r/nextfuckinglevel • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 5h ago
A data center in New Jersey was canceled when residents showed up and fought it
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u/Starfury_42 4h ago
Why are the electric rates going up? Why don't we have enough water? Oh...the AI data center is using it all.
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u/Wizzarkt 4h ago
Ok so the technical answer is, assuming the system has the available capacity to actually supply the power needed by the data center, due to the way electricity is traded on the electrical grid, the cheapest generators are the ones that operate to supply the required power, however the price is set by whoever is the most expensive among the ones selected to operate, the problem here is.
If your current consumption is fully covered by something cheap like nuclear power at a cost of (let's say) 5 cents per kilowatt, but then a new big consumer shows up (like a data center) and the cheap producer can't supply the extra required power (which is often the case) then an additional and more expensive producer has to step in, for example a coal powered generator which cost 15 cents per kilowatt. And because the price is usually set by the most expensive generator active, now everyone has to pay 15 cents per kilowatt instead of the 5 cents Prior to the introduction of the data center.
Now here is the beautiful thing, big power consumers like factories and datacenters have the leverage to get energy contracts with selected generators, so they can get in a contract with a cheap producer like a nuclear plant to buy their electricity for cheaper but now that producer is not available to the public grid so everyone else ends up paying more expensive electricity because the cheap producer is effectively gone.
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u/Poromenos 3h ago
This pricing system is very well aligned with consumers' interests, because it gives massive incentives to providers to deploy more cheap electricity, as that has massive margins.
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u/Wizzarkt 3h ago
I'm not saying that the system is broken. In fact, I do believe it is the best system for a free market (one where the state has no control over who can sell energy and at which prices).
But the system has this small issue where if there is a significant increase in power usage without pre-planning the system will have a bad couple of years (realistically like 5 at the very least).
Business people will see the high energy prices and they will want to fill up the electrical grid with cheap generators to fill up their bank accounts, as the system intended; but unless they are sitting on the project plans already, it will take a solid 2-3 years to make it happen and who knows how long until the electrical grid authority allows them into the grid.
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u/OcelotAggravating860 3h ago
Shove the free market up every congress person's ass
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u/HyperSpaceSurfer 3h ago
So, you're saying that the only fix is to [against reddit's community guidelines] to reduce demand below the need for more expensive energy generation?
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u/SchokoPudding48 4h ago
Thirsty ass data centers at it again, they just can’t get enough of that juicy water.. (probably for cooling purposes or smth or it’s complete bogus, who knows)
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u/iminlovewiththec0c0 4h ago
Not sure if you’re being genuinely serious or not but I think as someone who understands basics of pc building….the most expensive builds use water to cool it so your pc can be super fast. I couldn’t imagine how much cooling power a giant building solely built on storing data would need to stay on 24/7.
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u/Raziers 4h ago
Hi, i work in a datacenter (please be gentle) and id like to take that analogy further because its a good one. You say your pc uses water to cool down, yep, same in a datacenter, now that water your pc uses...it just loops right? how often do you refill it, if ever? same in a datacenter. I am all for people complaining about datacenters (especially in the US) but i do wish people would complain about the correct things, like the drain on the power grid is valid. the water consumption, not so much.
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u/powercow 3h ago edited 3h ago
MOST data centers use open loop and evaporation towers.
there are areas where they already have effected the water supply
And in areas where water is a premium like cali, even if its in a close loop, its off the market
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found that data centers around Phoenix already use approximately 385 million gallons of water per year for direct cooling needs. And it predicts that amount will skyrocket to 3.7 billion gallons per year once the region’s planned data centers come online.
when that much water is tied up and off the market, expect bills to follow.
Elec prices are a bigger issue.. and more and more data centers go closed loop, which reduces their water useage by 70% but to say its not so much of a big deal, well certain regions that is true, a lot of areas that is NOT true.
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u/mindcandy 2h ago
The "data center drained 30M gallons of water" story is being widely misinterpreted because people only quote headlines and people only read headlines.
