I'm not necessarily in favor of data centers. That said, every time I see something like this I just wonder when we are going to start hearing about data centers being built in poor countries powered exclusively by coal and zero regulation. I really have no idea what a good outcome looks like but playing ultra hardball seems unwise. I'm very poorly educated on data centers and AI in general. But, I am an expert in electrical generation. I know we could do it pretty clean, at least relative to coal/heavy oil. I don't think stopping data centers built in the US will magically cease the boulder rolling in the AI direction. Seems like the money is at its back so its going to happen, just a matter of when, where and how dirty.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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The US will soon be the poor country that's powered by coal and zero regulation.
soon?
Coal is a miniscule and shrinking source of power in the US regardless of how hard Republicans try to bring it back. We may end up poor, but it won't end in coal being a dominating force again, especially given the oil we can harvest and use for natural gas.
While it has been deminishing, its still 750TWh.
Still some third world shit tho. Look at that gas go brr.
It’s pretty easy to regulate this:
- Closed loop cooling
- grid upgrade built into design plans, paid for by the datacenter.
- cleaner power generation
I'd say your list is a bit too short. Some more considerations (not comprehensive):
- Construction noise and seismic limits (nearby neighborhoods have been disturbed and experienced damage from blasting operations)
- Operating noise limits (ban on-site gas turbine generation, limit noise levels from cooling towers)
- Limit light pollution
Edit:
- Job protections and guarantees for workers displaced by automation
Data centers ought to only be allowed in rural areas to begin with. Even if the noise/vibration/heat/etc. weren't an issue they're still a goddamn hole with zero foot traffic, and that's just bad urbanism. They're like public storage warehouses, but even worse.
They need access to the Internet backbone, but that doesn't mean they have to be in cities. Put 'em somewhere along the fiber halfway between.
Still missing heat increase, up to 26°F in the surrounding area. All that heat from the gpus and cpus is a lot. I've heard of people using their gpus to heat their apartments.
I have first-hand experience living near a source of infrasound, and oh my god, it's terrible. Here's a good video about the infrasound generated by data centers.
Job protections and guarantees for workers displaced by automation
Jobs are a necessary evil, not a goal in itself. The goal should be to eliminate all jobs.
Until that time we should figure out a better way to share the burden of the work that nerds to be done as well as better way to distribute resources. Trying to preserve jobs is not the way.
What type of generation are you envisioning here? What type of cooling systems?
Datacenters aren’t responsible for workers displaced by automation.
Construction and noise aren’t special to datacenters and don’t need special regulation.
On this particular topic, the more red tape the better. These companies are shady and will find any loophole available to circumvent any protection the current laws are meant to provide.
Closed loop is absolutely the right answer, and easily regulated.
As to your other two points, the answer is obvious. Nuclear.
It doesn’t need to be nukes. Hydro, solar, wind, and any other mix of power sources is fine, including fossil fuels as an alternative should it be a cloudy, windless week.
Hydro is limited by geography, and wind and solar requires a metric fuck ton of oil to produce and replace at EOL. You want clean, you want nukes.
Agreed
I think there are definitely ways to do these data centers that have minimal external impacts, but it costs money and time, and they are trying to rush these through as fast as possible.
Yeah, tough to have a good faith conversation about it.
Seems like the money is at its back so its going to happen,
Well, there's certainly a lot of money being spent to make you believe this. I'm not buying it. Every day, dislike of AI grows. Meanwhile, AI companies still aren't turning a profit. If the AI companies win, they'll be in control of a public utility that many businesses will need to survive.
You basically understand what the people with a vested interest in making AI happen want you to know. The truth is that AI is already starting to crumble. It's a technology that doesn't do 99% of the things it's perported to do, and will never do 90% of what they sold it on.
Yeah I'm not versed in the subject enough to say/think you're wrong necessarily. I do know the general slant Lemmy's population has against it though.
Lemmy's population is overrepresented by software engineers who know more about how LLMs actually work than the general public does. Let that sink in.
Also a field disproportionately affected by it so still kinda biased
GenAI as it currently stands is a fancy text predictor. You ever had your phone suggest the next word in a message you're typing? It's that, on crack.
