the no data center movement

i think this is a pretty big deal and has a good chance of significantly changing how people vote, especially older people. i also feel like it has a chance of building local radical energy. it has pretty quickly appeared as a powerful venn diagram center of groups with not-completely-congruent values. residents pack town halls, yell and scream, get ignored, the righteous anger builds. many similar stories happening all the time everywhere right now in the u.s.

to start i've got to link this brutal takedown of clown billionaire investor kevin o'leary from two young women in utah regarding the hyperscale stratos data center currently looming over 65 square miles of high desert north of the great salt lake in box elder county.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOVaBDzEAN/

The remote chance of getting a data center in my drought-stricken North Central Florida county is currently being used as an excuse to ignore burn bans and water restrictions by chuds.

Map, this is crazeeee..! the most blatantly anti-democratic thing I've seen in ages

Last week, there was a further twist when the developers withdrew their application to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from ranching to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application set to be lodged with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project

what's interesting about it is how political support for data centers is bi-partisan, even though absolutely everyone hates this shit. "political support" as in the elected and unelected officials (often appointed by municipal leaders) who actually vote on these things and "listen" to the public feedback.

it's a wedge issue among the left, i think, and democrats, very different from israel's genocide in gaza, but a similar effect in that if you oppose data centers, you have little representation at a national level. the "we hate data centers" voice is drowned out by neoliberal technocrat bullshit, looking the other way, passing through data centers and failing upward to the next level of life success

That Utah one is fucking insane. This is where it really starts to feel like the tech oligarchs really do run everything, unchecked (bi-partisan support, as z_tbd notes!) and we are all just fodder in the making.

there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way. It's certainly going to help shareholders and CEOs but I've yet to be convinced, but I am convinced that these data centers are fucked. The Utah thing will use more electricity than the entire state of Utah is currently using

btw fuck Kevin O'Leary and that stupid fucking show that made him a recognizable name

yeah I read the Guardian piece on the Utah center and holy crap the energy and water math on that one is on another plane. O'Leary was quoted in it blahblahing about competing with China, and to state the tediously obvious: why aren't we compelled to compete with China on education funding, transition to renewables, electric vehicles, etc.

Kevin O’Leary had a role in Marty Supreme as well.

cool another reason not to see that shit

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

xp yeah he's also doing that 'paid protesters' bs schtick w/o providing a shred of evidence... that's the new line with these fucks, if there's a mass protest they must be on the Soros econazi payroll because who would *not* want this massive destruction of the natural world for a handful of jobs and some tax incentives?

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

milo clearly getting paid by the post

Also if we want to do something before China, how about green energy?

And yes, people absolutely hate these data centers, with every good reason imaginable. I agree there's the makings of an anti-billionaire populist political coalition there, if only we had a major party interested in such a thing.

yeah I just said the same thing about China and I mean if we're really worried about them beating us, perhaps we should try communism??? O'Leary can contribute to the glorious cause by digging a lithium mine

in stl, one of the many proposed data centers at "the armory" was approved after a last minute voting session (announced 24 hours before the meeting, the bare minimum required) which was switched to a zoom call rather than their regular meeting spot, and passed unanimously. i saw friends scramble to try to get to the physical meeting spot, get to the meeting (at 2pm or something, during workhours), only to show up at the spot and find that it was on zoom. and then of course, very few of the zoom attendees were allowed to speak.

the mayor, on this same day, meanwhile, no joke, was in england at a small dinner party with the billionaire who proposed the data center. on the same day it was being voted on.

later that day the mayor seemed to realize that some people were disappointed in her, so she released a clip where she defended the data center, and with not a small amount of barely concealed resentment against her own constituency, mentioned the conditions the city had boldly placed on the data center to "address community concerns".

but what are the conditions? on energy use:

The Developer must use reasonable efforts to source at least 50% of
the data center’s energy load from renewable sources (wind, solar,
geothermal, etc.) within five years of commencing operations. If the
renewable goal is not met, the Developer must endeavor to purchase
localized renewable energy credits. The Developer must also recycle
e-waste. The Developer must annually report electricity usage, waste
heat, and water usage, which may be made public.

yeah, GREAT

even better, all those jobs!

