↗
            The ability to improve their data centers, of course. Google is the company that launched data centers with commodity components.
          2. shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
            It tells them exactly how much they have to invest in hardware buildout to stay competitive with Google in terms of raw compute.

            This is right up there with being able to predict a competitor&#x27;s total manufacturing capacity for the next year because you have hard numbers on their raw material purchase.

          3. bryan_w · · focus · HN ↗
            It doesn&#x27;t even have to be competitors their suppliers would love to know the total amount of widgets that they&#x27;ll be buying. That way they know if they&#x27;re the single supplier
          4. washadjeffmad · · focus · HN ↗
            A friend accidentally told me not just how many servers Google was deploying for Bard, but what they were putting in them and the volume of the scale up.

            A competitor with that information might have made a rush on a supply-constrained component market or negotiated longer term pricing agreements.

          5. motoboi · · focus · HN ↗
            The strategic advantage, by definition, is something you, as a company, don&#x27;t know what it is. If you know, then people leaving your company take the information to competition and the it&#x27;s not strategic nor advantage anymore.

            So, given that you don&#x27;t know what makes your company better then the competition, it&#x27;s better to hide everything you can so you don&#x27;t accidentally disclose useful information. God forbid competition discover your own strategic advantage before you do.

        3. shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
          And this one in particular is a high-ticket trade secret; it has been for decades, long before the AI push.

          Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It&#x27;s handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) &quot;Hey, here&#x27;s the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything.&quot;

          ... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.

      3. aliasxneo · · focus · HN ↗
        This was more than a decade ago. Back then, the data center didn&#x27;t even have public signage because Google was trying to be so secretive. Things have changed significantly since then and a lot of data is now published publicly.
        1. kube-system · · focus · HN ↗
          Very few datacenters run by companies of any size, large or small, have signage.

          Companies put signs on buildings so you can find them. Signs are important for retailers or offices where people need to find it. This isn&#x27;t really the case for a data center. Data centers typically have a sign with simply the address of the building on it, so delivery drivers can find it. Any sort of a sign with branding is a waste of money at best, and a security liability at worst.

          Even if you aren&#x27;t worried about intentional security threats to your data center, you don&#x27;t want the name of your company on it, because people will start showing up at the gate there instead of your primary business location.

    10. WarmWash · · focus · HN ↗
      The current hysteria has little to do with datacenters and a lot to do with societal unrest about AI.
      1. numbsafari · · focus · HN ↗
        Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews. People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.

        I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.

        1. vovavili · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt;People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.

          Others don&#x27;t like technological progress to be reduced to the speed of bureaucracies who have no compelling incentive to be particularly efficient. Especially when the technology at hand might end up making quite a few of these bureaucracies much less staffed.

          1. whatshisface · · focus · HN ↗
            The thinking on display in this thread is something like,

            &quot;I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a &#x27;call us&#x27; form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform.&quot;

            1. vovavili · · focus · HN ↗
              I honestly have no idea what you&#x27;re trying to say.
          2. estearum · · focus · HN ↗
            People dislike secretive bureaucrats more than they dislike slow or overstaffed ones.

            Good luck with this attitude homie!

            1. JumpCrisscross · · focus · HN ↗
              &gt; Good luck with this attitude homie!

              This was the attitude these leaders took, though. It shouldn’t be downvoted simply for being wrong—it’s wrong in an interesting way.

              Lots of folks in Silicon Valley thought they’d be cheered for bypassing bureaucracy. They were wrong and will pay dearly for it, possibly with their wealth and freedom. But it was a commonly-accepted attitude, in part driven by the Bay Area’s obscenely inept bureaucracies around power and building.

        2. tbrownaw · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt; Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews.

          Hasn&#x27;t it been common knowledge for a while -- as in since well before the ai boom -- that those reviews are in practice mostly tools for obstructionism (I don&#x27;t want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we&#x27;ll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?

          Is that&#x27;s even half true, I don&#x27;t think the &quot;unforced&quot; there really applies.

          1. vel0city · · focus · HN ↗
            If they&#x27;re truly there to just be crooked and corrupt then sure let&#x27;s remove&#x2F;reduce them openly and together.

