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Long time listener, first time caller.
The war on AI datacenters (and normal ones as a bit of collateral damage) has been going on for a little while now, with those opposed fiercely fighting a lot of these projects pretty much wherever, whenever. It seems to be one of the most bipartisan issues facing the country right now and those who are pro-datacenter have been effectively politically slaughtered. As of a few days ago though, there seems to have been a small little flash point in the thing. I haven't really seen a thread here about this (although definitely could have missed one), and I'm actually a little surprised at it since I do think this is probably one of the biggest culture wars in America of this year. Anyway, curious thoughts on this, etc
From what I can tell, the flashpoint was yesterday when Axios reported (and later posted) a letter from the Ohio RNC to AI companies effectively calling being pro-datacenter politically radioactive. It kinda exploded at this point over Twitter and later Greg Abbott put a thing out about it yesterday after enacting a pause earlier this month. Basically the only one who didn't respond in a politically obvious way was Trump in a presser who was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country
The reaction to these things are incredibly understandable. Their argument effectively goes "they use our water and electricity, provide a service to enhance the surveillance state and the interests of Big Tech, their proponents openly admit that they're gonna take your job, they bully communities, and they don't even pay taxes either, all the while poisoning the communities they leech on with pollution and noise." Personally, I'm honestly quite surprised that political radioactivity is the biggest thing that has happened so far. This seems to be an issue that unites people regardless of political party or affiliation...
...probably because it's being correctly seen as a existential threat to people's lives and livelihoods. Polling against datacenter construction is incredibly poor, arguably being worse than coal or nuclear power plants (yeah I know, different surveys). I think this, if I were to pin a spark on this (there are many), it's the story of the Memphis xAI datacenter and also the lawsuits against Solon Township to effectively bully them into allowing the project. Communities, seeing what happened there and politically, have somewhat backtracked quite a bit where before they were much more open to it. Some of those that haven't are proactively enacting outright bans
If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.
Both Altman and Amodei screwed up public perception big time, although I don't think it's 100% their fault. I imagine though this is basically because they're put in a double bind. If it isn't absolutely economy ending for every other company, the trillions pumped into their valuation will vaporize faster than you can say "AGI," but people tend to believe (correctly so) when someone threatens them (and have especially checkered pasts as both these guys do), that their threats are genuine, so when those PR puff pieces trickle down to the public at large.
The All In guys have tried to pin this on Amodei in particular, but I think some people just see that as them talking their book
They've tried to label the opposition as "China," but that clearly doesn't make much sense given that the problems are genuine. Cremieux has tried to take up the mantle on the issue, but I think people see his arguments are seen as specious and as relying on theoreticals that don't match observations on the ground, and this has I think backfired
Expect to see more bans and moratoriums happening across the country. Will be interesting to watch. Thoughts?
I really hope Democrats do that. As a Republican this seems like it would be the biggest free political gift of the decade. Take a brand new issue very much open for debate and give the best side to President Trump, the most skilled political messenger of a generation.
It seems like a no-brainer. On balance, the current panic will almost certainly pass. The future is a debate between an expanding, triumphant vision of more energy and processing and building a new world, or a reactionary vision scared of change and unwilling to countenance any. Please, please give us this, I would love for Republicans to be the bold party with a new vision of industry.
I don’t think this will go the way you imagine it will. At least, there’s a lot of room for people to change their minds. I don’t think it will help that the concerns about water and toxins are basically fake news. The challenge that AI will rapidly change society is more serious and I think there are a lot of serious anxieties mixed in with that. But if one party wants to retrench and back away and the other wants to go forward into the future that seems like a free gift to me, no matter what the polling looks like right now, thank you, thank you!
I think the problem is that a good portion of the public has these points precisely backwards. They believe in the stupid water and toxin points, while believing that AI is all empty hype that will surely end in a rapture-like bubble pop that will magic everything away and make all technology revert back to 2021 again.
