Why are people on hackernews downvoting this? I am not American but from what I hear from americans, this is such a genuine and proven concern that AI does end up increasing their electricty and water costs.
I recently saw a county in america trying to have a deal and the deal itself is behind NDA and the govt cant tell its own citizens about the deal.
Personally I feel as if the problems aren't datacenters themselves (there were so many datacenters before AI) but AI datacenters in particular are really lucrative for the business but really hurtful to the average person in that area.
AI datacenters increase your electricity bill, water bill & now your ability to buy your hardware (ramflation)
Why are the demands of some billionaires preferred over the needs of the people who vote and how the mindset in many people themselves (I don't think there are billionaires reading my comment) is to be on the other side of line rather than fixing it, this whole philosophy doesn't sit right with me honestly especially within AI datacenters (I don't think that I am against normal CPU datacenters so much)
> I am not American but from what I hear from americans, this is such a genuine and proven concern that AI does end up increasing their electricty and water costs.
The media pretty much hates AI because it competes with them (people read the AI summary instead of visiting the publisher's website), so they're churning out one hit piece after another.
If you have a sudden spike in demand for electricity, short-term prices increase. Then the higher prices drive construction of new generation capacity (the cheapest option is currently solar) and long term the prices, if anything, come down, because you get more economies of scale and data centers used for AI training are actually pretty good at curtailing load during the rare extended periods of renewable generation undersupply which is one of the main things you need for the grid to take advantage of that cheap solar.
Meanwhile data centers don't inherently use any water. In some climates it's more efficient to use evaporative cooling -- it lowers energy consumption. That doesn't mean you have to do it that way, or even that it's the best choice for all climates. Moreover, many areas don't have the same water problems as the Southwest. "Millions of gallons of water" sounds like a lot until you realize the Great Lakes contain quadrillions of gallons of water, and it's really just being evaporated rather than actually consumed and then comes back down as rain shortly thereafter.
The media also likes comparing these numbers to household water consumption because households don't actually use that much water. Agriculture in just California consumes around 11 trillion gallons of water a year. Using the standard media units of household water consumption, this is the same amount of water used by 160 million households. There are around 133 million households in the US in total.
The water consumption is an entirely fake problem outside of areas where water is actually scarce, and not even the major offender in the areas where it is scarce. You can also obviously put new data centers outside of those areas, or use non-evaporative cooling systems.
> I recently saw a county in america trying to have a deal and the deal itself is behind NDA and the govt cant tell its own citizens about the deal.
This is likewise related to the media trying to impede them. If the local media is going to launch a vendetta against you as soon as they find out you're trying to build something, you'd want to keep it quiet for as long as possible.
That city with the NDA was in Wisconsin. This is not a place with water scarcity.
Imustaskforhelp|28 days ago
I recently saw a county in america trying to have a deal and the deal itself is behind NDA and the govt cant tell its own citizens about the deal.
Personally I feel as if the problems aren't datacenters themselves (there were so many datacenters before AI) but AI datacenters in particular are really lucrative for the business but really hurtful to the average person in that area.
AI datacenters increase your electricity bill, water bill & now your ability to buy your hardware (ramflation)
Why are the demands of some billionaires preferred over the needs of the people who vote and how the mindset in many people themselves (I don't think there are billionaires reading my comment) is to be on the other side of line rather than fixing it, this whole philosophy doesn't sit right with me honestly especially within AI datacenters (I don't think that I am against normal CPU datacenters so much)
AnthonyMouse|28 days ago
The media pretty much hates AI because it competes with them (people read the AI summary instead of visiting the publisher's website), so they're churning out one hit piece after another.
If you have a sudden spike in demand for electricity, short-term prices increase. Then the higher prices drive construction of new generation capacity (the cheapest option is currently solar) and long term the prices, if anything, come down, because you get more economies of scale and data centers used for AI training are actually pretty good at curtailing load during the rare extended periods of renewable generation undersupply which is one of the main things you need for the grid to take advantage of that cheap solar.
Meanwhile data centers don't inherently use any water. In some climates it's more efficient to use evaporative cooling -- it lowers energy consumption. That doesn't mean you have to do it that way, or even that it's the best choice for all climates. Moreover, many areas don't have the same water problems as the Southwest. "Millions of gallons of water" sounds like a lot until you realize the Great Lakes contain quadrillions of gallons of water, and it's really just being evaporated rather than actually consumed and then comes back down as rain shortly thereafter.
The media also likes comparing these numbers to household water consumption because households don't actually use that much water. Agriculture in just California consumes around 11 trillion gallons of water a year. Using the standard media units of household water consumption, this is the same amount of water used by 160 million households. There are around 133 million households in the US in total.
The water consumption is an entirely fake problem outside of areas where water is actually scarce, and not even the major offender in the areas where it is scarce. You can also obviously put new data centers outside of those areas, or use non-evaporative cooling systems.
> I recently saw a county in america trying to have a deal and the deal itself is behind NDA and the govt cant tell its own citizens about the deal.
This is likewise related to the media trying to impede them. If the local media is going to launch a vendetta against you as soon as they find out you're trying to build something, you'd want to keep it quiet for as long as possible.
That city with the NDA was in Wisconsin. This is not a place with water scarcity.