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Comment by guitarlimeo | Hacker News Reader

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-ge...

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They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid. We're currently building a nuclear reactor in my county as well. This is economic growth and a good thing. My town is dying. Main street is depressing. There's a general lack of optimism in the people here.

And the DC will employ, what, 20 people long-term? It’s not a factory.

We'll bring in buckets of money in taxes. Not to mention the nuclear power plant being built in response to the DC.

> We'll bring in buckets of money in taxes

Got any hard numbers on the tax revenue? I am skeptical because typically these projects receive tax payer money.

> Not to mention the nuclear power plant being built in response to the DC

A nuclear power plant takes 6-10 years to build in the US, and sometimes even longer.

> Got any hard numbers on the tax revenue?

According to the county FAQ: https://www.boxeldercountyut.gov/661/Stratos-Page-FAQ-Page

> What tax revenue is expected?

> In Phase One, the county expects to receive $30 million in annual tax revenue. When fully built out, it could generate up to $108 million every year.

"Expects" to receive is weasle-y. How much will they receive?

"Could" generate 108 million a year

Naw man. These numbers need to be more concrete upfront. This sounds like "under ideal conditions (that we won't ever achieve)" weasling

A "small" datacenter I personally know if in a municipality I am directly involved with generates about $6m/yr in taxes just from the city utilities (electric usage) tariff. That ignores any property taxes and the rest.

This is for a standard "warehouse sized" 100MW facility no one would know exists unless you told them it does which has been there for 20 or so years now. It generates far more taxes for the municipality than buildings of similar footprint next to it, as it's in a light industrial park like most of these things are. Scaled up to 1GW that's $60m/yr in simple "sales tax" on electricity consumption. Property tax is harder to dig through, but ignoring initial 10-20 year abatements typical for such projects it's roughly double that - but that's from memory.

I agree the tax abatements are bullshit. But those are bullshit for any sort of development and imo should be outright illegal at a federal level regardless of the project.

This doesn't account for any local income tax/etc. generated by jobs - where a datacenter of course will not be significant compared to most industrial land uses of similar acreage.

These datacenter facilities have typically been very tax revenue dense land uses for quite some time now without cities needing to invest very much in infrastructure to service them. It's why they generally have sailed through approvals until recently.

> $6m/yr in taxes just from the city utilities (electric usage)

Wow, that's a lot of electricity. What market is that electricity purchased from?

Comed in this case. So the PJM interconnect region.

The locality tax is in addition to everything else paid on the electric bill.

And yes, datacenters have always been about converting electrons to photons, density of photonic output and electron input steadily increasing over time.

Why bringing in buckets in taxes, is it owned by a local company? That, or one of us is misunderstanding how taxes work.

Taxes are assessed at multiple levels. Property taxes go to the municipality.

$108 million annually in property tax?

Data centers and almost all big companies don’t bring in any taxes. They negotiate zero property taxes for 30 years and have govts pay them money, because they say the half dozen people they employ are going to create a boom in the economy, they will buy houses, eat out, go to bars and this will create money for the local govt and property taxes.

The bucket of money is from the food truck, the only business that can be sustainable from a DC in the local area. The food truck is cash only, because they payment company now charges 50% because they are using AI to counter the spam and fraud from the other companies using AI.

Yes, which is why the smart way to do it would be to allow it but make sure it brings in plenty of tax revenue.

(Farms don’t employ many people either.)

> (Farms don’t employ many people either.)

I can't eat the output of a data center, though.

You don’t eat the output of most US farms either unless you subsist on field corn, soybeans, and hay.

Ooo, this is exciting, I so rarely get to be the random dumbass crawling out of the woodwork to provide a statistically-unlikely counterexample to an otherwise sound point!

I've been really enjoying eating soybeans. Absurdly good source of protein (yes, even for a bean), dirt cheap, decent source of fiber and a bunch of minerals, and pretty easy to just drop in a pressure cooker and eat however you like once it comes out.

Can't say I eat a lot of field corn or hay though.