I've had frustrating discussions with people in my life who say that all the data center build out isn't worth it for "a better search engine." I had to make the point that if it is all hype, then they don't need to worry about the environmental effects of data centers, as we'll have a 5-10 year period of build up and usage and then all the infrastructure will be shut down and put on moth balls. The idea that LLMs and generative AI might actually be something new and interesting is not very widespread.
Heck, my D&D group has people who think that Mythos-tier cybercapabilities literally do not exist, and I still have art friends who act as if bad hands are an inevitability for AI art.
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People really hate big tech. Flock has the same problem, though it's much easier to put up a bunch of cameras than build a datacenter. That's all it is.
The anti flock case is more coherent because mass surveillance is a meaningful tradeoff. The water and power concerns are probably not as real.
The thing that scares me about Flock cameras isn’t just their ability to surveil cars without license plates. The story of the guy who was rollerblading down the street and stopped underneath the camera may not seem striking to a reader until you find out that it was so good, it was able to clearly see that the man was watching rollerblading videos on his phone while he was there. It’s crazy to think that it was only a century ago that if you and someone else chose to walk into a forest and have a private conversation, nobody else in the world would’ve been able to know what you were talking about. Today, that’s impossible.
One thing I was talking about with a friend recently was the financial system and how the nature of fraud has changed. If you look at a traditional, physical counterfeiter of currency, the fundamentals of that haven’t changed in roughly a hundred years. Do small amounts, avoid large bills, don’t go on spending sprees, etc. Today, it’s one of the worst ways to counterfeit. And not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of your likelihood of getting caught. In the digital era if you want to commit fraud, the best way to do it isn’t to steal a million and deposit it in an offshore shell account somewhere. Government’s often hire extralegal forensic auditors in the shadows to avoid the costly red tape and they will catch you before breakfast. The best way to do it is not to go for the cash register but to go for the vault. Massive sums of money. Deposit it in private, international shell accounts all over the world, outside of your home country’s jurisdiction. It isn’t because some of it won’t be recovered. But the banking system and other companies write it off and outsource it for third parties to chase you, because they don’t have the budgets to put in the necessary work to battle with other countries to get their money back. And if you’re spending 2:1 or 3:1 to recover every dollar lost, you’re losing money. And if all else fails from the criminal’s standpoint, declare bankruptcy. Stay clean under the window of scrutiny and then afterward go get your money. A century ago, the opposite of all this used to be true.
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They aren't real concerns at the nation-wide, environmental level. They can be very real concerns for the locals whose utilities get diverted.
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<tinfoil>Anti-datacenter sentiment is being astroturfed by Elon Musk, who stands to profit via space-based AI service delivery more than he loses via increased training costs for Grok</tinfoil>More options
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This is a bit of a tangent, but I think there's a 4D chess angle to Trump breaking from the broader Republican Party to say and do unpopular things. He's not up for re-election! It is great for the Republican Party if people believe that all of America's problems are caused by Trump personally, and that without Trump around, downballot Republicans and their 2028 Presidential nominee would do a great job running the country.
As another example, Trump recently tricked a bunch of outlets (including the Rachel Maddow Show blog) into running a story about how Vance and the White House staff wanted to make things more affordable for Americans, while Trump personally thought it was okay for gas to be expensive.
Is this the level of delusion Trump supporters have reached, where Trump doing and saying indefensibly stupid things that contradict non-stupid things other people in the administration say is now just part of some big trick? Seriously, how is it a trick? Is Vance not knowing Trump's position supposed to make him look competent? In what election cycle, anywhere in the world, anywhere in history, has the strategy you've describe worked? Probably never, because it's so stupid I doubt anyone would ever attempt it, and if this is really the best the GOP has they're even dumber than I thought.
