The page mentioned in the article seems to focus on "AI Data Centers". Looks like it's a much smaller set of hyperscale stuff, not every telco building with a bunch of racks.
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
Erin Brockovich is popular enough that it justifies duplicacy of efforts, amount of visibility her name will brings in much more value than cost of building it.
Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever xAI is doing with "mobile" generators.
I mean, the wastewater issues can be real in some environments. It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed and mitigated. It's not like these things have the ecological impact of steel foundries or fruit orchards, but they're not parks either.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable".
A lot of the "sneering" I see from everyone who isn't an investor or an executive is a consequence of resistance to outreach. It's very difficult to discuss subjects with people when many now interpret factual explanations as propaganda and reassurance as manipulation.
By the way, plenty of people feared electricity a great deal (and it wasn't exactly implemented safely when it was new). In the 90s, many people also thought the Internet was a temporary fad, a mere novelty that would fade in some years.
Maybe the issue is the "reassurance" is identical to propaganda and manipulation. It definitely doesn't help that the companies having to "reassure" people have aligned themselves with so many others that have been pushing propaganda to manipulate others for some time now. Nor does it help that many of the same companies that need to "reassure" people are also actively doing the opposite - see the billboards bragging about not hiring humans, or CEOs bragging about how AI will replace the majority of people and leave them destitute.
There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.
I don't see it that way at all, but then I'm a housing activist, and I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers. People just like opposing development. It's very satisfying!
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized by concentrated minority interests in specific spots in the country. The only big picture thing about it is the left-populist sideshow it's created.
> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.
That seems very untrue - multiple areas have already banned data centers, and senators like Bernie Sanders have proposed stopping data centers nationwide. This is just the next phase of NIMBY-ism. Alternatively, source that the "data centers the industry wants are all going to get built"?
> I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers.
I'm guessing you're referring to rather cherry-picked data? I've seen data center opposition making even the national news, but I don't recall any '4-story apartment buildings' opposition doing so? And senators like Bernie Sanders are proposing halting data centers nationwide - are there any similar proposals to similarly outlaw such housing construction nationwide?
> People just like opposing development.…
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage in comparison if we measure in per person consumption
Is this a serious comment? No one, in an environmental discussion, ignores how much water beef needs. It’s a central part of most vegan/vegetarian commentary.
But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.
It's totally absurd to pretend like you aren't sure if this is AI. It has every single tell. Most of my slop code doesn't use react either and it looks just like this.
I think it's absurd to pretend like you can know how a stranger thinks.
If I had to predict either way, I would guess that it is significantly AI generated, but that isn't the same thing as being sure.
Almost every link submitted to HN has a comment about the content being AI generated, many of which are not, I would rather talk about the "tells" rather than make confident assertions that I can't prove.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
I started a project similar to this early this year [1] when I got frustrated with the lack of decent free resources documenting data centre build out. The plan was to focus on AI build out specifically, the ones costing billions and the recipients of all the Nvidia chips rather than the boring 'normal' datacenters.
I also wanted to add useful and accurate tools on things like local noise, water or grid impact. In addition to actually monitoring progress via satellite imagery and building a basic graph model for filling in missing attributes.
The reason why I stopped was that I significantly underestimated the effort required to complete such a project to the standards that I wanted to. As you can probably tell the site itself is AI assisted but all of the information was collected by hand which just takes time that I no longer had (~30 mins per site). The only way this would have made sense was as research project or something which sadly didn't line up.
You'll need to compare how many job postings there are as well to get the full picture, especially for junior roles. That's one of the most contentious effects and has an outsized impact on society.
Not much layoffs and they're probably due to the Trump #1 tax hikes on engineering anyway. But you can't say that without getting tariffed. Saying you're using AI is a much safer bet
It does seem most of the pro-AI people aren't actually affected by any of the negative aspects of it. It's a lot easier to be in favor of something that doesn't actually affect you or anyone you care about.
Some people have empathy for those who are, even if they are not.
I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it.
And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.
