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- Hacker News
- “Everyone in McKinney is dead”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzA8DcAiijcby cocacola1
- My first real job was in McKinney, sad to hear they are all dead.by RSHEPP
- With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks?
The benefit to effort ratio seems fishy to me.
by ansley - Even at today's demand Anthropic and OpenAI often return 'model overloaded' errors.
Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this:
>I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years
Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy.
Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world.
If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice.
The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.
by user43928 - Coding agents are increasingly popular right now, and they can use millions of reasoning tokens per hour. Basic ChatGPT queries hardly use any tokens by comparison.by Legend2440
- Out of curiosity, how are large data centers zoned?by nemomarx
- industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits
honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
- When I worked at a big cloud provider the large sites were either within an existing industrial area, or off by themselves with lots of buffer.
I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now.
For me, noise would be my first concern
by lokar - Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.by matherial
- Interesting, as we increase our total global power consumption, losses in the form of heat will increase proportionally.
This is more of a zoning problem
"...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"
by MSKJ - A modern data center (1GW) is about the same as 140k additional cars in traffic in terms of direct heating.
Seems more likely that the heating is climate change driven primarily. But, 140k cars 24/7 is a lot of cars, so???
by K0balt - Something smells wrong. You could dump a gigawatt into resistive heating and not see such temperature rises so far away.by adamsb6
- That's surprising to me. You think a gigawatt of heat cannot be felt 500 meters downwind? How near before you experience the temperature rise in the article, if not that?
- I’m confused. Rejecting one GW of heat to the building exterior with heat exchangers is going to heat up the area around the heat exchangers.
If you had a hypothetical 1 GW generator and used a hypothetical 1 GW loadbank with 1 GW of resistive heating and a fan that was outdoors, the air temperature would rise.
- where there is a demand for results, academia will meet the supplyby whimsicalism
- Luckily, modern cooling techniques like heat pumps are much more efficient than resistive heating, 300% to 500% efficiency is easily attainable. You can keep the inside of a data center nice and chilly at room temperature even in the middle of a heat wave.
Then there is also the heat island effect. Concrete boxes will heat up an area more than dirt or wood, even if those boxes are completely empty inside. If you build them near where people live, people are gonna notice. Houses have gardens, industrial complexes such as data centers and factories don't.
Also, the effect is more concentrated downwind, so the heat effect is not some kind of uniform distribution in all directions.
by jeroenhd - These comments are full of the "but you participate in society" fallacy.
Data centers can do a thing positively and yet have negative impacts that should be discussed. It's not that hard.
by Ydarbleoj - Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem.
If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
by vmchale - The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
- People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons.
That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.
by BurningFrog - Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest, which includes LA, and LA's water system includes NorCal consequences, and California water issues include all-country impacts due to the farming there.
If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
- Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers.
All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.
by doctoboggan - > it's all people seem to care about.
You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.
by bad_username - The impact is highly geography dependent.
For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.
by stvltvs - It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.by barbazoo
- Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.by tintor
- >but it's all people seem to care about.
This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism:
>Why is that?
The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too.
So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?
by xoa - If only we had the same amount of concern about oil refineries and gas stations.
https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in...
https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic...
by bdcravens - ... and solar panels.by fearmerchant
- Fossils use, production and trade needs to be rapidly ramped down to mitigate the climate catastrophe and resulting megadeaths on all fronts.by fulafel