Even if I humor you for a second and assume that it would be possibly, then the way they're playing it doesn't make sense. It's not like you see Republican politicians putting up any real opposition to Trump. What happens is they say something, Trump contradicts them, and they either ignore it or try to explain away how they don't really disagree with Trump after all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Vance made any statements about how he advised against the war from the beginning, supported the president out of a sense of duty, but has come to the conclusion that the costs it's borne on Americans mean it's no longer defensible. And he's supposed to be the frontrunner! One would assume he's getting campaign advice from Kamala Harris on how to run as veep to an unpopular incumbent without criticizing the incumbent for the things that are making him unpopular. And he can't get fired or primaried. And behind him they have Marco Rubio, who at the moment seems more concerned with dismantling the government of an irrelevant country we aren't at war with than doing anything about the war he helped convince Trump to start.
Who else do they have who is actually criticizing the president? Ted Cruz is more hawkish on Iran than Trump. Marjorie Taylore Greene is unelectable and supposedly out of politics anyway. And Thomas Massie just lost an election because he wasn't enough of a Trump supporter. Which is another thing; there isn't even a movement among primary candidates to cross Trump. In my own neck of the woods, every single Republican candidate ran on being more in line with Trump than his RINO opponent. The idea that Republicans are going to suddenly, en masse, turn on Trump in 2028 is ludicrous, and the idea that voters would buy a last-minute face turn is even more ludicrous.
No it's supposed to make Vance look like he was always opposed to unpopular Trump policies.
(No idea if that story was astroturfed or not but generally I think people are getting the impression Vance opposed the Iran war. Maybe it's not 4D chess but if it isn't maybe it should be.)
Members of both parties do this sort of thing all the time (Kamala accusing Biden of being racist and then becoming his running mate, for example, or J.D. Vance and his past relationship to Trump). They won't say anything until they're in the primaries, or maybe the general and then perhaps Vance will say "he advised against the war from the beginning, supported the president out of a sense of duty, but has come to the conclusion that the costs it's borne on Americans mean it's no longer defensible" or whatever. And he'll be able to wave the Politico page to show that he didn't just make that up after winning the primary.
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Republicans have spent ten years in a civil war with Trump to the point that you still see sitting senators like Cornyn fighting over core positions like immigration — but it’s never enough to convince partisans that the Republican Party isn’t some kind of Trump cult where no dissent is tolerated.
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I would imagine "geopolitically-minded elites", more generally. There is no cosmic justice that would ensure the nation that protects its plebs from pollution, noise and unemployment will ultimately come out ahead, and it is quite plausible that China would eventually overtake the US in the AI race simply because they do not need to concern themselves with such things (or at least have more High Modernist solutions available to deal with them, like expropriating and resettling whole communities away from good datacenter locations). There are plenty of people who are more interested in the US as in some entity that has continuity with it winning than are interested in the good fortunes of every or even most of its residents.
There is no such cosmic justice, but I don't think it's going to get people to care when they feel threatened
The "China might overtake the US in AI development" risk is I think generally seen as either false, "so what," or "good, I like cheap stuff" whereas the current risks of be de-electrified or not having potable water is seen as existential
I take your point that people are scared about this. I see them commenting on reddit about the insanity of giving all our water to AI.
They're entirely wrong of course. Repeating hysterical false claims with no basis in reality. Pure memetics unbound by truth value or the external physical world.
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I’m not going to criticize you for analyzing the political consequences of the data center water issue, but I feel compelled to point out here that it is obviously 100% unsubstantiated nonsense and is in no way existential.
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JFC both of those outcomes are ludicrous fantasies.
For the former, we finally have justification to invest in power generation more appropriate to our civilizational needs. There's going to be a serious lag, but 10 years from now the new plants are going to be feeding cheaper AI and we'll all reap the benefits.
For the latter, it takes municipal fuckups of incredible magnitude to put water at risk anywhere we're putting data centers. Surely you're not falling for publicity stunts with muddy mason jars? I have higher expectations of even a first time caller!
