I don't think society has enough power to control what billionaires spend their money on. The promise of AI is such an attractive nuisance for power seekers that trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now.
Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they going to be able to control what incomprehensibly-rich people do? They can purchase political favors from whichever nations are selling them.
> trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now.
With way less access to infrastructure, hardware, capital, people. That’s literally what we need, it should be constrained by having way less resources
Having fewer resources such as security engineers will not lead to better outcomes. A skeleton team with gigawatts of compute in some middle east bunker is MORE likely to unleash something poorly aligned.
Gigawatt of power doesn’t come from nowhere. You cannot have that much power consumption without being visible to regulators (of course that assumes a government that isn’t as corrupt as the US).
You can create bioweapons today, from a small lab. Doesn’t mean we allow it
Advancing the state of the art takes so many resources that it can't happen underground, at least for now. Slap enough controls on the means and the handbrakes are on. So your doomsday scenario could be preventable. The crux is that enough people need to come out in favor to put constraints in place. It's not impossible, but public opinions form slowly.
Just because it's fully digital means what to you?
To the viewer relying on captioning, it makes no difference whatsoever. Captioning is decoded by the TV itself. Subtitles are overlaid by the app. Streaming sources when decoded send the embedded captioning to the same caption decoder as OTA broadcasts or decoded from a VHS tape.
From someone that has spent decades working with subs and captions, the differences are obvious. To everyone else, it's just text on screen regardless of what it is technically
People that roll their eyes when you correct them in stating captions and subtitles are NOT the same thing have clearly never worked with captioning. However, I'd much rather work with them as SCCs over the old way of using a CAP file and hardware encoder connected to a PC. Unfond memories of inserting captioning to to the same tape using pre-read where it reads from the tape, sends the signal to be captioned, and then records the data back to the same tape. In real time.
The solution for this is to pay open source maintainers for their attention. If I want them to review and merge my bugfix I should attach $1000 to the PR.
This is actually not a bad idea for funding open source software. It used to be that you’d have an author who coded a project and then could fix the occasional bug or two quickly.
Now, we have larger projects where it is rare for one people to have a complete understanding, and the main value is a person to reviewing patches and bugs to make sure the changes align with the larger goals/path for the project. There is little incentive for a maintainer to do this, aside from wanting to limit forks.
Paying for that review might be the way to keep this whole model sustainable.
I typically work with commit chains of at least 5 commits in various states of code review, so I spend at least 60% of my development time editing an old commit in the middle of a rebase -i.
This machine needs better networking options to be useful, such as built-in 100Gbit QSFP28. There is not enough space between the x4 PCIe slot and the power supply for a NIC to fit, and even if there was, you'd have to cut a hole in the back of the case to get at it.
I think there's room for win-win solutions here; the cost of placating the locals is a rounding error compared to the cost of these data centers.
1. Local governments can require that if the data center peak load is 1.0GW, they must provision transmission and generation capacity for the local region of 1.2GW; the extra power can be given to the neighbors at substantial discount.
2. Construct a public swimming complex nearby, heated with waste data center heat.
3. Local governments can enforce strict limits on environmental noise at the property boundary. I've personally stood right next to a 150MW-class datacenter and experienced sound levels less than traffic from a typical suburban 4-lane street; making the datacenter quieter than any other industrial use is a choice the builder can make if they have the right incentives.
Setup directional microphones around the perimeter, and fine them $25,000 per minute per dB above the agreed threshold. Distribute the fines to the neighbors. Failure to pay promptly means the sheriff shuts down the power.
All of these options are far cheaper than launching the data center into space...
None of these mitigations (although they’re good ideas) address what I think is the real issue here, which is that people don’t like AI. And why would they, when the dish being served by AI CEOs is job loss with a side of extinction risk.
I think many data centre opponents understand that being opposed to AI is not sufficient to halt a local project, so it is noise, water use and power consumption that they latch onto - although, in jurisdictions without plentiful water and clean power, those two reasons are quite valid.
