I'm not necessarily in favor of data centers. That said, every time I see something like this I just wonder when we are going to start hearing about data centers being built in poor countries powered exclusively by coal and zero regulation. I really have no idea what a good outcome looks like but playing ultra hardball seems unwise. I'm very poorly educated on data centers and AI in general. But, I am an expert in electrical generation. I know we could do it pretty clean, at least relative to coal/heavy oil. I don't think stopping data centers built in the US will magically cease the boulder rolling in the AI direction. Seems like the money is at its back so its going to happen, just a matter of when, where and how dirty.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
518 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
87450 readers
3466 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
It’s pretty easy to regulate this:
- Closed loop cooling
- grid upgrade built into design plans, paid for by the datacenter.
- cleaner power generation
I'd say your list is a bit too short. Some more considerations (not comprehensive):
- Construction noise and seismic limits (nearby neighborhoods have been disturbed and experienced damage from blasting operations)
- Operating noise limits (ban on-site gas turbine generation, limit noise levels from cooling towers)
- Limit light pollution
Edit:
- Job protections and guarantees for workers displaced by automation
Data centers ought to only be allowed in rural areas to begin with. Even if the noise/vibration/heat/etc. weren't an issue they're still a goddamn hole with zero foot traffic, and that's just bad urbanism. They're like public storage warehouses, but even worse.
They need access to the Internet backbone, but that doesn't mean they have to be in cities. Put 'em somewhere along the fiber halfway between.
I have first-hand experience living near a source of infrasound, and oh my god, it's terrible. Here's a good video about the infrasound generated by data centers.
Job protections and guarantees for workers displaced by automation
Jobs are a necessary evil, not a goal in itself. The goal should be to eliminate all jobs.
Until that time we should figure out a better way to share the burden of the work that nerds to be done as well as better way to distribute resources. Trying to preserve jobs is not the way.
It's more about resource allocation, who gets to control of how much. You can eliminate jobs and have most people scratching out a meager existence or you can elinimate jobs and have everyone on a level playing field. I think we'd mostly agree we want the latter but currently looks like we'd need a war against the already wealthy to avoid the former.
What type of generation are you envisioning here? What type of cooling systems?
My place uses very clean diesel generators. The sound level is below 65 DB with all the generators running - which only happens during an outage. And that's 10 feet away.
The cooling is fully closed loop. A toilet uses more water a day than the 120,000 sqft DC used in a year.
Still missing heat increase, up to 26°F in the surrounding area. All that heat from the gpus and cpus is a lot. I've heard of people using their gpus to heat their apartments.
One square foot of parking lot generates 80 watts of heat in the summer sun. A Walmart parking lot is approximately equivalent to 20 megawatts of heat.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(9 replies)
load more comments
(16 replies)
I think there are definitely ways to do these data centers that have minimal external impacts, but it costs money and time, and they are trying to rush these through as fast as possible.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The US will soon be the poor country that's powered by coal and zero regulation.
soon?
Coal is a miniscule and shrinking source of power in the US regardless of how hard Republicans try to bring it back. We may end up poor, but it won't end in coal being a dominating force again, especially given the oil we can harvest and use for natural gas.
While it has been deminishing, its still 750TWh.
Still some third world shit tho. Look at that gas go brr.
You basically understand what the people with a vested interest in making AI happen want you to know. The truth is that AI is already starting to crumble. It's a technology that doesn't do 99% of the things it's perported to do, and will never do 90% of what they sold it on.
Yeah I'm not versed in the subject enough to say/think you're wrong necessarily. I do know the general slant Lemmy's population has against it though.
Lemmy's population is overrepresented by software engineers who know more about how LLMs actually work than the general public does. Let that sink in.
Also a field disproportionately affected by it so still kinda biased
GenAI as it currently stands is a fancy text predictor. You ever had your phone suggest the next word in a message you're typing? It's that, on crack.
When you really wrap your head around the fact that that is all it's doing, it loses a lot of its appeal imho. Especially for the cost to do so.
To be more specific (for anyone interested), the next word predictors are usually a type of model called an LSTM (at least I think that’s the most common). This model type has been used for a long time for dealing with sequential data. In 2014 there was a famous paper introducing an attention mechanism. This was a rather brilliant, though relatively minor extension to how LSTMs work. Essentially between each step of an LSTM it generates some data representing the model’s knowledge of the sequence to that point. The attention mechanism looks back at these intermediate values and determines how relevant each state is to the current point in the sequence and pulls in the most relevant bits. This vastly improved the memory of the LSTM over longer sequences.
In 2017 there was another famous paper “attention is all you need” which said something to the effect of “the attention mechanism is doing all the work, we don’t need the rest of the LSTM we can replace it by running attention between all point combinations in the sequence.” It’s actually significantly slower to run as the model grows, but much much faster to train because it’s not intrinsically sequential. This is the transformer model that’s the basis of all our LLMs.
Obviously some massive simplifications here but as despite being fairly anti AI, I do love the engineering behind it. So yeah, pretty literally a fancy text predictor, but it turns out when you throw all the compute you can muster at a fancy word predictor is makes the world go crazy
Thanks for this explaination, it finally clicked for me.
That's still limited to LLMs. A lot of work being done is not even in any language. It speaks election orbitals and bonding energy. This is used for biomolecular and pharma purposes.
This AI work is normally not classified as “GenAI” which is what I was responding to, and the parent was specifically talking about LLMs. Usually GenAI specifically refers to LLMs as well as image/video creation.
The big data centers aren’t for the most part being built for pharma research.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Seems like the money is at its back so its going to happen,
Well, there's certainly a lot of money being spent to make you believe this. I'm not buying it. Every day, dislike of AI grows. Meanwhile, AI companies still aren't turning a profit. If the AI companies win, they'll be in control of a public utility that many businesses will need to survive.
Prohibit them from producing their own electricity. Force them to invest in and use renewables.
How would that look? Wouldn't inventing in and using renewables be producing their own electricity? Or do you mean force them to be tied to the grid but also force them to force the grid to use renewables.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Nothing will change. This won't get passed. It'll all get brushed under the rug and the Democrats will keep the status quo as usual
Call your representatives. Or email them.
view more: next ›