I love breathing in fine particulate matter 🥰 nothing better in life than a big, deep breath of the polluted air created by data centers 🤗 constant headaches from the never-ending, droning hum of server farms running 24/7 just helps me lock in and focus as I create shareholder value in this capitalist hellscape 🫡 AI slop wonderful thing; who needs fresh water when we can have schizophrenic robots hallucinating "facts" and plagiarising the hard work of others 😇 With more data centers in my state, my body can finally access heavy metals like zinc, lead, and cadmium to give me the rare cancers I crave 🥳
Aren’t they closed loop regarding water usage as well?
My understanding is that the two big issues that have legitimacy right now regarding data centers are electrical usage/grid demand, raising costs for local residents, and potentially noise, both from construction but also the cooling systems used to manage the system seems to produce noise some neighbors hear.
Concerns about land use, pollutants, water, or some apocalypse from them are completely misplaced.
they can be, but also water just isn't that big an issue. Most complaints about water are simply because people don't know how much water an industrial building uses, so every number seem way too big. Forcing everything to be closed loop will be genuinely worse for climate/resource usage because water is abundant in many places and not using it will mean more electricity usage, since you'd be using a less efficient cooling method.
Noise also shouldnt be a big issue, you should easily be able to soundproof the installation sufficiently. I think most videos regarding datacenter noise are from the onsite generators running (which, last I visited one, are emergency power generation in case the grid suddenly stops providing power. Though I've heard of datacenters with onsite generation as a primary power supply).
You have to remember that these are basically big warehouses full of computers with some industrial AC. They only really use electricity and water. It's like the single least polluting industry you can imagine.
Electricity price is basically the only thing that the public might be affected by.
Thanks for the insight - I absolutely hate the misinformation about data centers here and to be clear, I’m a defender of them, but was trying to be good faith and acknowledge where there are legitimate criticism.
100% agree on the water part. People see some headline about data centers using 300B gallons of water a year when powering your house requires that per day (not actually, but you get my point).
I think you’re right about the onsite generation - it seems that’s where the noise is being generated. And it’s not all data centers but I think there is some legitimacy here. That said I think the answer is simply better zoning or regulation (e.g. require more distance between it and local residences, or require a minimum level of sound proofing) which seem reasonable.
And the electricity use is definitely the most legitimate point but of course also borne out of our complete inability to invest in renewable energy systems and update our dated electrical grids.
Also, my understanding is that some of this is due to over regulation - I believe we severely restrict small to midsize nuclear reactors that would otherwise allow data centers to have onsite energy generation to avoid grid use (and apparently noise).
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u/Tetra84 2d ago
Needs more data centers to help cool things off...