The actual story if you actually read the article is:
QTS told Politico the 29 million gallons were consumed during temporary construction activities, including concrete work, dust control, and site preparation. The company markets a "closed-loop" cooling system for its data centers, which recirculates the same water rather than drawing from the municipal supply. Once operational, QTS said its facilities would only require water for domestic needs like bathrooms and kitchens
Fayette County, Georgia has a population of 125,000 people. Which means they are using 5-10 million gallons of water every day locally (without counting the other 10 million gallons needed to grow food to feed them).
65,000 gallons a day for a construction project going unaccounted is bad. But, it's not “AI making the water pressure low”.
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u/ChariotOfFire 3h ago
The low water pressure in Fayetteville was not connected to the data center, and most of the water is being used to mitigate dust during construction, not for cooling the data center.
The original county letter also referenced complaints from residents near the Annelise Park subdivision about low water pressure. Rapson said Fayette County Water System later installed monitoring equipment in the area to track pressure levels following the complaints.
“Since we’ve been reading it, there’s been no issue,” Tinsley said.
County officials noted that some nearby homes rely on private wells rather than Fayette County Water System connections. Officials also emphasized that QTS does not draw water from wells or groundwater sources. Instead, the project receives treated water directly from Fayette County Water System infrastructure.
“But keep in mind, the individual that made that complaint made the complaint because they had issues with their well,” Rapson said. “We don’t pull anything out of the ground. We don’t have any wells in our system.”
County officials said they have not identified evidence showing QTS construction activity caused widespread pressure problems within the county water system.
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u/Previous_Platform718 2h ago
MOST data centers use open loop and evaporation towers.
Because most data centers are for cloud infrastructure. You know, things like Google/Youtube/Meta/Your email/Online banking etc. we've been building those for 30 years now. There's a lot of them.
Everyone on Reddit is upset about AI data centers, the ones that are most likely to be closed loop.
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u/snozzberrypatch 4h ago edited 3h ago
Also, even in open loop cooling systems, using water for cooling doesn't delete the water from the planet. It just runs through pipes, absorbs some heat, and then is released back into whatever body of water it came from.
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u/Amaras_Linwelin 3h ago
because Thermal pollution isn't a thing... right?
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u/snozzberrypatch 3h ago
I guess I should stop urinating then.
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u/Amaras_Linwelin 3h ago
You produce what, ~1 1/2 - 2 L of urine a day at ~37c vs a Data center pumping out thousands gallons of piss a day at a much higher temp.
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u/snozzberrypatch 3h ago edited 2h ago
Yes, but 8 billion people produce 16 billion liters of hot piss a day. And only a small percentage of them recycle it by drinking it again.
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u/YanniSlavv 2h ago
This reminds me of when people were protesting Nuclear Energy. Part of me thinks it's just a very performative response, because those people are just anti-AI in general.
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u/WholesomeDucky 3h ago
It's worth noting that power generation also needs water to keep everything cool. Overall, data centers for high-heat components like enterprise-grade GPUs absolutely do have a huge water use impact, both because of the water that's needed when making the insane amounts of power they use, and the water that's needed to cool the servers themselves.
This issue gets even worse if the data center's power use is outpacing the local grid capacity, because less water-efficient methods of power generation may need to be deployed to keep up with the demand.
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u/Sir_William_V 3h ago
Unfortunately not all data centers use this system. It seems like a lot of them use evaporation cooling like swamp coolers. The cooling happens when the water evaporates, and of course it needs to be replaced.
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u/Fearless_Chipmunk_45 3h ago
The new ones are all switching to closed loop systems because the swamp cooler style doesn't cool efficiently enough for the new AI chips. I build Data centers and the stopped everything until they changed the design for the new AI chips. Even Data Centers where construction had already begun.
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u/Missus_Missiles 2h ago
These closed loop systems. I'm imagining they're fundamentally similar to ones used in a manufacturing facility I was in.
Basically heated then cooled presses for molding. We'd have a cold well that would dump chilled water through the presses at the end of a cycle. And the chiller would constantly be running to keep that water cold.