The Developer must meet escalating, median-wage "Job" minimums for 20 years (starting at 25 in year 1, 50 in year 2, and 100 thereafter) and pay $2,000 in liquidated damages for each job short of the required total.

something tells me that 100 people are not going to be working at this data center. and what is this incentive? if they don't meet 100 workers, and they're deciding what to do, they can either add another worker (ballpark, paying them $50K), or they can pay a $2K penalty. i wonder what the billionare will do?

the other thing that occurs to me: Iran has shown that data centers (specifically Amazon or AWS sites) are legitimate targets for attack... something to think about, it wouldn't have to be a foreign power, it could be a target for domestic terrorists or space lasers

xp the good news is data centers are not going to be built

I don’t know how reliable Ed Zitron is but he’s penciling out that data centers take forever to build and very few have actually been completed and are up and running

Don’t theae data centers become outdated in a matter of years and need to be completely upgraded?

I don't know about AI specifically but there are plenty of Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers up & running all over the place

New data suggests that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is operating out of more than 900 data centers, far greater than previous estimates.

As reported by SourceMaterial, citing "leaked" data seen by the publication, in 2023, the cloud giant was operating from some 914 data centers in more than 50 countries.

Right, but AI dedicated ones need far more power and water and cooling space so are far bigger than regular ones

i hope ed zitron is right! the part where it gets way over my head is about how the debt holders of the ai data centers are these shitty ai startups built on a bubble that are likely to disappear. i can see how that would be a problem! however, when it comes to billions of dollars, for some reason it always seems like another group of really rich people always manage to step in just in time to make sure that the environmental destruction of our only home in exchange for short-term private gain continues as long as possible

yeah cloud servers and AI computing centers have very different demands xp

ultimately its all just computers in a room thing thats really different about the current ai boom is scale

i do agree that most of them will prob never be built

yeah I don't know the technical requirements but the Guardian article says that the one planned in Utah will be as large as Manhattan if completed, which is fucking nuts

Musk wants to build them in space which is fine I guess but you would have to have staff living up there and what if the AI goes crazy and locks them out

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/

not sure you could come up with a better bubble indicator than someone trying to build a facility bigger than manhattan

im going to build a tulip greenhouse bigger than manhattan

could be a rad indoor skate part after the bubble bursts

def a cool place for teens to hang out and throw rocks at things

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

2x the size of Manhattan apparently? Two Manhattans. That's too much even for a single lunch date.

speaking of manhattan one aspect of new york city living that bodes well for the future is that i assume building an AI data center here is cost prohibitive (not that i don't think someone will try)

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

What can I say, the people yearn for mysticism. Maybe try to get him to just join a nice cult instead? The Jehovah's Witnesses will take anyone.

I've read some of these fools talking about 'Oh yeah, Claude likes to write poetry in his free time' and I'm just thinking 'you fucking suckers really believe this shit don't you?'

a lot of companies that sounds like fly-by-night operators are proposing a lot of stuff right now but I wonder how much is going to make it past the "we rented a building" phase because the hardware to fill all these places is nonexistent or already spoken for

the thing with these giant wealth funds and venture capital expenditures is that they can bet a ton of money every time with the assumption that one of every five, ten, etc. things they throw money at will show a profit after five years because the profits will make up for the rest of them being failures and it's a matter of keeping the money rolling

yeah I guess part of the worry is when they start building the Manhattan-size building and then run out of money and there's just these giant concrete pads in the desert or prairies or whatever... even an unfinished one can still cause a lot of damage, and declaring bankruptcy can help you avoid cleanup and remediation. Look at all the abandoned oil wells all over the place

I have a free Claude account that I've used very rarely, I mainly set it up to poke and prod at it, and I set my username as "Human." So when I log in it says, "Hello Human." I think it's good to keep those boundaries clear.

does he ever write you poems in his spare time?

