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Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

The world is a very, very large place and I have a hard time imagining space would be an easier place to do anything. Nobody wants to live near petrochemical factories or aluminum smelters, either, but we’ve got lots of petrochemicals and aluminum. SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy. They need to learn from their mistakes, develop some humility, and approach people with a serious financial proposition, like the oil industry in Alaska. That’s not as cheap as it could have been if they didn’t start out acting like scaled-up shady local real estate developers trying to build condos on protected wetlands, but it will absolutely be a lot cheaper than space.

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> SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy.

Did they though? From what I’ve read the places where they build get lots of money and infrastructure (not only DC-related) from them.

Lots of places don’t. Some spin yarns describing job creation and huge economic opportunities, which are largely bullshit, in exchange for large tax exemptions. In Alaska, the people get money, directly, not just some institutions. The oil and gas industries are notoriously uncaring about the people near their operations, but they recognized what needed to be done to smoothly operate in Alaska, and they just did it. There’s a lot of fantastic reasons to dislike the oil and gas industries, but that’l is what mature big business looks like.

The cartoon evil part is less about the data centres and how they speak of AI.

Whether it’s A16Z tweeting about how the value of all white collar wages is their market or Anthropic basically saying entry level jobs are done.

It’s also very much about GPU-focused data centers. They’ve been installing essentially illegal (with shaky loopholes) gas-powered turbines on site with no emissions control to speak of, in populated areas. They’ve made local governments sign NDAs, under false promises of huge economic development and job creation, preventing them from telling residents that the big real estate project in town was a giant data center. Cartoonish.

Oh, they do that too, but it's cartoonishly evil to go in and ask for property tax abatements and for the local ratepayers to support your infrastructure when you have valuations in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

It's hard for the citizens who live nearby to learn about all of that when the idiotic SV execs forced their civic leadership to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Somehow, they just recently learned that was a bad idea.

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-says-it-is-going-to-stop-...

https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-to-stop-using-ndas-with-l...

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5879528/data-center-nda...

Psychotic? Likely. Arrogant? Unquestionably. Maniacal? Utterly. Cunning? Indeed. Delusional? Arguably. But, I wouldn’t call them idiotic, per se.

If they're so smart, why didn't they see this data center backlash coming and plan for it accordingly?

I mostly agree with you, and obviously there is a lot of intelligence in the valley, but there doesn't seem to be much wisdom.

I think they couldn’t see it because they’re steeped in the cult of AI, and far too arrogant, maniacal, et al to read the room. I don’t think you have to be dumb to fail to acknowledge reality.

I agree there is a profound lack of wisdom in tech, and they seem to be proud of it… like they believe they’ve discovered a workaround.

Well, I for one think self-awareness is a much higher order of intelligence than clever manipulation of symbols or the external world, so I still find it stupid. Finding a workaround for the inability to have ironic self-distance is kind of the most pointless, dumbest activity I can even think of.

> I agree there is a profound lack of wisdom in tech, and they seem to be proud of it… like they believe they’ve discovered a workaround.

Even in discussions here I'm constantly put off by comments that are this hand-rubbing talking to oneself about how the "AI haters" are all stupid, or how they can be forced to use or consume things they don't want against their will. It kind of baits all the sociopaths out into the open, because if their deus ex machina is about to show up, why bother with the tedious masking?

> I don’t think you have to be dumb to fail to acknowledge reality.

No, but you can be emotionally stunted to force you to be dumb. Call it narcissism or whatever, but no sense of others or self = constant need to rewrite the world around you, and fearing logic and honesty like a vampire would fear sunlight. A dumb person can learn, people who are forced to act dumb cannot. They are still, effectively, very dumb. They will go to their graves dumber than an illiterate or mentally handicapped person would have. Not knowing a bunch of things that are true is meh... but thinking you know a trillion things that are all just the scab on a wound that happened in childhood, none of them true, and one dumber than the other, now that is astonishingly dumb.

