So it is a low efficiency power station with some servers attached to it.

Good luck with that. Order books for gas turbines are full for decades. Diesels will probably get used and pollute everything with their stink and noise.

> Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.

I just love the irony of being absurdly callous and dismissive of human life while also getting the basic math wrong.

Nevermind that the 100,000 figure is across the nation of 300 million and includes things like automotive exhaust, while the other number is likely to be borne by that one specific community. Indeed, if you look at the study[0] your article cites -- which is looking at what we should be working on reducing -- industrial deaths are under 30,000, and electrical are around 10,000. So below half of your figure.

[0]: https://pubs.acs.org/estlcu/article/7/9/639/504911/Reducing-...

I think you're getting a lot of unfair pushback on this, when you're making some excellent points. Just to clarify, I think you're making these points:

- Existing air pollution causes a ton of harm.

- Realistically, the optimal amount of air pollution is probably not zero.

- Logically, we should treat the cost/benefit of adding this "new" air pollution the same as the cost/benefit of removing existing air pollution.

- As an absolute number, the harm caused by this facility is very large, but as a percentage it is tiny.

People seem to be interpreting your conclusion as, "therefore it's completely fine to build this facility because only percentages matter, not absolute numbers." But I think your conclusion is more like, "our society has a complex relationship with air pollution and our existing choices reveal that we are willing to accept some air pollution sometimes, so you have to do a cost/benefit analysis, not just look at costs."

Some of these residents will die, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?

There is already very little to make these projects pay the externality costs; at this point paying enough remediation costs to reduce additional deaths should be the minimum.

And this reasoning is exactly how we got here in the first place.

“It’s not that bad, just a little bad, so it’s okay”

We’re talking about air pollution and death rates, not financial risk.

For context, a US coal plant on average causes 3 deaths per year due to air quality. If we're not calling a coal plant a major source, wtf would we refer to as a major source?

It doesn't matter that the aggregate air pollution of the entire country far exceeds any individual source, the point of the major/minor distinction is to compare individual sources.

But that’s already the framing.

A minor source should never lead to deaths or to put it otherwise No deaths = minor source

deaths = major source

Many deaths = majormost source

Now we just need define many but we already know its a major source of pollution that kills people

Irony is wasted on the stupid (on @docdeek).

Health costs don't matter, because someone else is paying them. We handwave them with "well only 3-4 additional people die after paying that cost.

The air pollution does not matter, because global warming already exists and air is already polluted. And making all that worst also does not matter, because who cares about anything but what AI companies want.

The specific issue is that because it's a data center, from a company with unlimited money and therefore political power, it's being allowed to skip all the rules about clean generation. The ones in question are building on-side dirty power.

There's a surge in data centre building - a massive surge of power hungry hungry hyper scaled hippos.

Many local grids are currently unable to meet that demand, therefore various "solutions" so far include:

* buying up jet engines from COVID era bankrupted / downsized air fleets and running them continuously in banks along side data centres to spin generators.

You'll note these aren't the cleanest solution, are a bit noisy, and not renewable.

* building a data centre AND and onsite LNG gas extraction facility to directly on site gas supply and derived electrical power.

This one is expected to be the single largest CO2 source in mainland USofA (or some similar stat, it was recent news).

So these are fossil fuel polluting sources that are directly attached to specific data centres and not being used for non data centre purposes.

If building a data center essentially necessitates building more fossil fuel plants (and/or indeed comes with its own gas and diesel generators because the grid could not handle the extra load, plus generating their own dirty electricity is cheaper for the megacorp because a corrupt govt allows them to externalize costs), the extra emissions are obviously caused by the data center. No matter whether it could maybe in the future run on renewables instead.

There is also the giant "Tax Incentives" being given to these projects under the guise of them being "job creators". Unfortunately, data center's only need a bunch of jobs at the initial construction + installation of hardware. Once it's operational, it'd need about a dozen staff to maintain round-the-clock on premise supervision.

The data centers described incorporate dedicated power generation into their design. The power generation is fossil fuel based and high-pollution, and is being deployed at scale.

Behind the meter power generation is being included on site with the data centers.

>to my knowledge, computers do not produce any emissions at all.

>is there something more to these arguments that I'm missing?

Yes.

You can't be expected to know everything that comes into play, each person rarely has a very good grasp of the big picture.

Have you ever smelled the type of acids and toxic gases that need to be handled before you even get computer chips to build computers with?

Where do people think the toxic wastes from these processes end up?

Plus the emissions from the freight across different modalities which scales linearly with massiveness of the tonnage.

And that's before you even consider the power needs of development when it exceeds the clean energy available at any one time.

> What waste products do data centers output?

Energy production consequences aside, they produce tons of e-waste

[dead]

In theory yes. In practice if the local congressman wants to keep their job they’ll block it at any cost if there’s local opposition.

Well the reason data center stuff is news is that local boards are resisting all the usual efforts. It’s been quite extraordinary, but town after town is sending the data center folks packing.