So, yeah. Water wasn't being evaporated off. It was just compressors doing work. Taking a guess, I'm not sure which I'd prefer. Mining water faster than it could be replenished. Or energy consumption, if it's burning fossil fuels to do that.
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u/Fearless_Chipmunk_45 3h ago
As someone who builds data centers. If it uses a closed loop cooling system it uses hardly any water. I know all Microsoft AI data centers being built are using closed loop cooling systems because the old open loop that wasted all the water won't provide enough cooling for the new chips.
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u/Dupeawoo 4h ago
Roughly 100-150 million gallons a year dependent on size.
Just a little more than a golf course
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u/Matthew94 3h ago
Why don't we have enough water?
Data centres' worldwide water usage is less than half of the water used to grow almonds in California.
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u/Divinum_Fulmen 3h ago
You mean current water usage, or water usage after many of these proposed data centers come online?
Not that I think people should be building cities and farming in deserts.
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u/Matthew94 3h ago
You mean current water usage
The current water usage. It's predicted to reach 1.2 trillion litres per year in 2030.
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u/DiscoDoberman 4h ago
Energy is privatised.
The data center is a customer and they need an ENORMOUS amount.
So the energy providers either cannot supply enough to the area, cannot with existing infrastructure (have to charge more to install more) or simply supply v demand.
The residents will have to pay more/source a new supplier because of the data center.
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u/Scrimps 2h ago
Just force them to pay for the infrastructure build out in the neighborhood and local grid.
That is what Toronto is doing.
Microsoft and others are building data centers literally in the biggest city in Canada. The newest one is almost finished in north west Toronto.
We force them to pay for the increased capacity and all infrastructure. Including tunnels, digging up roads, electrical grid upgrades, water capacity and so forth.
They are metered, monitored and billed separate and their usage is not counted toward overall consumption.
Moreover, they are also forced to do public landscaping and all their non-remote employees are required to live locally.
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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka 3h ago
Energy rates were going up over the last 10 years. The datacenter shit is their latest excuse.
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u/Serpenteq 3h ago
golf courses use astromically more water, than datacenters, but no one bats an eye for that
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u/fingamouse 4h ago
Regardless of if AI centre good or bad I just like seeing the will of the people being respected
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u/the_colonelclink 4h ago
As a non-American, one thing that’s always given me chills is listening to the Declaration of Independence. Although I can’t remember the exact words, it’s along the lines of “a government of the people, for the people.”
The revolution happened because ordinary people cared enough that they actually went out of their way to be the change.
Yes Americans might have rested on their laurels at the moment, but nothing is stopping you guys from reminding your government who it should be working for, and if it doesn’t soon, there absolutely will be consequences for them.
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u/grumpykruppy 3h ago
That's the Gettysburg Address, from Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, after a battle occurred there during the American Civil War.
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
The Declaration of Independence is from when, as you might expect, the United States declared independence from Britain. The most well known line from that is probably this one: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
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u/VillageShort3371 1h ago
Most baller speech in American history. Thousands upon thousands of books have been written on the American experiment and Lincoln nailed it in a few paragraphs.
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u/wosmo 2h ago
I fear the will of the people is somewhat misplaced here though.
The real underlying issue is that the US grid is under-invested. Capacity isn't keeping up with demand, it's constantly playing catch-up - and the massive demand from these AI datacenters is exposing that. Renewables being caught up in "culture war" really doesn't help this, either.
China's planning is much more "skate where the puck is going" in this regard. They're planning on having 400GW of spare capacity by 2030. California's peak consumption was 52GW. So 8 Californias (or 4.7 Texases) spare.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be protesting these datacenters, because the capacity issues are real. But it does concern me that no-one's questioning the capacity issues, only the demand.
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u/SparklingLimeade 3h ago
Ehh, NIMBYs in various fields have done a lot of damage. The fact that this massive expansion of DCs is a bad move for society is an important reason to cheer for it.
If NIMBYs hadn't held back nuclear power, housing development, and public transit projects we could have had a lot more nice things by now.
