The alternative to multiple jurisdictions racing to the bottom is strong centralized control to prevent anyone from racing to the bottom. That will be an even worse pill than datacenter pollution to swallow for Americans. Only the big cities are big enough to resist the race.

It's because in the US historically black neighborhoods have a unique history of racism and disinvestment.

Here's an article about what happened literally where I'm sitting: https://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEE...

Stories like this played all all over the US. Read up on Robert Moses for example.

Not that you intended it, but your comment veers close to the sort of "why do black people always talk about racism" thought ending cliche or similar demands to be "colorblind" that ultimately are only functionally used to shut down conversations about extant and continuing racism.

That's a misreading of the term in the same way saying that the phrase 'black lives matter' imply white lives don't matter

The point is that this type of environmental pollution only is allowed to happen in poor areas that are disproportionately black because of decades of systemic racism like red lining.

If that concept makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing, it should. But you should resist the urge to deny the existence of ideas that are inconvenient

> It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.

I read it the other way: that it simply wouldn't happen in a white neighborhood.

The phrase implies that powerful companies know that historically black neighborhoods don’t have the resources to mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the pollution near historically black neighborhoods.

The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.

It's because it's part of a more general pattern where bad things like this are preferentially done to black people. It's the same with highway locations. For some reason, when choosing where to demolish to build a highway, they prefer to demolish neighbourhoods with mostly black people.

How tall are the stacks at the combined cycle plant compared to the ones at the xAI datacenter?

https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/xai-datacen...

https://maps.app.goo.gl/uPkQtSQzMZC3rPZB6

i’m curious, are you skeptical xai would wiggle around regulations and pollute a city?

by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air? because that seems like an entirely reasonable agenda to me.

Here are some quotes from an article [1] that directly addresses your point:

> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.

> The turbines are only temporary and don’t require federal permits for their emissions of NOx and other hazardous air pollutants like formaldehyde, xAI’s environmental consultant, Shannon Lynn, said during a webinar hosted by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The argument appears to rely on a loophole in federal regulations that environmental groups and former EPA officials say shouldn’t apply to the situation.

> Mayo and Lynn didn’t respond to calls and texts from POLITICO’s E&E News requesting comment and have not said publicly how much longer the “temporary” turbines will remain onsite. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

As you can see, xAI is being deliberately deceptive here and this has been known, but unaddressed for a while now. Remember that we are talking about a grave threat to the health and life of the entire population of a town. That too in a country where healthcare is deliberately unaffordable to ordinary folks. I don't know if you know how nasty formaldehyde and NOx smells.

How do you so casually trivialize and vilify such concerns as 'agenda pushing'? It's very sad that HN has too many apologists for these greedy serial violators and abusers. At the same time, the sheer lack of empathy towards the unprivileged is appalling! They're humans too!

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

That plant is subject to regulations. The xAI turbines have evaded regulations by claiming that they are portable.

This stance strikes me as questionable, to use the first hunch that comes to mind to seed doubt in a topic that is researched and reported by multiple fairly reputable sources and multiple people on the ground.

Or the usual Musk externalizing costs and letting someone else handle the cleanup. Who's going to fine him? The government?

Polluting the environment in any form is a violation of property rights. It’s unfortunate our government hasn’t codified that reality.

My neighbor’s don’t have a right to pollute my property by shining a bright light on it or blowing smoke into it or dumping chemicals into my underground well. Even if it’s mostly legal, it’s still a violation of my underlying right to property

Ah so because they're black people and they're already near _some_ pollution, we can just add _more_ pollution since they won't notice.

/s because some of you are fucking psychopaths

Just because one corp does something x bad, it means some other corp is ok to do something 10x bad?

There's a huge difference between a utility scale power plant (you know, with things like tall chimneys) and "truck mounted" generators in the impact to the local air quality. But you know this and are playing word games.

Adding to their sins, many of those airports are in "historically black neighborhoods", you know!

Gas furnaces and stoves are known polluters of indoor air: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/gas-stoves-and-indoor-air-p...

Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.

>I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.

it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too, while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for "simple" LNG burners/heaters.

What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7 near your house.

Burning gas always creates stuff you don't want to be breathing. These small portable turbines were allowed to run dirtier than a full-size NG plant because the premise was that they are small and temporary. But then xAI put 40 of them in a parking lot and fired them all up at the same time, which is quite illegal but xAI also controls the government of both Tennessee and the USA, so residents are fucked.

You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.

They certainly can emit NOx. The common technology used today to reduce this is called Dry Low Emissions (DLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_low_emission). Emissions can be very low if done correctly.

Global issues start locally. See: tragedy of the commons

Check the map. There's an operational industrial scale natural gas power plant next door to xAI facility. And it was there for what, a decade already? Before it, there was a coal power plant there too.

Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.

In the US, we have a living history of discriminatory policies based on race

https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-shado... , here is a quick overview of redlining in Memphis

Because the people who decided where to locate it and the people in government who could do something to stop it make decisions about how much they care based on those folks’ skin color. If those generators were placed near a rich white neighborhood, the government response would be wildly different.

Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.

> some people are going to have to make minor sacrifices if the majority want AI services

_Does_ the majority want AI services? I feel like the question “if you could stop AI, would you?” is far too controversial for this to be the case.

Would you be willing to volunteer and make that sacrifice for the majority?

I honestly cannot tell if this is satire. Literally a Lord Farquaad level take. Some of you may get asthma and lung cancer, but that’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make to ensure we can deliver MechaHitler to the masses.

> it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.

In that case I think it would be only fair to also count the energy required for training the LLM.

LLMs are far ahead of humans in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge they can remember, but nowhere close in terms of general intelligence.