            Shady backroom deals are bad though, and selectively choosing to apply the rules to some and wave them for others isn&#x27;t cool, in either direction.

          2. samudrijan · · focus · HN ↗
            I like clean water to drink and air to breathe and a climate that isn’t on an increasingly hotter trajectory. Government should police corporations.
            1. WarmWash · · focus · HN ↗
              We could also just stop giving bad corporations money. I can assure you it&#x27;s the thing that they absolutely hate the most and 10x as effective as trying to write legislation.
              1. katdork · · focus · HN ↗
                this works less and less as corporations buy from each other and everybody has things like pensions&#x2F;401k and investments. there are also many who will buy shit regardless. it&#x27;s just ignoring the reality of the situation, really.
              2. fzeroracer · · focus · HN ↗
                Companies aren&#x27;t earning the majority of profit from your average joe buying products anymore. The consumers are investors: Rich assholes with too much money, gamblers, and true believers. It&#x27;s a lot like how McDonalds true income comes not from consumers but from holding and renting out valuable plots of land.
            2. onion2k · · focus · HN ↗
              That&#x27;s entirely fair and reasonable if you level your complaints about power and water use at everything that uses a lot rather than just data centres.

              If you&#x27;re only saying we need fewer data centres then your argument is against AI, and not in favor of sensible approach to the climate.

          3. Forgeties79 · · focus · HN ↗
            Then let’s change the laws and regulations.

            In a society of laws you can’t just ignore the ones you don’t like, otherwise it undermines the entire system and suddenly the ones we all generally like&#x2F;support aren’t being followed either.

            1. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
              Elon musk used his hundreds of billions of dollars to buy a social media platform to push a certain politician, bribed voters, and bought his way in to the government to fire everyone who would investigate his AI business.

              You can&#x27;t just &quot;change laws&quot; when the people building these data centers control the laws.

      2. bdangubic · · focus · HN ↗
        I live in northern va and I can tell you that histeria is about ballooning electric and other bills. vast majority of population is unfortunately “not there” in regards to any unrest about AI
        1. master_crab · · focus · HN ↗
          Yup. From Fairfax. Very much what you said.
        2. bryan_w · · focus · HN ↗
          Not saying that increases in power bills aren&#x27;t caused by ai datacenters at all, but I would like to remind people that there is currently a conflict going on that is impairing 5-50% of the worlds energy supply, which even if we used none of it, still would impact us (LNG exports) and getting people angry at tech is a good distraction for this time of year.

          I think there&#x27;s more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills

          1. bdangubic · · focus · HN ↗
            there is definitely more to the story when you are not personally affected by it deeply, then you have the luxury of looking at “deeper meanings” and shit. when you are, shit is quite simple and to the point. I attend every public hearing, community open house and submit shit online (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loudoun.gov&#x2F;datacenterstandards" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loudoun.gov&#x2F;datacenterstandards if you live in the area) and it has absolutely nothing (and never will) to do with some conflict in some shithole place. it is 100% a local issue and it is not only if you have the luxury to not be personally affected by and which gives you additional luxury to dream up “global reasons…”
        3. roenxi · · focus · HN ↗
          Is there a well known reason that the US has ruled out building more power plants to meet the increasing demand? This seems like a weird complaint; if it is a problem that this industrial activity uses power, why not ban all industrial activity? Traditionally the response to more demand has been to build more supply.
          1. kube-system · · focus · HN ↗
            1. Power plants take a long time to build and large capital investments, typically both public and private dollars. The power demand for the current hyperscaler datacenter trend is happening faster than supply can keep up, guaranteeing the current spike in prices.

            2. Most heavy industrial users of power are running stable businesses that are often expected to offset some of the infrastructure costs themselves, making payments over time. Not only have many hyperscalers bent the rules to avoid doing this, even if they did do things the right way, much of the rapid investment is highly leveraged and if a bubble pops, taxpayers would be stuck with the infrastructure bill anyway.

          2. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
            Because the bubble will pop if they have to wait for power plants to be built.
      3. hackernud3s · · focus · HN ↗
        That can&#x27;t be true. People obviously believe DCs have big local impact and it really does affect their power bills at least.