You don’t get to 25 or 30 trillion total addressable market, full stop. It's just a straight up pipe dream. If everyones jobs are automated away, there won't be any customers for the products and services provided by the companies that are fully automated by AI.

> How is anti pollution argument pro ai?

What? (Edit: I think you misread "in support of their primary concern, being AI" as "in support of AI"? People who complain about pollution are usually mostly concerned about AI, and they use arguments of pollution to strengthen their argument against AI related things.)

> And even if you do inference at home you are not training the models.

No, and training does use a large amount of energy on a large amount of hardware. But:

- That sort of workload doesn't really require many distributed data centers, only a few powerful ones. I believe training is also getting cheaper for the achieving higher levels of capabilities, but I don't think the efficiency advancement has been as dramatic as it has been for inference.

- I believe we are really hitting a wall of diminishing returns, especially at the high end of large models. There is lower demand for training, because models are good enough to have a reasonably long shelf life at this point. Year+ old models that were SOTA in their time are still useful today. The demand for training is going down.

> Moreover, most people certainly are not doing inference locally.

Maybe not, but I think most people who go out of their way to use LLMs because they find them useful for their work actually are. Though most inference is probably from people who do it accidentally (as a part of a search result or something) or students who don't have the resources to do it themselves. But basically every software engineer that I personally know that uses AI for programming is either running their inference on their own hardware, or is talking about building a rig to do it.

I am GPU poor and have a piece of crap rx570 8GB but still get ok performance out of qwen3.5-9B-4bit and various fine tuned versions. Plan on finally buying a decent gpu like a amd 7900 xtx. I still use claude for coding primarily but do research locally. What everyone has said about qwen3.8 though is making me feel I really need to invest in a decent rig.

Not the parent, but I'm enjoying Qwen 3.8 27B on my Strix Halo machine.

Americans believe in the free market but it was the feds who in the 1930s rolled out electricity to every little house on the prairie.

Plenty of power in northern Quebec.

Plenty of ice cold water in northern Quebec.

With the Nordic area, it is already happening. I am not sure it will be as much of a problem, because there will be a lot less jobs with automation. The promise of a good job even in a cold climate will draw people. It will be like the oil fields, except with hydroelectric, wind, and cold climates which will help sustainability. Nvidia and many of the large data companies have already been moving north. North will probably include Alaska as well, because of the cold weather, large amounts of hydroelectric power, and the people used to working remotely.

In this time of drones? I don't see that working out for them...

And this doesn't make you question the narrative that they are really damaging anything?

I saw a photo of him sitting down in a very concerned about data centers interview and the thing that struck me was that his wheelchair was visible. This represents a change in his style. (if he thinks it's going to make him more sympathetic to the average person I'd cynically say that's probably true, since he's starting from zero...)

Isn't he talking about data centers because he is up to reelection in november?

Wait, you didn't read the news articles that China is using United States social media astroturfing to undermine the United States on data centers?

I thought people on HN kept up with this.

Pro data center propaganda paid for by US govt probably

"The luddites were right" seems like an odd position to have on HN.

People have often resisted progress of all sorts, particularly if they feel it threatens their position or erodes their sense of superiority.

> stable and affordable electricity and water supply

Look, I think you misspelled "demand" there. It's an understandable error; those keys are so close together.

Data centers present a demand on resources. A demand that wasn't there previously. You hook a DC up to the grid, and it will demand more electricity from existing generation capability. The DC proposals, without provision for their own generation, present extra demand.

So yeah, unless the supply of those resources can be commensurately increased in some way, the DCs will present extra demand on what we already have, and that means someone, somewhere, will have less available.

> The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply

The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations. The idea that we will from here on just have degrown and decline is insane. I'm not up for that. Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have

As for water supply. Data centers barely make a blip on the water usage.

> The water, light and noise pollution?

The only one of these which actually has any validity is noise pollution, and the US has one of the lowest population densities of any country in the world, and data centres don't need to be close to population centres.

> The threat to jobs?

CEOs saying they are laying people off because of AI is not the same as anyone losing their job because of AI, but even if that was the case, it's about as smart as not using an electric drill to save jobs.

> The threat to truth and transparency?

AI does not only not threaten truth and transparency, it makes it easier to find the truth and to circumvent transperency restrictions.

> The threat to privacy?

It's not.

In my state, when a data center needs a lot of new electricity generation, the way utilities are regulated, the existing customers pay for the new generation capacity. The new customer doesn't get the bill. Bills at the state legislature that would have changed this were effectively stopped by lobbyists.

Not being from silicon valley, I am not sure of the communities mentioned.

But may I suggest we put it right next to Zuck's house? How about in SamA's back yard?

They are noisy buildings, designed to turn electricity into heat. And provide a small number of jobs.

> are you confident the demand for massive ai datacenters peppered everywhere isn't just some financial gambit?

yes.

I always hear about how concerned everyone is about water usage from data centers, however I haven't heard any of these people mention the amount of water we lose to leaking pipes. we lose 3x the amount of water to leaking pipes as data centers would use so if they're so concerned about water usage wouldn't fixing those be higher priority?