I think the water use/toxicity issue is the probably the least (but most visible) issue. De-electrification (or getting utility bills blown up) is ultimately, in my personal opinion, a much realistic concern (one that has materialized in many places already), just because the energy infrastructure isn't and might simply never be there and modern life effectively requires it
Regardless, both I think are seen as existential risks, whereas "China might beat us to an undefined goal" is ultimately unconvincing
I do agree that at least temporarily electricity will get more expensive. We're hemmed in by declining demand from regulation, offshoring manufacturing, and general efficiency improvements plus the pernicious insanity of cost disease for anything infrastructure related.
Unlike healthcare though there's a pendulum to swing back there if AI forces investments.
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Other datacenter issues are more complicated, but it's worth noting that the risk of "not having potable water" is entirely imaginary, not existential.
In drought-ridden areas where water consumption is already a very politically sensitive issue, datacenter water usage is admittedly not risk-free
Though the water issue itself is probably more fear than reality. There's also some other issues like the instance where wellwater was poisoned with nitrates in at least one instance which probably contributes to the fears though I can find like a grand total of like 2 stories on water contamination (this and the Morgan County story).
I think there'd be alleviation of a lot of these concerned if these cooling loops could use gray water or something similar, but as it stands there's too much stuff in them
Even focusing on the regions with the most water stress, this gives an inaccurate impression.
Water usage in acre feet:
Arizona datacenters: 2,777
Arizona alfalfa: 1,310,000
Nevada datacenters: 2,197
Nevada alfalfa: 645,000
Its water usage is orders of magnitude smaller than a single crop. And no one is histrionic about the threat of alfalfa to kill us all by using up all our water.
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Pearson v. Port of Morrow is mostly about agricultural nitrate use and bad filtering approaches by the Port during wastewater treatment (and, allegedly, overt dumping). Amazon's just not mechanically plausible for more than a couple percent of nitrogen in the system; they're just not that big a source of incoming wastewater and they can't be concentrating that heavily. They settled for 'go away' money.
The Morgan County story looks to have turned out to be the normal effects of construction, and hard to distinguish what portion (if any) is specific to the data center construction.
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Is anyone in the data center space running open-loop cooling? Otherwise they're just using the same water round and round. It looks like it is used some places, but we could easily be adding incentives or requirements for closed loop (air of ground source) cooling and battery-backed solar on rooftops instead of outright bans.
The majority of them are, currently, it seems
Even closed-loop systems do need to be replenished once in a while (although much much greater efficiency). The tradeoff there is power usage; closed loop systems use more.
Yeah. I think the current environment on this just is incredibly low trust so I think it'd do little to quell outrage. I do think the water usage thing is probably the most strawmanny of the worries, but it is probably the most visible
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Evaporative cooling still sees extensive use, but in the last eight months many of the hyperscalers have realized that it's not worth the ill-will that it generates. The balance may change over time for the better.
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Both Altman and Amodei run on the Thiel 'the most important part of making a startup is securing your moat' playbook. They have potentially screwed the entire sector in their attempts to gin up enough fear that the government decides to regulate and make them the only two frontier labs in America.
How bad exactly does the state of AI need to get before you start reading "don't worry, we can totally handle it" as the dishonest part and not "now, we'll need to be careful because this is really dangerous"?
Probably when the AI I personally use stops being friendly and helpful and useful, and we stop learning more and more about how to get into its brain and make it do what we want.
I'm not saying nothing has ever gone wrong, but I see literally absolutely nothing to make me think any scenario resembling FOOM is possible and if that's off the plate then the worst we've had is essentially minor accidents of the kind that resembles Falcon rockets blowing up on launch: natural, broadly controlled, and limited in scope.
My main concerns are twofold:
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I have not been following the issue closely, but FWIW to me there is kind of an astroturf vibe to this opposition to data centers.
