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- Hacker News
- [fnord]
- You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
by donmcronald - Nobody is "missing" anything. There are migrations to the cloud, but AI growth is on top of that.
AI computing capacity is doubling every seven months. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-chip-production.
by KennyBlanken - Man, I wish I had more downvotes. This is not just about consolidation, it's about massive resource usage in areas where hardly any of the benefits accrue to the locals.
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
- I don’t know why you’re phrasing it like it’s not a big deal that these juggernauts are attempting to make themselves indispensable.by jazzyjackson
- it's not a consolidation because all those computers are still in office parks and the like. This is new usage, and it consumes exponentially more resources than all of the previous usage.
- People would love to build their own servers (and run AI or other workloads on them) and kids would love to build their first PC, but big tech is buying all the hardware and stuffing it into data centers. You make it sound like they asked for it.by eska
- How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks.
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
- > after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus
Hey where’s that person from yesterday who argued with me over the 1m vs 1cm hole in the boat?
Everyone saying stop talking about data center water use is missing the entire point as this article shows.
by bix6 - Data center water use is a fairly separate topic from what this article covers. Related of course but the conversation on USE centers around actual volume use, not contaminants.by jatora
- This is why datacenters in central texas are desperate to build anywhere in the edwards aquifer... so they can get "free" water from natural springs (already stressed by draught) and dump the effluent into city wastewater systems.by mertleee
- A bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle: Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities. This is gold for a comedy sketch :)by delegate
- Often life doesn't just imitate a movie, but imitates a goofy movie.by nine_k
- Move fast and break things is back.by bentt
- Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this?
I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
by Catloafdev - it's incredibly hard to identify microbes like these, this is not a simple task, especially if you're not aware they exist or that they can occur in this way.. if they did, which i'm skeptical of
- Is this a common problem? I would assume not, since it lead to a suspense, and that is probably very expensive and something you aim to avoid.by jstummbillig
- By definition, externalizing a cost is less expensive than internalizing it; the only recourse for the rest of us is forcing them to properly internalize their costs.by kibwen
- I kinda think the reaction and reporting on this is already being colored by the objection to the datacenters, as opposed to the other way around. And it's not obvious exactly where the problem came from in the first place: it doesn't look like this is some super-obvious, common and easy to prevent issue that they just decided to cheap out on, nor is it obviously a datacenter-specific issue.by rcxdude
- Not do what? Not discharge the water with bacterium? But the data center claims that their independent testing shows that they didn’t even discharge the bacterium. It seems that neither the city nor Meta knew where the bacterium came from.by kccqzy
- Testing for an extremely rare bacterium is not the bare minimum. In fact even the water treatment plants rarely do it. They admit in the article we don’t even know whether or not the bacteria originated from the water supplied by the city that entered the pipes in the first place.
DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
by derekdahmer - This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently.
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"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"
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Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
by beloch - Omen AI just got $31m to solve this problem...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/omen-ais-plan-to-optimize-...
by latchkey - Oh, great. A group of men in black shirts and jeans are here to fix the issueby bl4kers
- Interesting I’ve been waiting for something like this on our rivers. Hopefully.by bix6
- As a former microbiologist, this news is important but not too concerning. It’s good that we found detected this and can respond accordingly. It doesn’t mean indicate an immediate, critical issue.by stephenlf
- Since the article doesn't make this clear, let me explain.
The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad. But nobody really does this because you don't want to keep adding additives to water you're constantly discharging.
The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered.
Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.
I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped.
So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear.
I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.
by jmyeet - > But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.
Maybe but there are citywide chlorine flushes of their water supply. some worse than others
Erin Brockovich tracks this
by stogot