        The global impact of AI doesn&#x27;t change when you force DCs to build in another area.

        1. hinkley · · focus · HN ↗
          It does if it slows the rate of data center builds and makes it progressively more difficult to site future data centers.
          1. hackernud3s · · focus · HN ↗
            If you make it hard to build them in the US they will get built in other countries. Do you think Chinese residents get any say over where DCs go?
            1. rapind · · focus · HN ↗
              Exactly. It&#x27;s just like when we used to pay workers a living wage. Well where did all of those jobs go amiright?! Stupid peasants can be so annoying... we&#x27;re just trying to bring everyone into the grand age of abundance!

              Totally not a new robber baron era at all. That&#x27;s just fake news guys.

              &#x2F;s

        2. carefree-bob · · focus · HN ↗
          Kansas is a rural state that survives because of government agricultural subsidies as well as costly boondoggles such as ethanol that everyone else has to pay for. Complaining about government subsidies also going to other people is a bit rich.
      4. lokar · · focus · HN ↗
        The noise issues seem real, but don’t impact whole cities
        1. bryan_w · · focus · HN ↗
          Is it? Can you give me a link to a video that shows the issue in a straightforward manner?

          Most of the shorts I&#x27;ve seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.

          I&#x27;ve also seen ben jordans price on &quot;infrasound&quot; but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).

          I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it&#x27;s a pervasive or unsolvable problem

          1. toddmorey · · focus · HN ↗
            the generators and cooling equipment on some data centers are certainly audible.

            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;shorts&#x2F;AAQsnrAHy5Y?si=vgmEGHS38mzzs2G9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;shorts&#x2F;AAQsnrAHy5Y?si=vgmEGHS38mzzs2G9

            1. georgemcbay · · focus · HN ↗
              Another video of the same data center:

              <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;interesting&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1uleoa2&#x2F;sound_emitted_247_from_a_30_megawatt_data_center&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;interesting&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1uleoa2&#x2F;sound_...

              Sound meter shows &quot;only&quot; ~60 db, but that constant audible hum is, IMO, the data center actually assaulting those residents and apparently doing so 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

              If someone who lived near that place set fire to the data center and I ended up on the jury and heard these recordings I would do everything in my power to nullify because that seems like a completely justified response to me in the face of the company running the data center not shutting down until the problem is fully fixed.

            2. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
              This is so much worse than I was expecting. You&#x27;d pretty much have to move out, and your property would be worthless for anything but industrial use at that point.
            3. tripledry · · focus · HN ↗
              Is this something that happens by accident in the sense that the decision makers didn&#x27;t know how it would sound or is there actually someone in a room at some point going &quot;fuck it&quot;.
      5. toddmorey · · focus · HN ↗
        I mean, the latest ones are massive. Climate concerns aside, data centers don’t make great neighbors. They are never a net positive for the local community.
        1. WarmWash · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt;They are never a net positive for the local community

          Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.

          The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.

          1. lostlogin · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay.

            We hear about their tax breaks though. Why don’t they get treated the same as other local businesses, and pay the same rates?

            1. EgregiousCube · · focus · HN ↗
              Because the tax revenue of them not coming there is zero, and the tax revenue after the breaks is very significant.
          2. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
            The datacenter companies are forcing local governments to sign NDAs so they can&#x27;t discuss the details with other areas, leading to them being pressured in to taking horrible deals that are a net negative for the area without.

            They force these NDAs so people can&#x27;t collaborate and see what a horrible deal they are getting.

      6. hn_throwaway_99 · · focus · HN ↗
        Two things can be true at the same time. Data centers are fundamentally extractive. They take resources in terms of space, electricity and water and make someone far away richer. They have almost no positive impact on their local communities beyond the initial build out jobs, and then after that they are huge windowless boxes that provide almost no jobs (and in the future, as they are more and more automated, they really will provide no jobs). And their negative impacts are already here, e.g. Maryland utility customers saw a huge increase in their electric bills due to data center build out.

        At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology that its most significant leaders say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near&#x2F;mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn&#x27;t do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.