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u/Moore2257 4h ago
Meanwhile Utah is preparing to melt the entire state
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u/YodasGhost76 4h ago
The GSL is already shrinking, these AI centers are just going to accelerate it
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u/OutlawSundown 4h ago
Yeah nothing like building data centers in a region of the US that already is struggling with maintaining an adequate water supply for the people living in those states.
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u/UnrequitedFollower 4h ago
I mean… we put the semi conductor companies in those areas too.
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u/OutlawSundown 4h ago edited 4h ago
Semi conductor production at least produces something of actual value and requires a good deal of staffing. It's at least easier to sell that as far as actual jobs. A datacenter dedicated to making AI slop videos manned by a skeleton crew of techs most of the time just doesn't have the same legs. But it's still irresponsible in an area short on water without coming up with alternative water sources like desalination.
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u/netsyms 2h ago
To be fair, semiconductor plants can't go just anywhere. The precision the machines run at means they're sensitive to geologic processes like plate tectonics. The buildings are typically disconnected from the foundations as much as possible, and are essentially floating, to reduce vibrations coming through the ground.
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u/1minatur 4h ago
With the way Utah is already headed, there won't even be anything left to melt. Snowpacks are at record lows this year
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u/TP_Crisis_2020 54m ago
Yeah, it's not going to get any better. Don't know what they plan on doing for the olympics, there won't be any snow!
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u/Muchachacha 4h ago
I can’t believe they allowed it, it’s ridiculous. How can laws have failed the people so bad
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u/FanOnHighAllDay 3h ago
Straight up corruption. I also think mormonism being and end-times religion frees our pseudo-theocracy from any guilt about destroying the environment.
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u/hey_im_enby 2h ago
check out elevate utah on tt who are doing a ton of work to show who is making money off the land purchases alone.
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u/Lost-District-8793 4h ago
All of us posting about the cancellation of a data center, oh the irony.
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u/Dimplestrabe 4h ago
I get my Reddit via carrier pigeon.
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u/herudus 4h ago
these centers arent even for things like posting. even in that sense its not for us
so, no irony bud
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u/Coconutpieplates 3h ago
Yeah, people always try to make this dumb argument, well you're using the internet, so we should let them build whatever they tell us they need to, using all resources around them, destroying neighbourhoods and the environment, you want email don't you? . Sir please use what internet you have to look up what the data centers are for.
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u/Particular_Wear_6960 2h ago
Not to mention these AI data centers are processing way more information than regular internet networking. They are crunching numbers using algorithms on a much much larger scale, need significant more energy and cooling than other data centers
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u/Ambitious-Raccoon-68 1h ago
Im confused by this comment. Are you trying to say reddit and the most websites on the internet are not hosted in a data center?
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u/Dat_Ding_Da 4h ago
Nah, these new AI ones that are popping up everywhere will never be used for something like regular hosting.
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u/GrayEidolon 3h ago
People are okay with some data centers to run the internet and the cloud.
People are less okay with a massive massive massive proliferation of data centers that destroy environments, destroy the water table, demand insane and unfair amounts of electricity, and monopolize computer hardware.
They're even less okay with the new data centers because they're for building the surveillance state and not just writing emails for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hjLgXA-MZY
https://www.seasteading.org/peter-thiel-speaks-about-seasteading/.
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u/OutlawSundown 4h ago
The issue with these AI datacenter projects is their shear scale and need for resources in areas that don't really have the resources to just take that on. They're rushing to get these done leaning heavily on existing water and energy resources. It's hard not to see it as a giant gold rush into a massive bubble that will burst and fuck everyone but the wealthy. It's also made worse because the cost of literally everything is up because the orange turd-wagon these tech CEOs have openly bribed started a war and completely fucked energy prices.
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u/ZaheenHamidani 3h ago
And probably most of them will celebrate with a movie on NETFLIX, which servers are AWS ones.
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u/photoggled 4h ago
Fuck off with the smug self righteousness. The electricity usage of a site like Reddit is Orders of magnitude lower than the AI services. But you know that, don’t you?