When you really wrap your head around the fact that that is all it's doing, it loses a lot of its appeal imho. Especially for the cost to do so.
To be more specific (for anyone interested), the next word predictors are usually a type of model called an LSTM (at least I think that’s the most common). This model type has been used for a long time for dealing with sequential data. In 2014 there was a famous paper introducing an attention mechanism. This was a rather brilliant, though relatively minor extension to how LSTMs work. Essentially between each step of an LSTM it generates some data representing the model’s knowledge of the sequence to that point. The attention mechanism looks back at these intermediate values and determines how relevant each state is to the current point in the sequence and pulls in the most relevant bits. This vastly improved the memory of the LSTM over longer sequences.
In 2017 there was another famous paper “attention is all you need” which said something to the effect of “the attention mechanism is doing all the work, we don’t need the rest of the LSTM we can replace it by running attention between all point combinations in the sequence.” It’s actually significantly slower to run as the model grows, but much much faster to train because it’s not intrinsically sequential. This is the transformer model that’s the basis of all our LLMs.
Obviously some massive simplifications here but as despite being fairly anti AI, I do love the engineering behind it. So yeah, pretty literally a fancy text predictor, but it turns out when you throw all the compute you can muster at a fancy word predictor is makes the world go crazy
Thanks for this explaination, it finally clicked for me.
Just simply ask yourself, why are all the AI companies discussing going public now? I hope you would agree that AI as it currently stands is far from the human brain replacement it was sold as. Outside of a few very specialized fields it's basically an email generator. They're out of training data for all intents and purposes. AI generated content is so ubiquitous now that you can't use most data moving forward without painstakingly checking it all, and AI is becoming increasingly harder to distinguish cheaply or easily. The widespread adoption has poisoned the well. So AI is as advanced as it's going to be, and it's not worth its valuation. They're all racing for the exit and IPOs are their last hope for their backers to sell and get out before the markets stop being irrational. I hope I'm wrong but that seems to be the writing on the wall.
Edit: they're also already posturing the current administration for a bailout deal.
Prohibit them from producing their own electricity. Force them to invest in and use renewables.
How would that look? Wouldn't inventing in and using renewables be producing their own electricity? Or do you mean force them to be tied to the grid but also force them to force the grid to use renewables.
My understanding is natural gas is cheaper than coal nowadays because the waste heat can be captured and reused.
I'm not necessarily in favor of data centers. That said, every time I see something like this I just wonder when we are going to start hearing about data centers being built in poor countries powered exclusively by coal and zero regulation
that's exactly what they are doing right now
I don't understand the aversion to datacenters. Just make sure that they use green energy and recycle their cooling water.
Well, to begin with. That isn't made sure and making it sure will delay the delayed projects considerably... which I am all for and is functionally similar to said moratorium. As this isn't happening we see huge data centers being illegally built with incredibly dirty emergency gas turbines designed for emergency scenarios.
The main issue is that the data centers are built with monopoly money, which enabled them to suck up all resources, pricing out the real economy from critical materials, and services (especially construction, electricity, cooling, IT infrastructure ...). This alone should make you understand why this wave of datacenters is bad, even if you don't care one bit about the environment but at least a tiny bit about the economy.
Because they often dont have a one time fill. Thats a myth. For issues or maintenance they have to be refilled. And the ai data centers cause a low frequency hum that causes neurological issues.
PROGRESSIVES introduced Legislation DIRECTLY to Help the Republicans they Talked to WEEKS earlier? I'm SURE Republican Voters will remember this during the next Election when they vote for ~~Progressives!~~ The EXACT Same people they Complain about!
If the Democrats were willing to negotiate at all, this would be an excellent starting point. Sadly, they're going to stomp their feet and hold their breath until the whole thing gets scrapped and we're back where we started. Part of me wonders if that isn't the point.
Do you understand much money was spent to spread your point of view as a method to get people to stop voting?
I'm willing to have my mind changed here. But in my view, the Democrats come to the table with their negotiation, and then negotiate down until they get absolutely fuck all, a la the ACA
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