I think we’re pretty firmly in semantic territory here.

They did see it coming. Thus all the secrecy, and why datacenters in space have seen so much attention the past few years.

Maybe they didn't predict the magnitude and vitriol of the backlash, but NIMBY resistance to all infrastructure projects has only been growing over the years. For example, wrt solar and wind power. It was obvious data centers were going to see at least as much resistance because you need to build the data centers and more power generation.

Do data centers in space make less sense than build outs in more accommodating countries? Not necessarily. It's not an either/or thing, and it all depends on the concrete bottom line numbers. In space you don't have to worry about managing political winds at all; you control everything. More accomodating countries tend to be poorer with worse infrastructure, so there are more unknown risks. And you don't need to develop or manage a foreign workforce, which is why 100% of Silicon Valley jobs didn't instantly jump to India or Poland.

I don't understand how data centres in space make any sense at all given the heat constraints. Has there been some plausible breakthrough in heat dissipation technology recently?

No, but every day, armchair business analysts and people high on AI optimism expand the infinite frontier of blind faith and unfounded optimism in the future value of LLM infrastructure.

Radiative cooling isn't as big of an impediment as people think. It's part of the reason why a desert that's 120F+ during the day gets so cold so fast unless there's cloud cover to radiate back.[1] IIUC correctly, the theoretical maximum is over 400 watts per square meter, and existing tech can achieve 80-90+% of that. It's an engineering challenge, but no more than creating reusable rockets. The real challenge is building a reliable convective system from the heat source to the radiating mechanism(s), and just the general problems of building a compact package for delivery that then unpacks and orients itself once in orbit. No new science is required, and you can pencil things out today the same way Musk did when penciling out the economics of building a reusable rocket.

Another way to think about it is whether orbiting data centers can be solar powered. Few people seem to think they can't. The amount of area you need to dissipate the incoming solar energy is approximately similar to what you need to capture it, so if you can do the later you can do the former.

Is it actually financially viable at all? And if so what fraction of data center build-out is sustainable at the increased marginal costs? I dunno. I agree there's probably some irrational exuberance involved in analyses. But don't underestimate the time value of money, marginal cost structures, and related financing and RoI dynamics.

[1] Convection effects are also involved, but that cuts both ways as the atmosphere is also radiating back at you, which is much less of a problem in space. A significant fraction of the net cooling is pure radiative.

> In space you don't have to worry about managing political winds at all; you control everything.

You ignore global geopolitics at your own peril. In space you have no government to protect you when a hostile nation state blows up your infrastructure.

> If they're so smart, why didn't they see this data center backlash coming and plan for it accordingly?

Because the backlash isn't actually about the data centers, it's about AI. 80% of the complaints about data centers are nonsense and the remaining 20% only apply to the ones where they're doing something that isn't actually required, like burning fossil fuels to power them.

Which you can tell because the demands look like "stop building data centers" rather than "to build one you have to add 110% as many watt hours in new non-fossil fuel generation to the grid as you use".

Funnily enough, the last comment I made before this chain was saying literally exactly this. I completely agree.

Sufficiently advanced arrogance is indistinguishable from stupidity

The majority of data center bans on the ballot passed. I undertsand theres a little schadenfruede in calling them idiotic, but the outcome doesnt realy scream competence. These execs arent beating the allegations if not being able to pass a ninth grade civics class

https://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/how-many-anti-da...

It depends on the company building the data center and the competence of the government approving the plan. https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/rural-louisiana-roa...

Oh yes, there is lots of money going to the places near me getting DCs. Specifically to the politicians who conveniently happen to own the land the DCs are built on or construction companies that are building them.

Someone ought to tell the voters who supported all the anti data center propositions and politicians that they're wrong and just imagining it not being handled well.

In seriousness this is an example of the previous point. Rather than engaging with the issue the tech/DC industry seems to think they can wordplay their way out of it by quibbling about irrelevant technical details and people are primed to get extremely angry at grinfucking type behaviour nowadays.