        So yeah, color me shocked that most people don&#x27;t want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it &quot;hysteria&quot; is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.

      7. geaibleu · · focus · HN ↗
        There is no hysteria. We don&#x27;t want to subsidise your lifestyle and to have pollution you produce dumped in our rural parts. We don&#x27;t want it and it does not benefit us. Have all datacenters you want in your backyard.
      8. ButlerianJihad · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt; societal unrest about AI

        More generally, societal fatigue with tech culture overtaking everything, subsuming power from every other corner. Surveillance, the Zuck and Elon, COVID-19, immorality, Luigi Mangione and Elizabeth Holmes, a glut of cat videos and jackal-eared Wikipe-tans, delinquency of minors, 5G and everything else that technology can share some blame for, now focused on their visible manifestations.

        The trouble is, once a danger becomes visible and ubiquitous, you’ve already lost. Fighting “A.I. Data Centres” is literally quixotic. If you look up “quixotic” in the Spanish Wikipedia, there is a photo of a chivalrous knight jousting with Nvidia’s CEO.

    11. thayne · · focus · HN ↗
      My biggest problem with the data centers getting built around me are that they are building new natural gas power plants to power them, that will be greenhouse gases and decrease local air quality. I would be a lot more ok with it if they were using wind or solar. And maybe built it somewhere that didn&#x27;t have a water shortage.
      1. cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
        One being built near me is being built on public lands that are being sold off for datacenters. That&#x27;s an additional pretty big negative (especially since the specific land was set apart as a wildlife habitat.)

        I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it&#x27;s going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.

        1. SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
          I guess we can assume that the executives at the big AI companies don&#x27;t believe in man made climate change.
          1. catlifeonmars · · focus · HN ↗
            A(G)I is supposed to fix everything so nothing matters &#x2F;s
            1. foo12bar · · focus · HN ↗
              Why is this sarcastic? Isn&#x27;t this a plausible possibility?
              1. taybin · · focus · HN ↗
                Given that everything important has trade-offs, no, AI, even if it were very very smart wouldn’t be able to “fix everything”
                1. roenxi · · focus · HN ↗
                  If we compare 2025 to 0025, a truly remarkable number of problems have been solved by, effectively, intelligent people doing research. While it is impossible that AI will fix everything it is plausible it will fix most things since it looks like it&#x27;ll be able to do research faster, better and with a higher quality than humans as well as more effectively communicate the results to the masses.
                  1. geaibleu · · focus · HN ↗
                    Yet Altman and Amadeo are talking how AI can kill us. So either it solves some problems it creates or kills off humanity... This is a gambling addict level rationalisation of betting your house to win it all at once.
                    1. misiek08 · · focus · HN ↗
                      The path they are talking about solves also a lot of problems, tho. They don’t care, because they’ll already live on Moon, Mars or will be dead.
              2. cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
                There&#x27;s not.

                The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.

                The second problem is that the CO2 is diluted in the atmosphere. Consider the amount of energy needed to remove salt from ocean water, it&#x27;s not simple.

                It just takes a lot of energy to that what was done by burning fossils in the first place.

                1. SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
                  Maybe not. You don&#x27;t need to chemically turn the CO2 back into hydrocarbons and free oxygen. You just need to remove it from the atmosphere.
                2. Marha01 · · focus · HN ↗
                  &gt; The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.

                  This is only a problem if AI won&#x27;t develop cheap carbon neutral energy sources, like fusion or advanced fission, or more efficient solar with cheap grid-scale batteries.

              3. akomtu · · focus · HN ↗
                The rule of thumb is that technology creates problems that cannot be solved with the same level of technology.
              4. Pxtl · · focus · HN ↗
                Do you think an LLM can change the laws of physics?
                1. Eueudhsbsj32 · · focus · HN ↗
                  Which societal problems require changing the laws of physics to fix?
              5. sirtaj · · focus · HN ↗
                We&#x27;ve been hearing some variant of &quot;engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don&#x27;t need to worry now&quot; since the late 90s.
                1. Marha01 · · focus · HN ↗
                  &gt; We&#x27;ve been hearing some variant of &quot;engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don&#x27;t need to worry now&quot; since the late 90s.