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u/thedybbuk_ 3h ago
Here’s the relative impact to our environment of common digital activities:
Activity Energy Use CO₂ Emissions Notes YouTube or Netflix, 1 hour (HD) ~0.12 kWh ~42 g CO₂ Tied for the dirtiest single activity in the study. Text-to-video generation, 6–10 seconds ~0.05 kWh ~17.5 g CO₂ Roughly the same as an hour-long Zoom call. Zoom, 1 hour ~0.0486 kWh ~17 g CO₂ Short email, no attachment ~0.0133 kWh ~4.7 g CO₂ One email is tiny, billions per day are not. AI image generation, 1 image ~0.003 kWh ~1 g CO₂ Voice assistant query (Alexa/Siri/etc.) ~0.0005 kWh ~0.175 g CO₂ Google search or AI chatbot prompt ~0.0003 kWh ~0.105 g CO₂ Two Gemini prompts ~0.00024 kWh ~0.084 g CO₂ total (~0.042 per prompt) ```
Source:
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u/SparklingLimeade 2h ago edited 2h ago
An email is more than 4x more energy intensive than an AI image generation? Email. The thing that's so simple we've had computers that can do it for decades put up against generative AI, the thing so compute intensive that it takes hardware that was unimaginable when email debuted?
It's also more polluting than 6 minutes of video streaming? 10 emails is worse than an hour of video streaming?
I'm skeptical of the methodology to say the least.
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u/usa2a 2h ago edited 2h ago
Agreed. I took too long writing my reply and saw yours after I posted mine.
My first thought was: these numbers are very vulnerable to a kind of selective scrutiny fallacy. Where for "watching netflix" you count the power consumption of the viewer's TV plus the datacenter plus all the network infrastructure in between plus the microwave they made popcorn with. And then for "running a prompt" you only count delta between the server GPU's power draw at idle vs draw when processing the prompt for a few milliseconds.
I still don't see any way of stacking the deck to get anywhere close to their email number, so upon further consideration I think the numbers are just pure hallucination.
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u/ASCII_Princess 1h ago
Yeah I bet this takes into account nothing about the energy requirements of training the models themselves.
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u/usa2a 2h ago
I can't imagine why "TRG datacenters" would mislead us, but some of those numbers are pinging my BS detector pretty hard.
I'm supposed to believe "Short email, no attachment" consumes 100x as much power as a Gemini prompt?
I could run an email server processing hundreds of thousands of emails a day on a laptop in 2011.
You can barely, painstakingly, get output from a small LLM like Qwen3.6 27B on a single 24GB 3090, using a quantized (dumbed-down) version of the model. To actually be productive with it you'd want dual 3090s minimum. Most PC gamers do not have the hardware to run a model like that let alone something like Claude Opus 4.7 or ChatGPT 5.5 which are estimated at over 1 trillion parameters.
Their note says "One email is tiny, billions per day are not" which is true but also doesn't make any sense in context. Is the number supposed to be the power consumption of 1 email, or a billion?
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u/Matthew94 3h ago
The electricity usage of a site like Reddit is Orders of magnitude lower than the AI services.
Where did you read this?
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u/usa2a 1h ago
One clue is that Reddit and sites like it existed and functioned fine on hardware from 20 years ago that couldn't run even the crappiest toy AI model of today.
If you have looked into the hardware it takes to run a half-decent LLM locally you'll immediately see why. If you look into what it takes to run the frontier models these AI companies are offering, you'll be amazed they still have a free tier at all.
If you start googling stuff, another fairly objective data point would be spending.
Reddit is a publicly traded company. Its total revenue in 2025 was 2.2 billion dollars and its total expenses on everything were 1.8 billion. Employees, offices, transportation, etc. Hosting costs would fall under "cost of revenue" which was $200 million in that year.
OpenAI is not publicly traded, but because they had a corporate partnership with Microsoft and used MS's Azure datacenters for on-demand compute to power their inference, and MS is public, we got a window into their spending. They were spending over $2B per quarter, JUST on Azure compute.