Field corn is made into chips and tortillas, not to mention also processed into corn syrup. Cornbread, polenta...

Hay is the stalk of a grain plant. We take the grain off the stalk and make it into flour. A main ingredient in bread and pasta/noodle.

I do, however, eat the things that eat those. Or byproducts (milk, cheese, etc) from them.

The point is that something tangible is produced.

Youre eating alfalfa that gets shipped to china and the middle east?

This is exactly the argument people are worried about. "If prices go up, it's a good thing." For whom? Residents will have to pay this for a decade before a nuclear reactor comes online.

It will accelerate the shift to solar for residential purposes.

That’s a great thing.

everyone gets a better grid.

Sure, but who pays for it?

If the data center which requires the grid improvements is fully paying for the upgrades, I'm OK with it. OTOH, if they expect to fob off the cost of the otherwise-optional upgrade on the rest of the ratepayers, Fck-NO!

And for those who say "but it benefits the rest of the ratepayers, so they should pay too", NO! If you (person or corp) come in and demand we change something, you should be a net benefit for everyone, not just yourself.

Be a good citizen and help everyone, and you'll find support. Don't, and find people see you as an asshat and you'll find opposition.

Ok fine keep the crappy grid. I don't know if it's actually cheaper to have blackouts but there's no sticker shock when it happens.

When the grid is already adequate for the existing customers, they should not have a forced upgrade.

More importantly, what says the grid improvements will go beyond upgrading the corridor to the new data centers? Sure, that might benefit customers right along that route, but not customers in general. IOW, even the "overall" improvements are likely to be limited, but the costs will be borne by everyone.

That said, the way grids are going, I consider the right solution to be primarily off-grid solar+battery on every house, maybe with local grids to share/level excess capacity, and maximum local solar/wind+battery for commercial. That would yield a robust power system far more resistant to human disasters relevant to civil defense and natural disasters; when every house can maintain basic communications, refrigeration, and sanitation on a near-indefinite basis (which is not possible with a grid-based collapse/destruction), disasters are far more survivable.

“Let’s stop all new economic activity as it might have an effect on <insert commodity> prices” is just so juvenile and poorly thought through.

That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day for the sake of shareholder value.

> That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day

Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction of the average American's budget, which is far more heavily weighted toward housing, gas, and groceries. This argument is extremely tenuous.

> for the sake of shareholder value

This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. These data centers drive down the cost of AI, which is valuable to me, and to society. The fact that it also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant.

> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me

No they aren't

They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit

They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money.

The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be.

>> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me

> No they aren't

You literally said they are building data centers to cater to demand later on in your own comment:

> If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built

There you go. Your own point debunked by your own words.

> They aren't benevolently trying to help you out

I didn't say anything about the owners building stuff out of charity or benevolence. Are you responding to the wrong comment? Yours is more-or-less irrelevant to mine in addition to being self-contradictory.

Come on bud. You claimed

> The fact that it (building data centers) also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant

It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built

Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards

Please own up to the fact that you self-contradicted yourself in your own comment by first claiming that "No they aren't" and then "If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built".

> It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built

...and without any implications, that fact is irrelevant. Do you understand what relevance means? It means that there's meaning, implication. You haven't given a single follow-on implication from that hypothesis that actually matters to the discussion.

> Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards

No, this is just factually false.

Fact: for datacenters, without market demand, without a buyer, shareholder value cannot possibly be generated.

So, first there is a market, and then companies act on it to generate shareholder value.

You're living in a world detached from reality where "shareholder value" exists as its own separate entity that can generate market demand.

You need to take a high-school level economics course so that you don't make objectively incorrect statements like this.

> and without any implications, that fact is irrelevant

If you think people's motivations are irrelevant then we just live in different worlds, and there's no point continuing

> If you think people's motivations are irrelevant

I never said that peoples' motivations are irrelevant in general. Just that they're irrelevant in this specific case. You're putting words in my mouth, which clearly indicates malice.