I’m not going to make myself popular but…

Hi, I’m building a datacentre and they don’t have to be terrible. My one is going to be water positive, they’ll be a net increase in water in the aquifer under us, renewable powered because that’s the cheapest and quickest way to do it. The waste heat is a resource we’re going to use for horticulture and growing algae for fertilizer, animal feed and aviation fuel.

In Europe there’s plenty of DCs heating neighborhoods with district heating, heating greenhouses etc.

Data centres aren’t the problem, it’s how they are built and the insane amount of money sloshing around AI. A DC will pay upwards of US$50,000/MWh for energy for AI. At this moment in Australia the spot price is AUD103 and it’s a still morning and the sun hasn’t come up yet. The ceiling price in the market is AUD26k. So DCs are massive distortions.

Trump fucked the US by putting tariffs in Chinese solar and batteries - that’s the easiest and quickest way to power anything particularly in the American West. Of course by design that pushes everyone to the next cheapest thing gas, which is terrible, and there’s a global shortage of gas turbine components because the latest generation jet engines break all the time and the turbine manufacturers all have uptime contracts with the airlines and so all parts go to planes.

This means that even worse choices get made; and of course like everything that’s gone before DC operators are not being held accountable for their externalities. The Investor owned utility, I.e. one without a market mechanism is a particularly bad fit for this (not that open markets like Texas are much better) - the incentives are there to fuck one’s neighbors as with Lake Tahoe above.

Of course whilst DCs will pay 50k/MWh they don’t want to and energy = water so will do cooling in the worst possible way and just vent heat and vapour to the atmosphere.

TLDR; datacentres are terrible due to lack of regulation, tech bro god delusions about what AI is and will be and capitalism. They deserve to be fought, they are bad news till proven otherwise.

Well right, I mean we've had big data centers for years — it's "the cloud" — and while there were concerns raised about their energy draw even before the big AI boom, they weren't at this monstrous everywhere scale that is being attempted now. I agree that not all of the centers being planned are going to be built, we're obviously in a gold-rush mentality right now and that can't last.

And yeah the problem is regulation, and that the regulation in the U.S. is being done at local and state levels that are just utterly unequipped to deal with any of it. These local mayors and commissions and state legislators get stars in their eyes when these big tech lobbyists show up and do big power point presentations on "the future" and everything, they actually think this is exciting stuff.

I should try and find an actual source for it but a DC nearly blacked out Southern Company and/or Duke last year. That’s most of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas IIRC.

They switched over to their internal diesel gensets without telling the grid and grids don’t do well when 3GW of Load just disappears like that.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves on XAI's big (polluting) data center in Southaven: "This is the largest economic development project in Mississippi’s history. It sets the pace for continued high-tech investments across our state and strengthens Mississippi’s position as a leader in this exciting tech revolution."

This shit makes me want to go all Ricky Roma — "Who ever told you you could work with men? You fucking child."

THANK YOU ED

"We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way.

meanwhile China is so far ahead of us in renewables, the US is gonna be like colonial Williamsburg for fossil fuels (analogy c/o Daniel Bachman)

china selling shovels to the ai gold rush

From what I gather, a lot of the boosters are focusing on the people throwing around a lot of dissent at city council meetings, zoning meetings, etc. and pointing out that people haven’t actually read the plans or what regulations will be enforced, and so on. Which is fair, the number of people raising the noise level in the last decade in local politics has been high and it doesn’t help anyone.

I think what they’re missing is that this is the tip of the iceberg of people who have vague suspicions or are finally noticing that the world has changed in the last few *decades* and there is a lot of vague, in-articulated dissent going on because the public at large has become uncomfortable.

The existing outliers that have been poor stewards of land, energy, and labor are in the spotlight and we’re getting a systematic reevaluation of what exactly we’re doing here.

The counter-example of a good site was provided when I questioned someone boosting expansion was a Colorado Springs industrial site that’s had the sort of incoherent pushback I mentioned. I agree it’d be a good site! Abandoned Intel manufacturing plant that was slated to be a solar cell manufacturing plant until the subsidizes dried up and that company pulled out. The issue there in my eyes is that there’s a pre-existing empty building, there’s no guarantee this will work out any better than the solar cell plant, and even if it does it opens the door to more expansion and industrial park crowding.

