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by yellowapple 2 days ago
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.
1 comments
solid_fuel 2 days ago
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/

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yellowapple 1 day ago
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.
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solid_fuel 1 day ago
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.

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yellowapple 1 day ago
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.

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