Most of the datacenters in my city are concentrated near the warehouse zoned area by the expressway, railroad and interstate leading to the airport. Basically nobody lives there, and those that do are probably much better off now that the diesel trains no longer running.
How isn't this the actual link in the post? Have to go through all these loops and hoops and the post doesn't even link to the source from what I can tell.
It’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?
I was thinking some of the community ones are bogus and then I started looking closer at a few of the hotspots. There is what appears to be a compelling site for a datacenter right in the middle of a cluster of these reports:
I looked around North Dakota and there are several that say community reported. Pretty sure those either don't exist or aren't significant in size if they do exist.
What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
Data center mech eng here - from our perspective it's higher rack densities typically due to GPUs. It's certainly possible to have high densities due to CPUs as well but I've seen a significant spike in rack densities in the last couple of years which has caused a switch from air cooling to liquid to chip.
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled condensers which leads to large amounts of water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled condensers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data center waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
The distinction is scale. "AI Datacenters" are a new level of scale with new levels of power consumption and heat generation. Sure you could run regular compute and w/e in them but it's not practical to build these mega sites for regular compute. GPU Compute / AI workloads require network/interconnect bandwidth and latencies where distance matters so you're forced to solve problems you wouldn't otherwise have to. Those problems are mostly solved with money.
This strikes me as a combination of semantics and false equivalence. You might as well argue that a new crowd of people illegally dirt-biking in a public park isn’t a meaningful change because people with baby strollers are have also technically been violating the “no vehicles” sign for years.
People have gotten so intense with the anti-AI sentiment that I hope this doesn't end up guiding people to places where they can exercise violence "for a just cause".
> I also think Americans have the right to decide what happens in their neighborhoods.
I agree with this.
At the same time, all of the data center proposals in my state are in remote locations nowhere near any residences. They’re still the target of protests.
Just because a data center is way outside your neighborhood; doesn't mean it can't have a direct impact on you personally. Electrical and water resources used can affect your utility bills.
But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.
I don't know that local control is an unalloyed good. The interstate highway system would never have been built if we followed this as a principle, for example. For another example, Californian voters consistently vote for state level increases in housing, yet locally consistently vote against increasing housing in their community.
At some point national and state level goals must supercede local control if progress is to ever be made.
I came here to say this. I'm highly confident the site was built with Claude. I asked Claude how it was built and Claude was confident it was built with Claude. Kind of ironic, honestly.
I love this. Yeah there's some FUD out there about water usage and whatnot, but using the internet to spread actual awareness about local concerns is a fine demonstration of free speech at work.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
Is there a map of munitions plants and spy centers and other facilities whose sole purpose is to active oppress, harm and outright kill people?
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
False equivalencies, you can be against ai and imperialism and ads. Go make those maps if you think they’re problems, otherwise you’re just shutting someone down for caring about something that impacts them but you don’t care about
AI compute is a major emerging export industry that the U.S. could become the global leader in. Strong First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control also make the U.S. uniquely well-suited for AI, unlike, let's say, manufacturing, where authoritarian states seem to have an advantage.
Opposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing. Jobs aren’t a left-right thing.
No one is stopping them from building out their own renewables and if they were doing that while also _fully_ accounting for water usage and any other externalities I don't think there would be much (if any) opposition to them. But that's really expensive so they (by and large) aren't doing that so there's opposition. Seems normal and expected to me.
I don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.
Nobody is complaining about the acreage used. The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. If they were just purchasing 100 acre lots of land and letting it sit vacant I don't think anyone would really care for the most part.
the money being talked about is so large that eventually the lobbyists will get their checks and the politicians will pass laws forbidding local scrutiny of data centers
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
AI is good, but the impact of data centers on the environment cannot be ignored. Over a longer time scale, AI is just one wave, while the environment will take much longer to recover.
It seems pretty insincere of a complaint, when in those communities, 100x more land and water is used for farming, just because farming is a heritage, no?
AI is useful for programmers and a few other groups of people to do their jobs faster.
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.