Sadly, I've spoken to enough friends in real life to know that it isn't astroturfed. People are using all sorts of discredited arguments to argue against AI datacenters. It's all the worst parts of NIMBYism come to roost.
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To me, it's not very surprising, and seems genuine. Let's ignore the problems with the physical data centers for a second. There's been much ink spilt on the issue of water, electricity, noise, and general quality of life for the people who actually need to live next to these AI data centers. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that some of those concerns are legitimate and some are not. The backlash against data centers seems to me to be an indictment on AI as a whole and the view of the future that has been, let's be honest, forced on us.
The average person's experience with AI is slightly positive at best. Maybe they use it as another, better search engine (with how trash Google has become, this is probably the most prevalent use of AI. Maybe they see some vaguely amusing AI slop on social media. Unfortunately, however, a lot of the average person's experience with AI is extremely disruptive and literally life ruining in some cases. It's not hard to find people who had their parents, grandparents, or friends completely one shot by AI on Facebook or companies replacing all customer service with AI agents, making it impossible to get any help. And don't even get me started on AI and its consequences on the job market. As if mass AI layoffs weren't enough, if you're searching for a job, you're now getting your resume reviewed by AI, interviewed by AI, and rejected by AI all before a human has ever seen your resume. People are resorting to using AI to apply to hundreds of jobs a day to have a chance. And when you get a job, you're being forced to use AI as a part of company policy. I'm not saying that a small slice of the population didn't make great productivity gains with the help of AI. I am saying, however, that these gains are simply not felt by the average AI user, let alone person.
All of that is to say nothing of the actual people who are responsible for AI. Everything I said before might even be acceptable if the people who ostensibly are responsible for selling AI to the public even vaguely resembled humans. Instead they loudly and often brag about how many jobs they've eliminated, how everyone's current way of life will be completely upended, and how everyone who does not enthusiastically support this is a luddite and should be left behind to rot as a permanent underclass. And by the way, the AI layoffs will continue. And not only that, they will actually accelerate. And actually we think it's a good thing that you're being rejected by AI hiring managers. And also, do you have any more of those subsidies that lets us build more of these?
Is it really, truly a surprise, then, that the average person is against anything and everything that supports AI?
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This seems like normal low-IQ people ranting and raving about hot topics. But this time, thé people on the other side are weird ultra-wealthy lizards with business interests that regularly get accused of being slightly evil by both sides of the aisle.
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It seems genuine to me. It's been brewing for a few months now at least although probably a bit longer. OpenAI alleged that "China" was responsible for astroturfing and so that's where that story came from, but they're obviously a little biased. I'm sure there is some sort of responsibility there but that's probably more a consequence of it becoming an issue rather than starting it in the first place
I think a lot of it came from the fact that electricity bills in a lot of places are soaring, and, if you're working in an IT or office environment, the prices for computer parts like RAM and SSDs have in some cases quintipled at best
It's been brewing for like 1.5 decades, I'd say this recent rapid buildout just made it topical and spread awareness.
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You're probably not going to get much buy in to that stance here. Most of the readership skews urban, wealthy, and technocratic. They don't view the negative externalities as real problems.
The Chinese interference theory is a convenient way to avoid having to confront those externalities without asking why nobody's crying out to have Fort Mason Park paved over and converted to a data center using "temporary" gas turbines for power.
It's very similar to the "Russian election interference" narrative from 2016. Sure, you can probably dig and find something, but Sexy Bernie coloring books do not a complete explanation make.
People just call it Fort Mason. Also, San Francisco already has multiple data centers in city limits, on the east side.
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I'm sure there's some of that, but NIMBY types and degrowth types don't need much motivation to oppose them as is. Plus all the AI haters.
I think this is a big part of the backlash much more so than the NIMBY or a degrowth mindset. AI, despite the use, seems to be deeply unpopular among some, and the datacenters are probably just the physical manifestation of this
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It's interesting that the Motte is considered significant enough to run the op on, too.
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