Thread

Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

395 points · 517 comments · sensanaty

aliasxneo · 1791145670 · 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. WarmWash · 1791151707 · focus · HN ↗
  The current hysteria has little to do with datacenters and a lot to do with societal unrest about AI.
  1. numbsafari · 1791151921 · 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.
    vovavili · 1791152819 · focus · HN ↗
    >People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.
    Others don'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.
    whatshisface · 1791153176 · focus · HN ↗
    The thinking on display in this thread is something like,
    "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 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."
    vovavili · 1791153302 · focus · HN ↗
    I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say.
    estearum · 1791154093 · focus · HN ↗
    People dislike secretive bureaucrats more than they dislike slow or overstaffed ones.
    Good luck with this attitude homie!
    JumpCrisscross · 1791158766 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    tbrownaw · 1791157257 · focus · HN ↗
    > Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews.
    Hasn'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't want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we'll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?
    Is that's even half true, I don't think the "unforced" there really applies.
    vel0city · 1791160919 · focus · HN ↗
    If they're truly there to just be crooked and corrupt then sure let's remove/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't cool, in either direction.
    samudrijan · 1791161539 · 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.
    WarmWash · 1791162924 · focus · HN ↗
    We could also just stop giving bad corporations money. I can assure you it's the thing that they absolutely hate the most and 10x as effective as trying to write legislation.
    katdork · 1791163814 · focus · HN ↗
    this works less and less as corporations buy from each other and everybody has things like pensions/401k and investments. there are also many who will buy shit regardless. it's just ignoring the reality of the situation, really.
    fzeroracer · 1791165797 · focus · HN ↗
    Companies aren'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's a lot like how McDonalds true income comes not from consumers but from holding and renting out valuable plots of land.
    onion2k · 1791179048 · focus · HN ↗
    That'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're only saying we need fewer data centres then your argument is against AI, and not in favor of sensible approach to the climate.
    LinXitoW · 1791188214 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh boy, do have news for you: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
    Point being that we've been literally eating our environment to death, long before AI was a twinkle in Scam Altmans eye.
    Weird how people never cared then. Weird how vegans were constantly shunned as too extreme then.
    Forgeties79 · 1791164445 · 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/support aren’t being followed either.
    Gigachad · 1791173335 · 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't just "change laws" when the people building these data centers control the laws.
  2. bdangubic · 1791152687 · 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
    master_crab · 1791154435 · focus · HN ↗
    Yup. From Fairfax. Very much what you said.
    bryan_w · 1791156093 · focus · HN ↗
    Not saying that increases in power bills aren'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's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
    bdangubic · 1791160139 · 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://www.loudoun.gov/datacenterstandards" rel="nofollow">https://www.loudoun.gov/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…”
    roenxi · 1791164657 · 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.
    kube-system · 1791168687 · 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.
    Gigachad · 1791174171 · focus · HN ↗
    Because the bubble will pop if they have to wait for power plants to be built.
  3. hackernud3s · 1791154168 · focus · HN ↗
    That can'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't change when you force DCs to build in another area.
    hinkley · 1791154797 · focus · HN ↗
    It does if it slows the rate of data center builds and makes it progressively more difficult to site future data centers.
    hackernud3s · 1791157441 · 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?
    rapind · 1791158426 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly. It'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're just trying to bring everyone into the grand age of abundance!
    Totally not a new robber baron era at all. That's just fake news guys.
    /s
    carefree-bob · 1791166145 · 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 · 1791154308 · focus · HN ↗
    The noise issues seem real, but don’t impact whole cities
    bryan_w · 1791155627 · 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've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.
    I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" 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's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
    toddmorey · 1791157498 · focus · HN ↗
    the generators and cooling equipment on some data centers are certainly audible.
    <a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/AAQsnrAHy5Y?si=vgmEGHS38mzzs2G9" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/shorts/AAQsnrAHy5Y?si=vgmEGHS38mzzs2G9
    georgemcbay · 1791159468 · focus · HN ↗
    Another video of the same data center:
    <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1uleoa2/sound_emitted_247_from_a_30_megawatt_data_center/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1uleoa2/sound_...
    Sound meter shows "only" ~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.
    Gigachad · 1791173544 · focus · HN ↗
    This is so much worse than I was expecting. You'd pretty much have to move out, and your property would be worthless for anything but industrial use at that point.
    tripledry · 1791179130 · focus · HN ↗
    Is this something that happens by accident in the sense that the decision makers didn't know how it would sound or is there actually someone in a room at some point going "fuck it".
  5. toddmorey · 1791157140 · 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.
    WarmWash · 1791160245 · focus · HN ↗
    >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.
    lostlogin · 1791162529 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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?
    EgregiousCube · 1791163782 · focus · HN ↗
    Because the tax revenue of them not coming there is zero, and the tax revenue after the breaks is very significant.
    Gigachad · 1791174279 · focus · HN ↗
    The datacenter companies are forcing local governments to sign NDAs so they can'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't collaborate and see what a horrible deal they are getting.
  6. hn_throwaway_99 · 1791157967 · 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/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.
    So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
  7. geaibleu · 1791163148 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no hysteria. We don't want to subsidise your lifestyle and to have pollution you produce dumped in our rural parts. We don't want it and it does not benefit us. Have all datacenters you want in your backyard.
  8. ButlerianJihad · 1791176311 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.

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