                  Well, it was true in the 90s, and it&#x27;s still true today. Once climate change becomes important enough (that is, causing actual significant damage to important, wealthy countries), it takes just one such country to start a stratospheric aerosol injection project, or, if space launch costs become low enough, put a sunshade between Earth and the Sun. Such solutions have their own risks, of course. But if climate change really becomes bad, they will be tried. And from what I have read, they have a good change of succeeding.

                  1. sirtaj · · focus · HN ↗
                    It will still be true another 30 years from now perhaps, but nobody who has the actual funds to spend seems to care. If the world was actually taking it seriously, it would be dealt with like the ozone hole was. Instead, we&#x27;re still debating whether it&#x27;s real, and if it&#x27;s real whether it&#x27;s important, and if it&#x27;s important whether it is more important than - I don&#x27;t know - pretty much anything else.

                    What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they&#x27;re melting. One would think the time is now.

          2. crote · · focus · HN ↗
            Climate change is a lot less important when you are rich enough that it doesn&#x27;t impact you personally, and when you don&#x27;t care about what the world looks like after you die.

            Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that&#x27;s going to impact the company&#x27;s profitability, but by then your stock options will have already vested - so that&#x27;s a problem for someone else!

            1. hackernud3s · · focus · HN ↗
              They could be doing more to combat climate change, but that&#x27;s also true for everyone in this thread.

              Personally I will forgive them the Datacenter carbon if they are willing to stop flying private jets.

        2. jonas21 · · focus · HN ↗
          Google, at least, purchases 100% of its electricity from renewable sources. This doesn&#x27;t mean that they have renewables feeding directly into all their datacenters at all times -- but for every kWh they consume, they purchase a kWh of renewable energy somewhere and add it to the grid.
      2. RajT88 · · focus · HN ↗
        By me they are converting cornfields to data center campuses. People hate it and are against it.

        They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.

        They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.

        1. lostlogin · · focus · HN ↗
          I wonder what causes more harm? High fructose corn syrup or data centres?
        2. hackernud3s · · focus · HN ↗
          What&#x27;s so great about cornfields? I can imagine hating it if they were deforesting the Amazon or something.
          1. RajT88 · · focus · HN ↗
            The argument they make is, &quot;it is food and we eat it&quot;. Nevermind most of the corn grown is not eaten by people.
        3. Pxtl · · focus · HN ↗
          It&#x27;s almost like people want things built that they directly benefit from.
          1. expedition32 · · focus · HN ↗
            A warehouse provides hundreds of lower education jobs. Well at least until they go completely robot.

            Not everyone is a software developer.

          2. Eueudhsbsj32 · · focus · HN ↗
            Aren&#x27;t most people directly benefiting from AI?
            1. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
              No? I can think of so many things in life that were better just a couple years ago.
        4. Eueudhsbsj32 · · focus · HN ↗
          In the US, there&#x27;s currently about 300x more land used by cornfields than by data centers.

          Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we&#x27;re not getting 300x more value from the corn.

        5. JuniperMesos · · focus · HN ↗
          A lot of people have dumb opinions grounded in ill-thought-out ideas like &quot;natural cornfields are morally superior to human-built infrastructure buildings&quot; or &quot;solar power is a Democratic party conspiracy&quot;. In general it should be easier for property owners with skin in the game to make good land use decisions to make them without having to need small-d-democratic opposition from locals with bad incentices and values.
    12. cassianoleal · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.

      At a large enough scale, it doesn&#x27;t matter how efficient you are - you&#x27;re still causing a more damage than the region or the world can take.

      1. perching_aix · · focus · HN ↗
        Except that&#x27;s not what you see people be up in arms about, or news reporting. Just like with a lot of other topics.

        There being a grain of truth or a valid angle doesn&#x27;t wash bullshit from being bullshit.

        1. cassianoleal · · focus · HN ↗
          Is it actually bullshit? Where&#x27;s the data?
          1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

            [deleted]

          2. perching_aix · · focus · HN ↗
            Well, in the post above, isn’t it? Mind you, I was simply reacting to your general reasoning with some of my own, so bit of a misdirected question if not rhetorical...

