[supern0va]

People are scared about the personal impact from AI, then backfill in justifications without even realizing they're doing it.

If the equivalent numbers for electricity and water usage were being being used for streaming video, I seriously doubt people would be demanding no more Netflix data centers. The news story would immediately die.

[trollbridge]

Nobody wants their electric rates to go up, the local water utility to have to raise rates to build a bigger plant, all in exchange for also losing good white collar jobs. That’s currently what AI data centre builders are selling.

[supern0va]

Not exactly. There are some data centers being built in places that don't have the power and water to support them, and obviously it's rational for the locals to oppose them.

But I live in a place where we have plenty of water and relatively cheap power (lots of renewables). There's not much risk to data center construction, but people are opposing it here, too. Because for most people, it's not actually about that.

[trollbridge]

An obvious question is if the cheap power is going to stay cheap after a large power-user comes in who has a proven track record of trying to make everything cheap for themselves with no regard for anyone else.

Or another question to ask is - how does this data centre benefit the people who live there? If it doesn't, there's no reason they should want one to be built. Rubbish tips are necessary. I still don't want one built next to my house and would fight such a thing tooth and nail.

[supern0va]

Here's a better question: as we've had nearly as large of a data center build-out happen between 2005 and 2020 for non-AI purposes, with similarly high electricity and water demands...where has the concern been? Why is it only in the last 2-3 years that people are suddenly up in arms, as a very specific application is being deployed?

[trollbridge]

The amount of data-centre construction is far more than it was 2-3 years ago.

There seems to be an alarmingly high amount of questionable data centre construction going on, such as projects being built in places with no access to power with an assumption they can somehow force the utility to provide it later. These buildouts seem to be being done for financial reasons (they are not Meta, Amazon, Azure, etc. facilities) with the hope to lease them out or sell them half-completed in the future. People rightfully don't want that kind of thing in their back yard.

To give a feel for the scale involved, this one (the new Amazon east DC) in my podunk area of the state is 250 MW (the existing us-east-2 in Columbus is 200 MW, although I'm not clear if this will be a new region or is just an additional availability zone). But that's small potatoes compared to the speculative project in Piketon, which amongst more absurd things is planned to be:

- 10 gigawatts (equal to 50% of current power consumption statewide) - "Modular" nuclear reactors built on site - 35,000 construction workers needed to build it (in a county with a total population less than that) - $30-$40 billion for the data centre, plus another $33 billion to build the 9 gigawatt natural gas electric plant - Meta agreeing to build an additional 1.2 GW nuclear plant on site - OpenAI in negotiations to lease the facility

This is a really big project, of the scale of "nothing like this has ever been done before". Nobody has ever built that much power generation at a single site before, nor has a datacentre this large ever been constructed. There is a very real risk of the project getting halfway done and then being unable to be completed. The prospect of a state literally doubling its electric generation is a bit ambitious, too (doing such means basically a complete revamp of the power distribution grid, or else some very novel designs to only use the power locally). For example, the normal type of shutoffs data centres have to prevent eg an incoming have are unacceptable in this situation because the grid cannot cope with 20 GW of demand suddenly disappearing.