In my own local community, there’s vocal opposition to a proposed data centre that is next to Lake Ontario, 500 metres from the nearest residential neighbourhood, on a brownfield site with 500 megawatts of clean power capacity. None of that makes a difference to those opposed.
In my area (South Carolina) - the opposition seems hyper fixated on “water use” with little or no conversation around electrical usage or even equitable utility rates. AI itself largely absent from the discourse.
I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.
It's the same tired distraction pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
What makes their actions mindless, exactly? Is the implication that what they've read is easily falsifiable by the average person? One of the fundamentals to society-scale problem solving is not to dismiss the masses as morons, as much as we often enjoy doing that. You must accept who society is composed of, or else you, by definition, can't fix their problems.
Social media fosters that kind of behavior. Plus, people usually don't look into issues before deciding which "side" to be on, and more importantly don't examine if the sides are a manufactured false dichotomy, as they often are.
I suspect rather foreign actors seed some of the anti data center narrative in order to try and reduce American capability to compete in the space, just like the Soviets did with nuclear in the 60-80s.
If they wanted to do that, they'd pick stronger arguments for starters. But either way, social media updoots and shares aren't going to change anything with capital's plans, so it'd be weird for a foreign power to think that it would.
They don't need strong arguments they need emotionally resonent ones, "AI is using all your water" is a more primal, plus doesn't matter they just flood with a thousand different arguments.
And updoots might not but plenty of people now are protesting and pushing against allowing data centers to be built near them so it is working.
Nobody's gonna change their mind about AI wastefulness from an obviously AI-generated infographic. The author should have realized this with about 5 seconds of thought.
Many communities are water limited. Many communities limit housing construction permits to available sewer hookups. Many communities are carrying expensive bonds that citizens are paying off to fund water expansion projects.
I do not want one penny of infrastructure that I have paid for in order to grow/better my community going to subsidize infrastructure for datacenters.
Maybe it's semantics, but I feel like local QoL concerns (mainly noise and electric bills, plus an overblown focus on water) are the primary driver for in-community resistance. Shoving AI into everything is annoying, and there's real ideological opposition amongst a lot of online tastemakers, but not enough to motivate John Q. Public to show up to county zoning meetings. If hyperscalers were tactful enough to limit impacts on their neighbors, I think opposition would be a much more niche issue.
My proposal would be to require data-centers to provide enough clean energy to power themselves for years to come. That would help humanity survive. Plus it would lower energy costs when there is more power-generaion available. Lowering your power-bill would make people love AI.
That addresses the extinction risk caused by climate change, but not the extinction risk caused by an AI's turning out vastly more capable than expected, then the lab's losing control over it.
All of these options require “extra” money to be spent, which even if it logically makes sense, will not happen when it’s shown companies can buy local politicians and continue anyway
With low pitched data center noise does the decibel level tell the whole story? I thought it carried better and penetrated better than the db level would indicate.
I generally agree that I would not like to live across the street from a datacenter. Having worked inside of dozens of them, I could not care less if I lived half a mile from one. Most people who live within such a distance currently do not have a clue. At that point I would not even worry about the noise from the backup generators.
It's the gas turbine generators at the massive DCs causing the big issue. There are dozens of them. Not your typical historical DC/colo or even 5yr ago hyperscaler DC.
These sorts of things done remotely close to residential areas are very rare in the grand scheme. And I agree these specific projects are a major problem.
It’s just not representative of the bigger picture when there are a dozen horrible projects against say 1000 total.
The hyperbole is what gets my mom terrified of moving to a city that might allow a datacenter to be built 8 miles away from the place she was looking at.
> These sorts of things done remotely close to residential areas are very rare in the grand scheme.
I'm sure that will be a great consolation to the thousands of people who have to live near them. "Don't worry, your situation is very rare! That's why we don't have to do anything about it."
It's inaccurate to claim that the opposition is "completely irrational".