            Or here, in this comment from below: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49958135">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49958135

            Now where&#x27;s the data for the popular claim (which as you conceded is not what you just posted, where it&#x27;s specifically the overall burden that is too big)? I&#x27;m amenable even for a complex mix of cases, where some of the local impact is too much. Would be good to know what share of it is true, even if only a sliver. Although this wouldn&#x27;t change the bullshit conclusion.

      2. bloaf · · focus · HN ↗
        There&#x27;s also a lot of folks out there with no sense of scale getting &quot;dihydrogen-monoxieded&quot; by scaremongering tactics like measuring power consumption in number of atomic bombs.
    13. master_crab · · focus · HN ↗
      It’s not the water. It’s the electric usage, air and noise pollution from sanctioned (and often unsanctioned) diesel generators.

      The concern is real and very much deserves the opprobrium voters are showing.

      1. hatsix · · focus · HN ↗
        It&#x27;s different issues in different places, and when built&#x2F;operated by different companies. Global companies that put their name on the facility will be more careful of optics than a PE firm that hides behind shell companies.
      2. jeffbee · · focus · HN ↗
        The data centers in the article aren&#x27;t ever running on generators.
    14. BearOso · · focus · HN ↗
      The disparity is that older data centers were for storing and serving data. They have a lot of bandwidth and storage, but aren&#x27;t consuming much energy. Plus, they are there to provide quicker access to data, to provide a service to actual people.

      New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.

      Then there&#x27;s the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.

      These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there&#x27;s no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it&#x27;s often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.

      With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?

      1. Lucasoato · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt; At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss

        Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable

        1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

          [deleted]

        2. snaking0776 · · focus · HN ↗
          I don’t find this wholly convincing since it’s a smaller scale search but there does seem to be some truth to noise issues: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo also some data here which seems to support OP during generator tests: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lsars.com&#x2F;data-center-noise" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lsars.com&#x2F;data-center-noise
          1. perching_aix · · focus · HN ↗
            I gave this half an hour video the first 10 minutes. He

            - explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)

            - played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient

            - showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas

            - did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record

            - did not disclose the actual dB SPL figures measured

            - kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.

            If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I&#x27;m not sure he&#x27;s a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research, at least in this context.

            1. JimDabell · · focus · HN ↗
              The video is nonsense. There’s an article that takes it down in detail here:

              <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.andymasley.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.andymasley.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

      2. tomr75 · · focus · HN ↗
        do you have data on no new jobs&#x2F;tax revenue?
        1. BobbyTables2 · · focus · HN ↗
          I’m under the impression that most data centers have very few staff on site, almost zero.

          Sure, some temporary jobs during construction, but I bet it’s nothing like a retail store or factory in operation…

          As for taxable revenue, how does that help the community beyond property tax assessments?

        2. crote · · focus · HN ↗
          Look at your local megascale datacenter on Google Maps satellite view. How many parking spots does it have? How many of those parking spots are occupied? Are you seeing hundreds of cars, or is it just the mandatory pair of security guards and maybe a remote hands technician or three?

          The tax breaks are well-established in the media, see for example [0].

          1. jiggawatts · · focus · HN ↗
            The taxable income is generated remotely from the location of the physical data centre.

            That’s the root of the problem.

            Even if the data centre raises billions in revenue and pays billions in taxes, that isn’t paid to any government entity close to where the building is.

            The locals get replaced by machines, the revenue is pocketed far away.

            It’s the equivalent of big mining companies “investing” into mine automation in some developing country. The locals do not benefit!

            1. expedition32 · · focus · HN ↗
              Yeah I am going to be honest if Google was a Dutch company they would bulldoze houses for them. They do it for ASML. But it is an American company and nobody likes them. The Netherlands, for all it&#x27;s faults, is still too dignified to become a US colony.
              1. RavuAlHemio · · focus · HN ↗
                &gt;They do it for ASML.

                Who then refuse to sell their machines to anyone except some Taiwanese company.