For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need to kill the people that AI makes redundant. This is apart from the fact that right now we are at a choke point where it's much more important to generate less CO2 than it is to write scientific simulation code a little quicker (and most people are using AI for much more unnecessary stuff like marketing)

A GenAI does not, however.

GenAI completely fails to even get the right answer to numeric problems

Inference itself is also very costly!

But either way, how many human lives are spent making that file?

> What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.

This article is coming from one of the premier groups doing financial and technical analysis on the semiconductor industry and AI companies.

I trust their numbers a hundred times more than a ChatGPT guess.

Thanks, that’s interesting. IEA definitely seems like a solid source for this kind of thing.

1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.)

Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.

I hear they LOVE Sanctuary Moon.

Another POV is, if datacenters are really constrained by power, by all means, offer users a discount when their queries utilize solar. Millions of Americans drive further to save cents to fill up their tanks - you can’t say there isn’t precedent among normal people to deal with this. The better question is, is it really a constraint?

The difference is they are new. It’s not rational but people on the whole generally are ok with the status quo of how the sausage is made largely because they don’t really think about it. But new systems being spun up provide an entry point for a discussion. Ideally that discussion can then be widened and open up an opportunity for wider scale change. Or nothing happens and it all becomes the new status quo which most don’t think about again.

The difference is that the food industry at least feeds me and a house provides me shelter. The people in charge of building AI data centers intend to replace all labor in using my own and leave me begging for peanuts, while also making energy and many goods more expensive and ruining the environment

FYI Fairly certain this account is a bot. Acct created in 2023 and has 36k karma

We need food and housing. We don't need AI.

You'd have to be a little thick yourself to think that's clever. If you think that's clever, let me recommend you sell your car for extra fuel money, chop off your legs for rapid weight loss, and perhaps abuse methamphetamine to not have to sleep, boosting productivity 3 fold. Perhaps you'd like to add robbing banks as a faster way to get your cash out.

"Getting a permit for 15 turbines after having illegally used 35 turbines that then poisoned the air for the residences around the turbines" is a clever way to achieve the goal? I wouldn't call doing a blatant illegal action "clever", but rather sociopathic.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

> What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.

My first thought when seeing that article is “I can buy one of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could’ve ordered one at any time in the last 50 years.”

I had been under the mistaken impression that the turbines in airplanes were more different from the turbines in power plants than they actually are.

Tesla is a battery company

So I guess it’s not a bubble then since these companies are raking in the big revenues? Or maybe they are counting all those circular investments as revenues somehow?

I mean, if so then they are lying through their teeth.

As far as I can tell, power isn't actually a major part of the expense, it's dwarfed by the capex. Just the amortization on the GPU will be an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the power to run the GPU at 100%. (Assuming a 5 year depreciation period.)

I understand the instinct but if people seriously think that they are solving any problem by unplugging cell phone chargers, they are simply bad at math. Human time is easily worth more than that, even when working at minimum wage.

That said, it obviously sucks that utility prices are rising for people who can not effortlessly cover that (not to speak of the local pollution, if that's an issue). Maybe some special tax to offset that cost to society towards hyper scalers would be a reasonable way to soften the blow, but I have not done the math.

> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai

Without agreeing or disagreeing with this idea, I’m left wondering how you’d write such a law.

If company A fires Bob and says “Bob’s job is now done with AI”, that’s a clear case.

What if Bob was on a team of 8 and they just go without backfilling Bob? Maybe AI was the cause; maybe it was the better coffee they got for the office; maybe the workload just shrank a bit; maybe they’re worried about the economic outlook for next year…

Or company A fires Bob and his whole team and outsources to company B. Maybe company B is more efficient at that business process. Maybe they were more efficient before using AI. Maybe they don’t even use AI at all. Maybe they were more efficient before AI but are even more efficient now. In which cases were “jobs replaced by AI”?

Maybe I start a company C and do that business process with 4 people and AI that would take other companies 8-25 people. A brand new company D starts and uses my company C instead of hiring a team to do it or contracting with company B. Were any “human jobs replaced by AI”? Whose job(s)?

> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai.

Then existing firms will just go bankrupt, and new firms which never had human employees will use AI, and you’ll have the same job losses but no direct replacement and no payment into the UBI fund. Instead, just tax capital gains and retained corporate profits more than currently (taxing the former the same as normal income, with provision for both advance recognition and deferment of windfalls so that irregular capital income doesn't get unfairly taxed compared to recurring income), and fund UBI with a share of that is initially basically the difference between status quo taxes and the new rates. That realigns the incentives, such that an increased share of the economy being capture by capital (a natural consequence of goods and services being produced in a more capital intensive, less labor intensive way) drives more money into the UBI fund, without needing a specific job-level replacement count to drive the funding.

It can't be "criminalized" if govt and justice system is effectively actively bribed by the AI cartel because AI-related GDP "growth" is only veneer hiding the economical fuckups of the government

I assumed gas plants are pretty good in terms of air quality?

Coal plants are bad.

The only way to solve problems like this IMO is to price in the externalities. Tax fossil fuels for the damage they do, in order to reveal their true cost. Then they will never look like the most affordable option, because they're not.

This website appears to be very AI heavy in articles. I think it's fair to say these articles are biased because of that.

> as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.

Same level doesn't remove the concern for this unnecessary pollution. Stop changing the subject from the environmental problems that AI usage can have by their increased power consumption.

Natural gas engines are efficient!

Ok! But what about the pollution they produce to nearby neighborhoods? What about the health repercussions? Do human lives not matter?

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument. It's fairly impressive in its density!

1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful.

2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better solutions!

3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and fuel consumption."

4. There are many problems that are significant and worth thinking about even if they are not the largest singular problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined criteria

supply is finite