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Notes -
To what extent is anti-data center pushing big tech into further GOP alignment?
BTW why so much hate for data centers specifically? Is it just "those folks make tons of money and don't give any to us, we must hate them" or is there more to it? I mean yes, they consume electricity/water/space/whatever, so do many industrial sites and nobody (excepting hippie Gaia lovers which are entirely different crowd) cares. Is it just a new fashionable thing to hate or is there anything deeper here? As big industry projects go, they seem to be far from the worst - they don't smell, barely pollute, don't look egregiously bad (in fact, if we ever manage to get away from endless brutalism, they can look as good as one wants) and can be, as I understand, located on the shittiest terrain ever without a problem. Why are they the devil exactly?
The water numbers are wholly made up, but they would be a serious problem if true, and there's been a lot of people pretending that they're true. I can aggressively claim that AOC is a liar -- she's a politician, her mouth is moving -- and recognize that just because people believe her doesn't make them liars.
The electrical consumption and power density concerns are genuinely unusual: some of the larger AI-driven data center plans involve gigawatt values, compared to tens of megawatts for a conventional server farm data center or normal manufacturing plant. The only really comparable industrial plants are the biggest aluminum smelters, and the US has largely stopped anything on that scale. For the most part, this hasn't impacted rates themselves directly, but it's lead to a number of areas being under surge pricing over more of the day, and it's likely to take a few years to fix. Some of this is overstated, since it's been a hot summer and you'd expect increased surge pricing anyway, but the impact does exist.
That's sometimes lead to onsite gas turbine builds, which are genuinely loud.
Some of it's concern about corporation, rather than data centers specifically: see AOC v. Amazon in 2019 for less principled example that rhymes closely, but there have been genuine problems in much of the Rust Belt with various organizations promising a ton of great things in exchange for support today, and those great things getting sidelined with the next business downturn. AI coming after bitcoin and such doesn't help.
((A smaller number are video game fans who want to buy RAM sometime this decade.))
But it's mostly an objection to the technology using whatever arguments are available. Some of that's principled, if not necessarily a principle I agree with: there are genuine problems with the use of AI for spamware, scamware, and employment war crimes; there are some economic concerns that are serious; there's a lot of copyright and intellectual property claims that people make with a straight face. A larger number are anti-these-vibes. And others are just generically anti-big tech.
This all made a lot more sense, after I learned the incremental source of gas turbines is converting 737 engines, because like RAM the manufacturers of gas turbines have their peodctuon sold for years.
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-powering-data-centers-b1c587a9
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