        3. Forgeties79 · · focus · HN ↗
          You can’t collect tax revenue by giving away tax breaks worth almost the entirety of the taxes that would otherwise be collected. This is particularly common in the the gulf south - see Louisiana with Hyperion, which also has been an absolute disaster of a construction project (deaths, school can’t operate, all kinds of violations and damage) and is estimated to produce double digit jobs.
      3. goodmythical · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt;For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW.

        This is always kind of funny to me. How&#x27;s an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?

        How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?

        What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed &quot;data&quot; center?

        Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they&#x27;d like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.

        Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can&#x27;t decide if it&#x27;s zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I&#x27;d be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can&#x27;t be purely about power consumption.

        &gt;With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?

        What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because you aren&#x27;t receiving the benefits is naive. No one&#x27;s doing all this for free.

        &gt;If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?

        You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We&#x27;ve been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?

        You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?

        And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.

        Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you&#x27;re not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.

        1. sfilmeyer · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt;How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?

          tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.

          Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That&#x27;s split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that&#x27;s less than 20 MW per factory.

          This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn&#x27;t try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W&#x2F;square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.

          I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the &quot;water consumption&quot; rather than &quot;water withdrawal&quot; numbers from Honda, that&#x27;s over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it&#x27;s equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].

          [0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aiwars&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1tes0rr&#x2F;ai_data_centers_vs_factories_energy_and_water_use&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aiwars&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1tes0rr&#x2F;ai_data_cen...

          [1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;global.honda&#x2F;en&#x2F;environment&#x2F;initiatives&#x2F;data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;global.honda&#x2F;en&#x2F;environment&#x2F;initiatives&#x2F;data&#x2F;

          [2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mckinsey.com&#x2F;~&#x2F;media&#x2F;mckinsey&#x2F;dotcom&#x2F;client_service&#x2F;operations&#x2F;pdfs&#x2F;bringing_fabenergyefficiency.ashx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mckinsey.com&#x2F;~&#x2F;media&#x2F;mckinsey&#x2F;dotcom&#x2F;client_serv...

          [3]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;consumption&#x2F;commercial&#x2F;pba&#x2F;health-care.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;consumption&#x2F;commercial&#x2F;pba&#x2F;health-care.p...

          [4]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electricityplans.com&#x2F;how-much-electricity-does-an-apartment-use&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electricityplans.com&#x2F;how-much-electricity-does-an-ap...

          [5]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC5058574&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC5058574&#x2F; for water usage per square meter for hospitals

          [6]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.usgs.gov&#x2F;of&#x2F;2017&#x2F;1131&#x2F;ofr20171131.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.usgs.gov&#x2F;of&#x2F;2017&#x2F;1131&#x2F;ofr20171131.pdf for water per person per year

      4. doodlesdev · · focus · HN ↗

           &gt; At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
        This is absolutely false. Those are the noise levels _inside_ the facilities. Noise attenuates by inverse-square law by distance. 90dB at 100 meters means 116dB at 5 meters distance... That&#x27;s industrial alarms level of noise and would never fly in a residential area.
        1. s3p · · focus · HN ↗
          Having worked in data center HVAC for a while I can confidently say you would only expect this noise from a pump room. Not even the air handlers or evaporators on the roof will be this loud
        2. BearOso · · focus · HN ↗
          Extra zero. Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB. Even traditional server facilities can hit 80-90dB inside. I&#x27;ve read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn&#x27;t fly.
          1. doodlesdev · · focus · HN ↗

               &gt; I&#x27;ve read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn&#x27;t fly.
            So, first of all, I agree, that&#x27;s still top much. But I think it&#x27;s important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).

            I absolutely believe that there&#x27;s leftover noise around the facilities, too, specially low-frequency humming for electrical equipment, but I have yet to see _actual_ reporting demonstrating newer AI-centered datacenters produce even near the amount of noise OP was claiming.

               &gt; Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB.
            That would mean 130dB of noise inside the facility, which sounds (pun intended) impossible to me, no matter how bad the acoustic planning is.

            edit: just understood what &quot;Extra zero&quot; meant. The original comment before being edited said 100m and that&#x27;s what I was quoting.

