[briffle]

Its a double edged sword. yes, it stifles renewable energy innovation, but those rules are usually put in place in a more general sense, and you would really want them in place if next door was suddenly announced to be a landfill, or chemical plant, or a chicken farm, or an xAI datacenter....

[endymion-light]

I think you've stumbled on the core problem - it's a lot easier if you have the funding to be able to do all of those things.

xAI would have the capital and lawyers necessary to push it through no matter what. You can hire "independent" environmental consultants to allow for these projects to be made with enough capital.

The problem with the UK is that these rules absolutley do not apply to be big players, it's a case of stifling smaller innovators while letting larger ones get off scot free.

[sidewndr46]

I've personally seen the opposite where a government regulator hired an independent environmental consultant to document the decline of wildlife in a specific area. The problem was their findings were that the wildlife were actually doing exceptionally well in that area. The government promptly ignored the results and then stopped providing any further studies on the wildlife population under the logic they were never required to.

[ntonozzi]

The UK is begging for people to build datacenters: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-...

[hdgvhicv]

National governments maybe. Local ones aren’t, and it’s those that fill with nimbys and maintain the majority of control over planning

[nxobject]

Everyone wants the datacenter somewhere in their country for sovereignty... just not next to them. Quelle surprise. At this point you may as well build supermarkets on top of them just to sell 'em to people.

[fc417fc802]

They're so absurdly capital intensive at this point that they probably ought to be buried at least 50 meters down. If any reasonably capable countries ever face off directly they'll probably be one of the first things to go.

[aitchnyu]

US suburban development followed nuclear war threats. Will history repeat itself by unconcentrating servers?

[fc417fc802]

Given the rapidly increasing power densities I expect it would be far more straightforward to bury them. I believe a single 42u rack of last gen nvidia hardware is already more energy intensive than the HVAC for a mcmansion.

However it occurs to me that the electrical grid becomes a high priority military target in this scenario. Maybe datacenters should go all in on building their own power plants.