> then we just live in different worlds, and there's no point continuing

We do. I live in reality, where most people understand basic facts of economics, causality is meaningful, and you still haven't actually provided a reason why you think that the motivations matter, so as far as the rest of us in the real world know, they don't. You've had three comments to point that out, and you haven't, so the reasonable conclusion is that you don't have a reason, and you're running away to avoid that intellectual dissonance.

There can be multiple effects for a given action. The main objection I have to this argument is the idea that the only beneficiaries of any corporate decision are the shareholders.

> Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction

You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.

> This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me.

At my company's internal conference we had a rep from one of our partners come speak, and he emphasized that a significant value-add of our company's relationship to our partners is that we're much more tech-forward. he went on to say "Execs in [partner industry] don't know what AI is or what it does, but they know that they want it."

We're seeing AI features being bolted into every application under the sun, whether it actually adds functionality or not. I think you bear a significant burden of proof to the claim that the demand for datacenters is in turn driven by consumer demand for AI, and company boards losing their minds over what they think AI can do and demanding their R&D divisions sink millions of dollars into AI spend to try and capitalize on their dreams.

I'm reminded of Bitcoin: for a hot minute every startup was talking about blockchain and GPUs were getting snapped up by miners left and right because of what people imagined the value could be. That's what I'm getting at when I say "shareholder value:" these developments seem to be less about what value a company is _actually_ producing (& thus the inherent cost-of-goods-sold demand), and more about the _possibility_ of what value a company _could_ produce.

> You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.

This is a good point. I see that I misunderstood your original argument - I thought you were claiming that the increase was going to be financially meaningful, rather than what you actually said, which was the perception of and response to the increase. My apologies. Thank you for your thoughtful response!

> I thought you were claiming that the increase was going to be financially meaningful

tbf, I didn't state the psychological thesis up front either :)

Some people on HN live in an ivory tower. Every "tiny fraction" is a big deal to someone working two jobs to pay rent.

> ... to someone working two jobs to pay rent.

Or two jobs and a "side-gig" or three, and still barely "squeaking by", and still unable to afford health care or any other such "luxuries" of life.

there is no cost of living crisis

I mean, if the new economic activity primarily serves to further enrich the wealthy then ya, that seems like a reasonable stance.

If I get a vote about new economic activity, and it makes me personally poorer, I'm going to need a very good argument as to why I should permit it. Or, you know, pay me.

If the data centers hadn't been _quite_ so hostile to absolutely all their critics and instead had simply offered to pay for some local schools or libraries or something, at like 5% of the cost of the data center, this would have gone differently.

Instead Altman says it will destroy the world: https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the-day-by-sam-altman...

So it's bad for the world according to its proponents, and at the same time, a bad neighbour? Why would anyone not vote against it given those?

If that new economic activity has lopsided benefits and will never pay off for those negatively impacted by those price increases, then yeah shut it down or regulate it so that the benefits are shared equally by all. Shorter version, if the new economic activity is exploitive of people and their communities, then shut it down hard.

People are tired of New Economic Activity that only benefits the already-rich.

Generally, economic activity is supposed to raise living standards. AI promisses to a.) speed up climate change b.) facilitate surveillance and authoritarian tech bros b.) make people obsolete and unemployable c.) kill us all because reasons.

Datacenter is not bringing more economic activity to the area.

future economic activity is fine;

the questions are 1) who is footing the bill and 2) who is benefiting from that economic activity

if it's not the local community, then why should they agree to it much less pay for some of it

Further question, why is it the default position that others should have a say on legal activities you are allowed to do on your own land? Thats frankly absurd. It should be on the people breaching others private property rights to prove real damages.

Pretending that market-distorting impacts on local utilities, air pollution, noise pollution, etc. etc. are just "legal activities you are allowed to do on your own land" is flabbergastingly dishonest.

Are you sure about noise pollution or are you copying something heardd from uninformed people? Again, thr onus should be on you tonprove damages in court. Its fucking ridiculous that people are clamoring to control others private property.

is this a serious question? because a DC has external impacts which, say, a workshop on your property does not; that's why.