Some of the more remote locations that are proposed might be fine from nearly every aspect but again, there’s no guarantee that this is long term and creating another rural or semi-rural vacant building is just more rural blight. There are entire empty small towns that are mostly nuisance properties at this point.

Almost nothing on that architect's website is actually built, let's hope this data center goes the same way.

‘Pure arrogance’: anger in Finland as Google illegally fells 250,000 trees for datacentre
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/oct/22/finland-google-felling-trees-datacentre

the hubris of companies like this... just do whatever you want, then pull out the checkbook when they hit you with fines

The Lorax is so relevant right now... The Once-ler destroys the environment to create the Thneed, which nobody wants or needs

'Do No Evil' my ass

i'm still laughing at how overpowering the stank of loser is in the gemini web ad i've seen a few times. literally just the sound of a touchdown being made while a finger slowly approaches tapping the gemini icon on a phone. click this and win the game!!1 god. usually advertising has at least something to work with but not with this crap apparently.

featured quote from that Guardian article ^^^^

Jussi Kangasharju, head of computer science at the University of Helsinki, said that while datacentres brought a limited number of jobs, potentially boosting the local economy, the benefits on a national level were minimal. “Really, for Finland, there are no benefits,” he said. “They are international companies serving international customers. Very little corporate taxes go to Finland. Datacentres ultimately have very little benefit for others except the datacentre operator.”

Amazon pivots from datacenter plan in exurban DC: https://www.fox5dc.com/news/amazon-drops-plans-data-centers-former-george-washington-university-campus-ashburn

I think that we’ve reached or are past “peak datacenter”

there's a now-abandoned shopping mall right on Market Street in San Francisco, and of course there's recent talk of converting it to a data center... worst possible place you could imagine

don't Norway have the power to withdraw a building licence rather than just fining the world richest company?

the new Alexa (?) advert on UK tv seems to feature a male with anger issues and makes a joke of it. it's not funny.

"Datacentres ultimately have very little benefit for others except the datacentre operator"

I often wonder what the hard sell is with datacentres. With factories and shopping warehouses the operator can at least argue that they're creating jobs, but datacentres are built as quickly and cheaply as possible, there aren't many staff, and the staff they do employ are mostly specialised engineers who come from far away and are only on-site for a short period.

And presumably the security mostly comes from physical barriers, cameras, and the remote location, and in any case the guards are probably bussed in from outside as well. Googling "local benefits of data centres" brings up this article, which inevitably is AI-generated. And some of the arguments are a huge reach.

e.g. "Data centres' power requirements can generate sufficient baseline demand to justify new investment in low carbon energy generation in the local area" raises the question of why that new investment would necessarily be in low carbon energy generation and not e.g. coal, and "data centres can provide a high-profile visible statement of the potential and growth aspiration in the local economy" raises the question of what's so great about a bunch of anonymous warehouses? Do local business leaders have warehouse envy?

I was particularly struck with this ludicrously upbeat article, which again appears to be AI-written. "Behind every successful data centre lies a powerful community story waiting to be told" it begins.

the Finns in that article also bring up a good point: with Russia as their neighbor, data centers have obviously become a worthwhile target for attack. Iran has already shown that, and has now threatened again to target data centers in the case of an attack

the benefit is that your stuff on the internet works and your video streaming, gaming, etc works with lower latency because the data center is closer to you

if they’re doing computationally intense things, there’s much less of a consumer upside, it’s just “big building that uses resources and makes noise sits near you”

my understanding was that the data centers that make the internet work are much smaller and less energy- and water- intensive than the AI ones

more resources, more noise

“boil the ocean.” “starve the people….”
but you still post on ilx. fascinating.

ilx could run off a server rack in someone's closet. it's not really comparable to the resources gobbled up by the new AI data centers.