* if that's a sarcastic / troll comment, congratulations, you got me but good :-)
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
I purchase surplus xeons on ebay, grind them into powder, and mix them into my milkshakes. If you aren't going that route then the real question here is what you're supplementing with to get the necessary computational boost. I'm aware of the complaints that surplus gear has a lower overall nutritional value but you'll see that it's highly cost effective if you can just be bothered to do the math.
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/
Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
Pretty functional design.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
A lot of the "sneering" I see from everyone who isn't an investor or an executive is a consequence of resistance to outreach. It's very difficult to discuss subjects with people when many now interpret factual explanations as propaganda and reassurance as manipulation.
By the way, plenty of people feared electricity a great deal (and it wasn't exactly implemented safely when it was new). In the 90s, many people also thought the Internet was a temporary fad, a mere novelty that would fade in some years.
There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.
When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized by concentrated minority interests in specific spots in the country. The only big picture thing about it is the left-populist sideshow it's created.
That seems very untrue - multiple areas have already banned data centers, and senators like Bernie Sanders have proposed stopping data centers nationwide. This is just the next phase of NIMBY-ism. Alternatively, source that the "data centers the industry wants are all going to get built"?
> I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers.
I'm guessing you're referring to rather cherry-picked data? I've seen data center opposition making even the national news, but I don't recall any '4-story apartment buildings' opposition doing so? And senators like Bernie Sanders are proposing halting data centers nationwide - are there any similar proposals to similarly outlaw such housing construction nationwide?
> People just like opposing development.… When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.
Agreed.
Actually it's a completely insane idea that can't be reasonably discussed.
But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.
The code is interesting though, it's not minified, it's very readable, and nicely indented with lots of comments.
The curated data center list is just some inline JSON.
The javascript uses var instead of let or const, I'm not sure if this is just style choice, or there is some code post processing.
It doesn't use react, AI seems to almost always opt for react for front end design, unless told otherwise.
If I had to predict either way, I would guess that it is significantly AI generated, but that isn't the same thing as being sure.
Almost every link submitted to HN has a comment about the content being AI generated, many of which are not, I would rather talk about the "tells" rather than make confident assertions that I can't prove.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
Like I get it looks a lot like apps built with AI but weren't LLMs trained on real website and a metric ton of website templates?
Is it possible they used a template or other UI library?
All noise, no signal.
I also wanted to add useful and accurate tools on things like local noise, water or grid impact. In addition to actually monitoring progress via satellite imagery and building a basic graph model for filling in missing attributes.
The reason why I stopped was that I significantly underestimated the effort required to complete such a project to the standards that I wanted to. As you can probably tell the site itself is AI assisted but all of the information was collected by hand which just takes time that I no longer had (~30 mins per site). The only way this would have made sense was as research project or something which sadly didn't line up.
[1] https://investigationsofadifferentkind.com/
But at the macro level, it is not really a big number so far. From ~2.48 million in 2023 to ~2.37million now. Or a 5% drop in employment in 3 years.
Fred: All Employees, Computer Systems Design and Related Services (CES6054150001)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ces6054150001
I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it.
And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.
For reference: https://www.datacenterjournal.com/data-centers/oregon/portla...
Just one random Google result:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
https://maps.app.goo.gl/nZyt5Yb3kqxj5thc8
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled condensers which leads to large amounts of water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled condensers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data center waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
The power an "AI data center uses" in a single rack used to be, or is still in many cases, the power draw of an entire room or even floor.
Going from a few megawatts to ~10GW.
I don’t understand why some people want to call everything violence. Watering down the meaning of a word doesn’t help anything.
I agree with this.
At the same time, all of the data center proposals in my state are in remote locations nowhere near any residences. They’re still the target of protests.
But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.
At some point national and state level goals must supercede local control if progress is to ever be made.
Brokovich might not know it. But her web people certainly used AI to build this site. From the Emojis, cards, to the single colored left border.
Why are you ok with spending $100 on groceries but not $100 on poison?
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
In what fairytale land does this describe the US today?
Why?
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing. Jobs aren’t a left-right thing.
ie it is in the economic interest of the writers to tap into (and foment) the FUD around "data centers."
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
> I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025
They of course call them “hyperscalers” because they’re the same size as all the other things. /s
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.