Yes, voters are very frequently wrong and support lots of policies that end up hurting everyone, such as rent controls.

What a bizarre non-sequitir. Rent controls don't work so "the voters are voting wrong"

The oil industry in Alaska that never pays what it should as oil prices are at all time highs?

Yeah. Nowhere did I say they were actually good, but they understand that money talks and bullshit walks when they’re trying to do something unpopular. Assuming ham fisted subterfuge and bullying is sufficient is a symptom of the ludicrous amounts of hubris in this industry’s leadership.

The possibilities are:

- America. Much harder since the elections. Not appealing.

- Europe. Doesn't have enough electricity with anti-AI, anti-big tech and high tax governments. Not appealing.

- Latin America. Expensive, likely to have your assets appropriated by socialists. Not appealing.

- Africa. No.

- Middle East. Your GPU cluster might get blown up. No.

- China. To some extent yes. Plenty of power and space, pro-AI government, but many companies don't want to send their IP to a country famous for copying it and they're still under GPU sanctions.

- Japan, Korea, etc. Maybe. They're not really famous for big datacenters though.

- Australia, Canada. Possible, but you're exposed to Europe-style political risks.

There just aren't many places on Earth where it's realistic to build and operate AI datacenters once political issues and grid constraints are taken into account.

We're currently building 500+ datacenters in the EU?

Yeah? By "datacenter" are we talking about the kind of gigawatt scale facilities dedicated to AI they're casually tossing around in the USA? I haven't heard of any such projects that actually got off the ground. Stargate UK was paused. If so where do they get their natural gas from.

Come on… this is exponentially too reductive to be a serious counterpoint. Also, 0% of the problems you cited are likely to be less expensive than building in space. And do you imagine being in space would make your data centers more or less defensible against the likes of Russia?

> - Latin America. Expensive, likely to have your assets appropriated by socialists. Not appealing.

I had to laugh. Not sure what Kool Aid you’ve been drinking, but you should stop.

Latin American countries have a long history of appropriating expensive industrial assets, what do you think is so crazy about this?

I laughed at the “likely”. How many times have foreign industrial assets been seized? Just in the past few years there has been huge foreign investments in Brazil (which is the one I follow more closely) covering assets that depreciate much slower than an AI datacenter. And all that under a government opponents call “communist”.

It’s far more likely the American companies will appropriate the government, as it has happened much too frequently, especially in Latin America.

Quite a lot of times? Brazil has an active programme of seizing land even today.

https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/brazil-advances-a...

They also love pressuring tech companies over content, something much easier if they have expensive assets in the country.

There are still court cases pending over Venezuela's expropriation of assets.

https://tlblog.org/d-c-circuit-allows-venezuela-expropriatio...

Argentina was seizing multi-billion dollar oil firms as recently as fifteen years ago.

You're going to say, but those aren't datacenters. No, because nobody builds big datacenters in Latin America, because they have a history of nationalizing valuable assets.

Do not confuse agrarian reform with state appropriation of farmland. Agrarian reform aims at unproductive land and sustainable farming development.

Tech companies operating in a country have to comply with said country’s laws. In the specific case of Brazil, compliance with judicial orders is not optional. I remember Twitter was blocked because Elon tried to be non-compliant by firing everyone and thus having no representative in Brazil. It obviously didn’t work. The US forced similar adjustment on TikTok and doesn’t seem to hesitate trying to impose American laws outside its territory.

Most countries consider mineral resources to be state-owned if they are located within their national borders. Bribing officials and installing puppet governments only takes you so far, and occasionally local governments grow backbones to allow them to oppose exploitation.

And courts in the US have no jurisdiction outside their borders. If there is a legitimate complaint, it can be brought to the WTO or other similar international court. Unfortunately, in order to avoid prosecution for war crimes, the US chose not to be part of the ICC.

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