One _extremely_ rational and common reason that people oppose these projects is that they can bid-up the energy cost in their regions, meaning that one of the residents biggest monthly bills gets bigger.
A second one goes around pollution and noise, particularly when the AI DataCenter is using "portable" gas turbines or similar.
Solutions are hard, but possible... so long as the decision makers are able to recognize that much of the opposition is quite rational, and that the deals struck need to accommodate the legitimate and rational concerns, while avoiding getting hung up by true nonsense.
The portable gas turbine is a somewhat separate issue, in that it's highly illegal but if you have more money than god you can just pay off the fines and the judges.
It's relatively easy to avoid being that egregious about it if you're a little bit patient on construction permits and power contracts.
NIMBY opposition to datacenter construction is orthogonal to that, except insofar as in both cases the construction will gravitate toward places that won't or can't object to the construction.
In theory, rising energy prices would encourage more investment in capacity increases, that would then real a new equilibrium and so on. In theory of course, energy markets are so distorted now who knows. Having AI data centers bring their own power or power investments is probably going to be necessary.
Residential electricity rates don't get "bid up" like that. Increases typically must be approved by the government and have to be justified by expenses rather than market prices. Ashburn VA, which has more data centers than anywhere else, actually pays below US average rates.
Growing up near Ashburn makes every anti data center argument feel like crazy land. From my perspective when I lived there, they were somewhat ugly large boxes that paid county tax and raised land value. I never noticed any kind of noise from them, though they were largely on industrially zoned land right by the airport. Also gave us single digit ping. Electricity rates are below the national average.
Now that I'm an adult I have several friends employed in the industry, mostly in cooling system automation.
1) your example pays very substantial tax. (property taxes, plus, recently, tax on electricity use)
2) your example primarily used undesirable land.
3) your example grew slowly, allowing the power company to add capacity without a big challenge matching demand.
4) your example is in a heavily connected part of the grid, so it didn't need all of that added power generation to be local.
All of these factors led to datacenters being viewed favorably by Loudon County for most of this century.... but many (and sometimes all) of those factors aren't there for other projects. For example, there are a lot of projects where the datacenter is not paying any property tax or sales/use tax at all.
Heck, even in Loudon County, they're changing regulations to pump the brakes because the hyperscale datacenters are growing electric demand a bit too quickly for them to manage without adding a little friction.
Your anecdote about "it was good in this one county, from 1995 through 2025" cannot be reasonably extended to believe that all of these projects have similar tradeoffs.
(And I'm not even getting into the reality that "this datacenter will let me use AOL" will, of course, be viewed differently than "this datacenter will help my employer remove my job.")
I agree that datacenters showed up because a ton of fibre was already there.
I was talking about reasons that the general public of Loudon County has had a positive view toward datacenters -- not why datacenters chose the county (that's a different list entirely).
Notably, that the datacenters showed up in a way that offered almost no material downsides to the locals... and that this differs markedly from what many towns face today.
It's actually because of DARPANET/ARPANET and other early computer research that was military or intelligence funded. It led to a concentration of networking in the region that led to MAE-East and it's all spiraled from there. The transatlantic cables were an aftereffect of everything else.
I'm pretty sure they actually come ashore in Virginia Beach and New Jersey, both a solid 4 hour drive away.
This might be true in the US (which is obviously what the article is about) but it isn’t everywhere. Data centre impact is a concern here in New Zealand and we have a poor track record of handling the impact of large users of electricity. Case in point - the aluminium smelter that has manipulated the entire country power prices (and various other things) via threats.
Which market do you mean when talking about "market prices"?
I'm pretty sure the utility where I am has been able to get rate increases approved partly based on rising prices they have to pay to buy power on the wholesale market when they do not have enough capacity of their own to cover all their customers.
I grew up right by Ashburn, Virginia, which has the largest concentration of hyperscale data centers in the world. I rarely heard of organized opposition to them until they became a politically charged issue and associated with white collar layoffs.