THAT’S the joek aimless

hahahahaha

no emoji = no joek

guilty

every post you make
every joek you fake

hey I laughed (twice, once at the initial post and again at Aimless totally misreading it)

LLMs don’t even need all this shit. That’s why they already “work” (inasmuch as they do, for slop porn and vibe coded shovelware) without this additional infrastructure. And for the niche within a niche of people who desire to use LLMs on their own hardware, you can run a handful of Mac Studios chained together on a regular-ass power strip in your house. All this buildout by the big tech fuckwads is essentially speculative.

^^ it's today's tulips

rude to tulips imho

tulips are beautiful and never apologize for returning fake results

fair

e.g. "Data centres' power requirements can generate sufficient baseline demand to justify new investment in low carbon energy generation in the local area" raises the question of why that new investment would necessarily be in low carbon energy generation and not e.g. coal, and "data centres can provide a high-profile visible statement of the potential and growth aspiration in the local economy" raises the question of what's so great about a bunch of anonymous warehouses? Do local business leaders have warehouse envy?

OK I really have to take this one. This is simple - low carbon energy literally falls out of the sky on a daily basis, for free and all you need is some cheap ass silicon and glass and similarly cheap batteries from China to catch it. (Cheap of course depended on massive fucking tariffs on Chinese imports not being in effect). Solar is cheap and quick to build new coal is expensive and slow. You have to be insane or subject to economically distorting incentives to thing coal is the answer to powering anything.

Similarly with water; water is expensive and valuable but water is also exchangeable for energy. I’ve just kicked off a design process for a DC project and the engineers are telling me that they don’t take town water they come with a tanker with 1000 litres per megawatt (that’s 1 cubic metre), every year you have to top it up by 50 litres. This isn’t rocket science it’s how your car works.

It’s cheaper and better to do this responsibly and faster too. Be nice to people, don’t waste the heat do something sensible with it (ag, food processing, district heating), he’s is valuable.

Fundamentally be nice to people, be good to the land, build stuff on the post industrial shitholes and use the cheapest energy source which is solar and wind.

AI DCs break the crankshafts in diesel generators, the sub-second variation in demand is just about the worst thing you can do to a spinning generator. Batteries batteries batteries batteries.

Today I entered into a pack with a colleague that if either of use catches whatever Silicon Valley brain-worms these arseholes have we will kick the other in the head till cured.

It is mind blowing how little appreciation for energy systems these dickheads have. It’s the wrong things in the wrong places, powered by the wrong things and the finance markets are working it out.

The next person who tells me it spinning thermal generation for inertia and system stability is going to get a picture of a synchronous condenser and a punch in the mouth.

Ed’s posts are great because I get to the end and wonder where to send the check and then I realize I’ve been pitched the best deal of my life

https://substack.com/@twvme/note/c-368407314?

^ best use of 3D printer I've seen in a long time

get em

👨‍💻 THREAD on how data center-related ballot measures are faring tonight

data centers are on the ballot in ~40 localities across 13 states, including proposed bans, votes on specific projects, and recalls of pro-data center politicians

— J.D. Capelouto (@jdcapelouto) November 4, 2026

can you summarize information instead of linking to a website owned by elon musk? thanks in advance.

my understanding is every single measure limiting or banning construction of data centers passed

here is an article from a paper owned by jeff bezos: https://archive.is/cpEem

thank you. i'm not against links fwiw. just asking for some basic info up front.

oh yeah I'm with you on that

I can't read replies and long threads — or even click on individual photos in a gallery — without a twxtter login.

Without being a hard ass about it, it'd be helpful if we treated links like those the same as we do with imgur images that can't be seen by our UK friends.

the golden rule baby

thank you. i'm not against links fwiw. just asking for some basic info up front.

― old helen (map), Wednesday, 4 November 2026 bookmarkflaglink

I'm lazy so no guarantees, but yeah sure if I remember.

Remarkable hate for data centres, as broadcast on Musk's own website.

😎

not remotely the same thing but sure

i don’t think xyz was saying they’re the same. no one was.

Tech and AI adjacent stocks getting hammered today

aw did something happen to their technofascist project

hey what’s up with the Nuremberg trials but for AI researchers?

its just cool thing thats going to start soon

they’re calling it the super nuremberg trials

my favorite nes classic game

lmao