[solid_fuel]

> “The biggest issue is a belief that AI should be how we solve everything, while ignoring the resources that it costs. This culture is omnipresent across tech.”

Well said. It reminds me of the peak of crypto hype, but worse and more pervasive. There's this attitude that no matter what the problem is, the solution MUST be LLMs.

[yellowapple]

Datacenters (even the new ones being built today) do a lot more than just AI, though. If the goal is to push back on AI, a moratorium specifically on datacenters rated for more than X megawatts or more than Y acre-feet of daily water per acre of occupied land would've been a much more reasonable approach here than just banning datacenters entirely.

[solid_fuel]

Oh, great ideas. Let's see here:

> The council approved two measures: an ordinance halting applications for data centers with electrical capacity of more than 20 megavolt-amperes — enough power for thousands of homes — and a resolution committing the city to study their impacts as a precursor to permanent regulations. [0]

Well, looks like this is exactly what you're asking for, actually! They have passed a moratorium on datacenters drawing more than 20 megavolt-ampers [1] and have committed to gathering more data before passing permanent regulation.

So, since what the council actually did is exactly what you're asking for here, you support the decision of the Seattle City Council to pass this, right?

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2026/this-is-seattles-position-on-a...

[1] https://energytheory.com/what-is-mva/

[yellowapple]

No, because that's per datacenter, not per datacenter-acre. I'll give them partial credit for trying, but a 5-acre 20MW datacenter and a 50-acre 20MW datacenter are not going to have equivalent use cases or local impacts, and that'll make measuring those impacts more difficult.

[solid_fuel]

Your desired unit of measurement is a stupid and pointless one.

No one measures data centers by “datacenter-acre”, because what matters is resource consumption not power density. A 20 MW is going to consumer 20 WM of power and require 20 MW of cooling, regardless of how many acres it sits on.

[yellowapple]

Power density is the exact metric by which datacenters are differentiated between “hyperscalar” (i.e. what most people call “AI datacenters”) v. your run-of-the-mill colocation DC.

Also: a flat MW cap per DC is straightforward to game by splitting one big DC into multiple smaller DCs.

[solid_fuel]

> Power density is the exact metric by which datacenters are differentiated

True or not, that is irrelevant. Total regional power demand is what affects consumer prices, not demand density.

> Also: a flat MW cap per DC is straightforward to game by splitting one big DC into multiple smaller DCs.

"Gaming" regulations like that is called fraud. This is irrelevant either way because the regulation applies per organization, creating subsidiaries to sneak things past won't help.

[quantified]

The entire process has blind spots. Starting with adding more demand for electricity, more demand for mined materials that harm the people and environment. Amazon hasn't helped the global environmental footprint in any way. If you work in most forms of tech, you've agreed to not lose sleep over these things.

[CamperBob2]

No matter what the problem is, the solution will involve some form of machine learning, inference, or both, with massively-parallel processing that is probably (and unfortunately) centralized to some extent. Hence the need for data centers.

They don't need to be built in the middle of downtown freaking Seattle, though.

[saghm]

> No matter what the problem is, the solution will involve some form of machine learning, inference, or both, with massively-parallel processing that is probably (and unfortunately) centralized to some extent.

I think the point people are making is that this claim is not self-evident, and there's a remarkable lack of justification for it whenever it gets asserted. If you're convinced that this tool can literally solve every problem we have in society, it would help to explain why you're so confident about that. So far all I've heard ever is "exponential growth", which is not particularly convincing when a high school precalculus class gives you enough knowledge to be able to understand that there are curves that look a lot like exponentials before suddenly hitting diminishing returns.