How can you be sure the workshop on your property doesn't have external impacts? You are being a bad community player by not first getting your workshop inspected and tested and awaiting the permission of the community and government before doing anything there.

Juvenile? Seems like utility maxing rational actors to me.

This is an intellectually dishonest and frankly completely inappropriate attempt to twist someone’s words. HN generally has good standards about acceptable comments and I’m surprised to see this here.

If we brought them up a decade earlier we wouldn’t have had to wait. Instead, we were told “renewables can replace fossil fuels”, despite us lacking the battery capacity to make them viable for the grid. Nuclear is a direct replacement for fossil fuels with better energy generation and actual on-demand capabilities, plus it’s far safer than fossil fuel-backed media will admit. We could have been using both and have completely cut down on emissions while also increasing the lifetime of our nuclear stores.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

For that little old retired lady who is on a fixed income, of course! It means she'll have to sell that cute little house of hers and let someone turn it into an AirBnB and make some actual money from it.

It sounds like your town needs a monorail! Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail!

> They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.

Everyone involved will lie in exchange for money. Put it in writing, make it legally binding, and then maybe I would believe them. They haven't done that, have they? Also, who do you think pays for expanding your grid?

> They're using natural gas to generate electricity.

Yep. And that will decrease air quality locally, which is especially bad for people with asthma or other sensitivities. And increases greenhouse gases globally. And this natural gas generator will probably be less efficient than a normal power plant.

> This is economic growth and a good thing.

Not much. Sure, there will be some construction jobs while it is being built, but after that, there won't be many jobs for the DC. And there is a good chance the jobs that will exist won't go to local residents. And the owners of the DC aren't going to be buying much if anything from the local community.

> Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.

What on earth is this "If I get in a car accident, it's actually a good thing because I get to buy a new, better car" logical reasoning?

Using electricity is not breaking anything. "If I sell all my widgets, it's actually a good thing because I'll have to hire more people and manufacture more widgets" is entirely coherent.

Using electricity to the point that the grid cannot accommodate it is indeed breaking something that was working before, and the data center folks are surely not going to be the only ones paying for the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate it.

It'd be like your widget maker harvesting wood for their widgets from public land and exhausting it so the public is left without this resource, then expecting the public to pay to arrange for more wood to be grown to replace the wood they used up.

Who is paying for the natural gas pipeline extension? Who is upgrading the upstream supply to manage the extra demand?

Did you know that global average temperatures are the highest they've been in 125,000 years, and temperatures are rising more than 20x faster than natural rates of global warming. Also the oceans are 30% more acidic, and the world's land ice is melting at a rate of like 660 billion tons per year. There's probably around 7% more water vapor in the atmosphere because warmer air holds more moisture and warmer water evaporates more quickly. Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense. Etc etc

But what about this guy's small town with a population of under 10k????????

[flagged]

Seems like this can go both ways. You should volunteer to have a bank of loud, polluting turbines from obsolete passenger jets running 24/7 next to your home so Meta can serve GenAI ads with 5% lower latency.

Only if you subscribe to the logic that somehow I support datacenters built in peoples' back yards, which I never claimed, but you made up. If you make stuff up, you can make any argument you want.

Sorry, your small town getting a short stint of construction work followed by maybe 20 sysadmins, is not worth the pollution that DC will pump.

I commute by rail to the tune of ~6000 miles a year. How long would it take for those gas turbines to make those greenhouse savings worth it?

Some napkin math, lets say a conservative 50MW/day? half what the XAI Colossus DC uses. So they'd be generating about 2MWh running 24/7.

Those gas turbines spit out ~700kg of CO2 per MWh.

My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).

The drive is far less direct than the train, so lets call it approximately 10k miles in commuting.

In a day, one of those gas turbines would produce about 16.8 metric tons of CO2. Over 3x what my car would produce. In a day. It takes me all year to save 4ish metric tons of CO2 from my personal carbon emissions.

