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Comment by luxuryballs | Hacker News Reader

When I look at the total number of acres in a state and the number that may get taken up by a data center… not that we should even have to look at this spec but still not sure why people are so focused on data center construction as an issue unless it’s literally going to be next to your house, is there anything more than FUD going on here? And perhaps people taking advantage of it specifically as a talking point given election season.

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You can't look at the total acreage of the state as a metric when 64.4% of the state is owned by the federal government.

The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.

They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.

When people hear datacenter they think ai-almost universally subsidies by the many for the few. They drive up electrical costs, increase carbon emissions, and are designed to make money by stealing and repackaging the fruit of human labor and thought, with the goal of ultimately replacing it not for the benefit of all, but for the benefit of the owners of that datacenter.

What's not to like?

I think part of it is the perception that real environmental and public health damage is being done for totally trivial and indefensible causes. A data center is not like an airplane parts manufacturer, which has lots of ugly pollution but provides a necessary national service. Most people use generative AI recreationally, and the productivity gains among white-collar workers are awfully ephemeral. And if you're less pessimistic about the economics of generative AI... that makes it worse!

"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!

casual/recreational AI use is only a subset of computing, data centers are a hardware problem, I say that tongue-in-cheek but literally it’s true, data centers and computing have always been growing in demand and distribution/regional needs regardless of the software and it will continue to evolve, making it an AI issue seems like an opportunistic way of injecting sentiment about AI for the purpose of discussing cultural opinions about AI, these vibes will transcend time and space regardless of the need for physical server space

Misdirected outrage. DCs are an easy outlet for people's AI frustration.

The problem is not the center per se. The problem is the power. And, all too often they make up for the lack of utility capacity by putting in their own noisy generators.

Water usage concerns in a desert, perhaps?

> the Stratos development would have spanned tens of thousands of acres in Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley. The project would ultimately require up to 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses

Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.

"Privatize gains, socialize losses"

This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters. I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in

Manhattan is roughly 0.00077% of U.S. land area.

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