[xp84]

Nobody's shutting off those 150 homes to take their electricity, though. They have to buy it themselves. Lots of industrial things take tons of energy, from metal smelting to food production.

Oh, and datacenters alone shouldn't even make electricity more expensive, because rates are regulated. The state regulators have to approve rate raises. Now, are the regulators a bunch of stooges captured by the utilities who always do their bidding? Probably! But that's a good reason to throw your corrupt state politicians out of office and hopefully run them out of town on a rail -- not to protest datacenters.

[multjoy]

Metal and food are useful, though.

[cobbzilla]

the irony of making an implied point that data centers aren’t useful, by using data centers.

[AngryData]

Pretty sure hackernews doesn't take a giant datacenter to run. Its a text-only website managed by nerds. If HN didn't care about redundancy they could probably host it out of somebody's basement.

[cobbzilla]

And there are zero data centers in between facilitating anything?

[20after4]

The data centers that already exist are one thing, creating a lot of new ones isn't necessary simply to continue supporting hacker news traffic.

These new data centers are entirely a speculative buildout of new capacity to support theoretical (and some existing) demand for AI compute.

[multjoy]

The irony of suggesting that this site is useful.