Yeah, so screw your small town and screw the datacenter. We all share this world. Your small town isn't worth the damage.

>so screw your small town

I don't live there, but this attitude won't make you any friends.

>We all share this world.

Yes, tell me how me and you and Bezos and Musk are all equally sharing the world. We're all in this together and you care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns. That's why there's nice neighborhoods and not so nice neighbourhoods, nice areas to live in and not so nice areas to live in. Because some people have to deal with the pollution so that you can live in nice neighborhoods without any pollution while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society that generate pollution except not in your back yard.

>My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).

And where was that car manufactured? In your back yard or in some industrial town with more pollution? Do you oppose car factories there too?

> care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns.

It's CO2, it's in my town too.

I'm saying, the minor economic boon for this small town is not remotely worth the pollution over the lifetime of that data center ran off turbines.

> while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society

We could enjoy the modern luxuries a bit more without Altman Et. Al. working to centralize labor into expensive automated Capital that we'd all have to rent back. Hell, even with some pollution caused by relocating manufacturing stateside.

I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.

> And where was that car manufactured?

Michigan.

>I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.

That's why in my country the government is incentivizing via fiscal policies for employers to be cancelling all home office perks to employers. To get people back to spending money on commuting.

>Michigan

So what's your opinion on building car factories there? If we remove those factories, air there would be cleaner.

This has a simple solution. Impose a carbon tax, and let the market sort out who is polluting more and who is providing more value.

Did you know that US produces 30% less carbon than it did in 2004? Even when adjusted for trade, carbon emissions continue to trend down since the early 2000s (absolute terms, not even per capita)

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

Ok that's nice, but it's not enough and now you want to add a bunch of natural gas power plants? Is that going to increase or decrease geenhouse gas emissions?

Are you arguing we did good so now we can cheat a little bit and have some ice cream? Like someone falling off the wagon on their diet.

That's great, but it's still not enough. We don't just need to drop by 30% of some number, we need to eliminate all carbon emissions and we need to start sequestering the emissions produced for over a century.

Anything less is just insufficient.

...so building that nuclear reactor would be a good thing since it will emit far less carbon than those natural gas generators (not to mention all the other pollution that nuclear plants do not emit). Hook the DC up to the grid and expand nuclear power to simultaneously accommodate the load and decommission fossil fuel plants. Wins all around.

OK, fine, but the DC construction cannot start until the nuclear plant is online.

(now you have two planning permission problems!)

Indeed and frankly we are way behind schedule on building nuclear plants, mostly because of irrational fears about nuclear power safety.

Slow to build, capital intensive. I would have loved a large build out of nuclear 30 years ago. Even now if you get one online more power to you. I just don't see it ever being a major part of the solution now. It's time came and went.

1) how long does it take to build a nuclear reactor?

2) what's the plan for handling the long-term waste, exactly? how many sites are available?

1) Years. I would say reducing carbon emissions is a higher priority for humanity than building more DCs, so building the nuclear plant should be a prerequisite for building the DC.

2) Dry cask storage. It works and it is extremely safe, you can leave the casks on site or bury them wherever you want. The most significant concern with nuclear waste is not the radiation, it is the possibility of radioactive materials leaking into the environment and that is exactly the problem dry casks solve.

2.1) Reprocessing, you can reduce the volume of nuclear waste by recycling fissile uranium and plutonium from spent fuel into new fuel pellets. The remaining waste is typically embedded in glass, which can be placed in dry cask storage (see above).

Nuclear waste is not the problem people think it is. We know how to deal with it and we have been dealing with it for a long time now. For comparison, solar panels do break down over time and solar panel waste includes several toxic heavy metals that can leak into the local environment. Nobody objects to solar power by pointing to the waste stream (let alone the waste created by all those batteries that you need to make solar power useful for industrial operations like DCs).

Imagine we focused this anti-DC energy on things that actually have material impacts, like meat consumption and air conditioning.

I'd imagine it's something like each American eating half as many cheeseburgers a year would offset all current and projected emissions from DC energy usage.