            1. rockwotj · · focus · HN ↗
              as someone who has driven by Google data centers in Iowa and Facebook in Oregon, I can report you that I can’t hear anything from them from the roadside.
            2. BearOso · · focus · HN ↗
              Apparently the noise emanates from massive fans for evaporative cooling on the roof. It&#x27;s not coming from inside, which is why it carries so easily.
              1. doodlesdev · · focus · HN ↗
                That makes sense, indeed. I&#x27;ve yet to see one of these new datacenters, but I&#x27;ve recently visited a hyperscaler&#x27;s datacenter and most of the noise did seem to come from the outside ventilation.

                I still heard almost nothing ~20m from it, but neither I (nor the company who built it) knew what kinds of workloads ran there and I suspect it was mostly traditional workloads.

            3. zamalek · · focus · HN ↗
              &gt; So, first of all, I agree, that&#x27;s still top much. But I think it&#x27;s important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).

              For someone who knows enough to point out that dB is logarithmic, you seemed to have neglected the fact that sound is inverse-square for distance? Unless these neighbors are _literally_ located 100m outside the data center?

      5. sillysaurusx · · focus · HN ↗
        1.2kw over what time period?
        1. echoangle · · focus · HN ↗
          Presumably on average over a year.

          1.2kw is power, not energy (which would be kWh).

          1. ButlerianJihad · · focus · HN ↗
            `w` is nothing but an ancient Unix command.

            The unit you want is spelled “kW”. There really is a difference, especially when you’re inconsistently correcting someone else.

        2. vengefulduck · · focus · HN ↗
          Watts is already a unit of energy over time. (J&#x2F;s)
          1. SecretDreams · · focus · HN ↗
            Aka it&#x27;s a unit of power. Hence the OP asked over what time to figure out the amount of energy used..?
            1. lostlogin · · focus · HN ↗
              Surely that is the average usage over time? 28.8kWh per day?

              Edit: The average household in the U.S. uses 10500kWh of power per year. 28.76kWh per day.

              <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;energyexplained&#x2F;use-of-energy&#x2F;electricity-use-in-homes.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;energyexplained&#x2F;use-of-energy&#x2F;electricit...

      6. oogali · · focus · HN ↗
        Bright lighting is typically an artifact of the commercial property insurance policy in effect (namely, &quot;Protective Safeguards&quot;). It&#x27;s asking you to demonstrate that you&#x27;ve done enough to create a barrier towards theft&#x2F;loss.

        It doesn&#x27;t have to be really bright lighting but that&#x27;s the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter&#x27;s request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.

      7. phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt; With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers

        I would have traded a data center for the dairies I lived near as a kid

        1. huijzer · · focus · HN ↗
          Why?
          1. bombcar · · focus · HN ↗
            Datacenters don&#x27;t (usually) smell of liquid cowshit, which is NOT AT ALL what you think it would smell like if you&#x27;ve only ever had the pleasure of cowpies.
          2. Marazan · · focus · HN ↗
            Cows smelly. Lots of cows really smelly.
      8. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

        [deleted]

      9. taneq · · focus · HN ↗
        The noise issue kinda needs to be treated separately to the other issues imo. As I understand it the loud part is the gas turbine generators that some datacenters run, so while it’s associated, it’s not strictly a datacenter thing.
      10. zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt; The disparity is that older data centers were for storing and serving data. … New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead.

        Maybe we should be calling them &quot;compute centers&quot; instead of &quot;data centers&quot;.

        1. infp_arborist · · focus · HN ↗
          Good point. That&#x27;s what a data center is called in German: &#x27;Rechenzentrum&#x27;, &#x27;rechnen&#x27; = to compute, calculate
    15. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

      [deleted]

    16. motoboi · · focus · HN ↗
      I can’t actually understand the incapacity of the richest country on the world to build infrastructure. Why would people be fighting over resources like that when you can just build a hell lot of wind, solar and gas plants along with batteries and whatnot.

      From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.

      As a non American, I find this incomprehensible.

      1. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
        Because the US president considers solar and wind to be a woke scam, and no company wants to build legacy coal plants because it&#x27;s a terrible investment at this point. So the datacenters are just building their own gas plants next to the buildings causing all of the noise and air pollution people are mad about.
    17. lostlogin · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.

      Why can’t it be discussed?

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