US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

The honeymoon is over. Among regular citizens, gamers and some groups of tech, many are now incensed by the cost of memory, I was once mildly enthusiastic about AI but now not so much.

I believe framing this as people being against "data centers" is missing the target. Data centers have existed for decades, ever since business started using computers. What people really have an issue with is data centers designed for AI, using far more power than prior data centers.

Honestly, I think we should just ban "AI" of all forms and get it over with. Rip the bandage off before the wound underneath turns into gangrene

The DCs are going up across middle income countries: industrial zones in South East Asia, India and Morocco, and also UAE/Saudi.

Anger towards DCs are pertinent from a politics-in-rich-country angle, but it has no relevance on the overall trajectory of where we are heading.

If DCs get banned in the US, there are still many middle income countries who want them in their special industrial zones, due to the FDI and employment opportunities they bring, and these countries provide generous tax breaks to hyper scalers to compete for their business.

Malaysia and India are recent examples of this policymaking. The new US funded DC zone in Philippines is another example.

There's an interesting geopolitics (emphases on "geo") angle to this if these critical assets are going to increasingly be built overseas.

Simply change the pricing so that the datacenters pay a higher rate to subsidize everyone else.

The handwriting was on the wall with this issue since the O'Bama administration: he had been convinced that putting all health care records in one central repository i.e. server famrs, and then unleash AI-systems on all that data, would come up with a cure for cancer. And at that time, there was an electricity shortage problem.

Another server farm is the one that the NSA built in Utah where the local power grid has been unable to keep powered-up. That's the one purported to have the backdoor on everyone's internet traffic kept. But some people prefer I go away with my foil hat.

the bull case for industrial AI looks a lot like turning the whole planet into paperclips

I feel that the resentment to be short sighted. Datacenters do not vote, but people do. If a datacenter is in a locale, it gives those voters a de-facto, outsized, soft power.

People aren’t mad about technology. They’re mad about being told after the fact that their town might lose water, power, quiet, or tax revenue to a project they didn't have a say in.

Build the future, sure. But don’t sneak it past the people who have to live next to it. If you have to sneak it like that, then maybe it is not worth having.

Get sick of all the shady behaviour and lying. These companies, owners, and CEOs need to be taken down a peg.

Nice. It's great to see democracy work. Now do the California officials everywhere. Oh wait, my bad. Constituents are happy with Karen Bass and the like. Never mind.

What's driving the need for datacenters All over the world?

Aren't there only a handful of companies need compute and can build datacenters? This isn't aws building more regions is it?

Also recently I was surprised and not surprised to find people are making anti ai like their identity now. Like there's a reddit community dedicated to this

We should all keep in mind that foreign interests, primarily China, are astroturfing to drive resentment in the USA against AI and datacenters. National governments are largely viewing AI as a strategic capability.

That’s not to say there aren’t downsides, but they vary quite a bit depending on location and grid capacity.

I actually expect there will be major progress made on the energy efficiency and performance of LLM models using novel hardware. So, the buildout may overshoot by quite a bit… If so I hope we can find a use for all those racks…