I never once noticed significant noise from any of them - they are nearly all on the opposite side of a wide road from the nearest housing, and the road is louder than the data center. There is enough electric supply in the region that they almost never run the gas turbine generators.
As a way of growing the industrial tax base of an area, they are one of the least dirty ways to use industrially zoned land, though they don't produce as many long term jobs. There is a big data center construction and design industry in that region, and it did pull Amazon to open HQ2 nearby, but those are both first mover effects.
Why? If you want this policy make it for the entire grid, not some random consumer.
Electricity should function as a common carrier like any other utility. If you want to pay for the watts you get the watts regardless of who you happen to be.
Well, because of lack of infrastructure a lot of these data centers are power plants as well, and will continue to be without larger scale buildout of energy infrastructure.
I've personally had a friend with misophonia (about subsonics) commit suicide (making it difficult to find out from them what was cause or correlation).
It's probably worth taking a step away and looking at your position when you find yourself starting with the political argument tropes (sounds like, "my opponents are simply crazy and stupid").
I oppose the data centers because they drive up utility costs and contribute to the instability of the local electrical grid. I get pain from them and no benefits. I really don’t want most of the unprofitable AI foolishness that is being forced on us.
Grid instability, which includes an increasing frequency of brown outs. It’s the primary reason residential owners are heavily investing in solar panels.
If you don’t know where I live how can you know if my claim is true or not?
Because I have been monitoring this as a weird interest of mine now for 20 years or more. To the point of absurdity.
I would be very surprised to hear of a location in the US that is experiencing grid instability due to recent increases in industrial scale electric usage.
I 100% refute your claim that grid instability is the primary reason folks in the US are installing solar. You will be still seen as a crazy prepper type if you call a company and tell them you don’t care about the financials penciling out, and only want it for potential blackouts. Assuming you are not in California of course - which I assume not since none of those instability problems have to do with industry so it’s not relevant to this discussion.
Generally speaking - if you want to live in a place with a stable grid, you will seek out a spot that has heavy industry in the region. These energy consumers stabilize the grid for residential folks. Especially datacenters since those tend to come with emergency backup and are the first to fall off the grid on a voluntary basis during peak usage events.
I’m sure somewhere in the US exists where this is true since basically everything is true at a micro scale. I just do not see it as a wide scale issue.
I cannot speak for why everyone in the US buys solar. I can only speak for my local community.
If you want to find locations of grid instability focus on growth, both residential and industrial, that is radically out of scale compared to larger geographic averages. Otherwise, it seems like you are measuring using the wrong trends.
What’s crazy is that the grid instability was there before the explosion of data centers and the primary revenue generator of the much larger geographic region is energy transport/production.
The engineer style snap to solution with no interest in the actual reasons many Americans are opposed to AI is one of the reasons Americans are opposed to AI
I like Rust and use it full-time professionally. Unsafe is not the same as unsound. Unsound means that the unsafe code is not maintaining the aliasing invariants on references required by the language, and thus undefined behavior can leak into safe code (that is, the safe code can be miscompiled).
Known unsound code should not be merged, let alone released to production. If you have good enough tests and run them under MIRI or ASAN, maybe you can get away with it for a time, but most Rust experts would not sign-off on such a project.
If somebody put a gun to my head and told me to make the best of such a codebase, I would try to figure out how to turn off the LLVM optimizations that assume the Rust references don't alias. With these optimizations this codebase is scarier than most C or C++ code.
I don't think this does enough to address to supply-chain security concerns. Before I use a crate, I want some assurance that the
transitive deps have had a proper security audit, and that I'm not a single "cargo update" away from getting malware installed in my machine.
I stopped using Facebook back in 2021 when the majority of my feed was reshared political content with 20+ comments from my friends fighting about divisive social/political issues. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't fostering community, so I left. A few years later I logged in again to see that most of my Facebook friends had also stopped engaging.
Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they going to be able to control what incomprehensibly-rich people do? They can purchase political favors from whichever nations are selling them.
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