Ok if you can talk Americans into eating half as many cheeseburgers I'll stop complaining about data centers. Seems realistic.

People against DCs seem to be quite keen on regulation. I'm sure someone could come up with a law that would have that effect.

Gosh I sure am glad natural gas isn't a major fuel for grid-based generation, and under contention with residential heating. If that were the case, all that extra demand on a limited resource could drive prices up.

Now you could argue that billionaires, their investors and loan sharks should be allowed to buy up gas —perfectly legal— but it's actively screwing up people's lives.

Cool, then there’s no reason it should be built. Building net new fossil fuel burning infrastructure to power data centers is civilizational suicide.

A nearby town was doing pretty well. Then suddenly on a ton of visible land were built either RV/boat storage places or u-store places. The town feels aweful. Lots of those people able to are moving away because the town just feels bad now. That one move dramatically changed that towns direction/future forever.

> My town is dying. Main street is depressing.

And the data center will probably contribute to it dying faster. It'll produce only a handful of permanent local jobs, and the long term economic output will largely be for rich companies who won't be in your town. Even tax revenue will be tiny because of the exemptions they give it.

Ok. Then natural gas prices will go up, and everyone who heats with natural gas will see their heating bill rise.

I was with you for a while here but you say nobody has an argument, then when someone presents one you say that actually that bad thing is a good thing because we'll react to the bad thing in a good way.

> But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.

Your other points are generally very well-thought-out, but this one is not.

Grid expansions take years. Building new nuclear power plants takes decades. And there's "slack" in the sense that utility prices can raise substantially before there's actually impetus to start planning a grid expansion, and then you still have to wait years for construction to finish.

And the party that takes the hit for those sustained elevated electricity prices is local residents, who in general have far less capital and are disproportionally hurt by it relative to the owns of the data centers.

You can make the argument that the electricity price increases are going to be lower than most people think and wouldn't meaningfully hurt the average local resident, but that's a separate argument. I don't buy that "if it pulls power from the grid that's a good thing" is valid.

If there isn't enough power to meet demand, then build out the grid first, or tax datacenter power consumption so that the inflection pain-point before grid capacity expands is less harmful to the residents.

If building a gas turbine for the data center can be done quickly, then building a gas turbine to expand grid capacity can be done just as quickly. (Barring any poorly thought out, unprincipled regulations that would affect one but not the other.)

Good point.

Now, I'd argue that building has turbines have negative environmental effects, but that's a separate matter.

Burning methane is not a good thing!

The externalities are not paid by the oligarchs who own the datacenter.

If the buildout was solar or wind or even hydro, then you might have a point, but new fossil fuel buildouts should NOT happen in the year 2026!

Apart from the immense greenhouse gas potential, if the wind blows in the wrong direction, you will definitely still get the combustion products. This would be much higher on my priority list than long-term tax revenues.

https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

I wonder how adding gas generators helps this graph go down.

I don't know about this one in particular, but generally data centers seem to be moving to nuclear energy for power generation.

Oh, good. Those will definitely be run safely. /s

Maybe these companies can't prevent their own bots from escaping containment and breaching others' systems, but nuclear is surely easier -- and if there's any issue, superintelligence can mitigate the damage.

By the time any of these nuclear plants come online, The current deferred tech debt apocalypse will have played out. The market is efficient, but the efficiency is very weak. This is no exception.

I really wasn't sure for a second there, which is the sign of a truly excellent, top tier Post. <3

We are also building a nuclear power plant in the county. I'm excited for the growth that's going to bring. The other reply to this comment is uneducated. Nuclear is incredibly safe.

Nuclear plants take over a decade to build. Data centers take a few months or years. New nuclear isn't going to power any data centers for a long, long time.

Not in practice they're not. They want to. But can you actually link to any data centers powered by new nuclear reactors?

There has been a lot of talk about investment/plans for microreactors -- but have any been approved, much less gone into operation?

AFAIK recent data centers are all either:

1. connected to the existing grid, or

2. using natural gas generators

Generally, where?

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