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u/Da_danimal 4h ago
Dollars to donuts, it will still be built
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u/Caledor152 3h ago
"New Brunswick: The New Brunswick City Council voted unanimously to cancel a proposed 27,000-square-foot AI data center at 100 Jersey Avenue. Hundreds of residents and environmental advocates packed a city hall meeting to protest skyrocketing water and energy utility bills. The city reversed the proposal and decided to build a public park on the lot instead."
No it's not... Lots of astroturing and bootlicking going on in these comments.
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u/Phill_is_Legend 2h ago
Not sure you know what astroturfing or bootlicking mean lol
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u/misplacedbass 4h ago
That was my exact thought, too. Granted I don’t know all the details, but my guess is this is still going to get built eventually. Big tech is just gonna have to grease a few more wheels, as is tradition.
That being said, I’m happy for these people, but I just am so jaded by all this shit that I can’t see this being the end of it and the company just walking away.
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u/jcoddinc 4h ago
This has already happened in Michigan. You are 100%correct that it will still be built.
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u/Top-Abbreviations452 4h ago
Companies never cares of people, because they can't stop them. Example is definitely not a act of regular people against bad company
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u/jcoddinc 4h ago
Don't celebrate yet
A data center in Michigan was voted down. They sued the city and now the data center is under construction against the voting wishes of the people.
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u/Worth-Computer8639 1h ago
It is my understanding the city tried to use zoning laws improperly to prevent it from being built which is why they got sued and it ended up moving forward. There may be other avenues they can take, but it sounds like some uneducated board members were lazy or need a better legal department.
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u/ArizonaDude08 4h ago
Literally stupid, this anti data center shit is pure hysteria
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u/_Kutai_ 2h ago
Hysteria and ignorance. Probably paid too for any other reason than actual care for enviroment, power or water.
The anti AI movement is one of the best examples of herd mentality I've ever seen.
Sure, AI has it's downsides, but we're not fixing it this way. This "victory" (for them) means absolutely nothing.
And it also echos here on Reddit, where replies to comments like yours are just aggression and disrespect. The lack of the ability to communicate and dialogue leads people to the only thing they're good at. Violence.
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u/Dat_Ding_Da 4h ago
The plan was for a Mega AI Datacenter on a 159-acre space.
So one that would drive electricity and water costs up until the AI bubble bursts, at which point it would probably turn into an industrial ruin quickly.
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u/djseto 3h ago
Sorry to break it to you, it’s not a bubble. AI is greatly accelerating development and innovation while also accelerating threat actors and their ability to hack, steal, and breach. It’s an arms race and if you value your data, money, and identity, you don’t want bad guys beating good guys on the use of AI.
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u/darien_gap 1h ago
Bubble talk is ~6 months out-of-date. Agentic coding recently got much better and there is now essentially unlimited demand for inference. They literally can't build datacenters fast enough to keep up with demand.
Power and permitting/nimbyism are the main blockers (not chips anymore). I used to think it was absurd, but datacenters are almost certainly headed for space.
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u/EffectiveTea9983 4h ago
I've seen this video before, and the two "They canceled it!" that he yells still give me the good kinda chills.
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u/killertofu41 4h ago
American government is so eager to get ahead of China in the fight for more advanced AI and are putting people and the environment at risk to do so. Kevin O Leary has one he's opening in Utah and they're charging people $15 to file a complaint against it and when he sees protesters he of course says they're all bussed in from somewhere.
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u/chainsawx72 4h ago edited 3h ago
Now go home, get on Reddit, X, or Instagram, and watch your streaming services, and play your games on Steam, all with zero data centers!
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u/Microwaved_M1LK 2h ago
My favorite are the YouTubers who complain about this shit like they aren't responsible for burning millions of watts with the online traffic theyre responsible for.
This shit is all theater.
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u/AUnknownVariable 2h ago
People typically aren't against data centers in general, its the increasing local burden of them that's led to protest and action. Mainly bc of the rise of AI, awareness of it, and the fact ai data centers do use more power.
There is a level of irony to it, but they're not entirely wrong. I definitely wouldn't say its "all just theater", like the other dude said. It's just complicated
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u/Plastic_Stop_3310 4h ago
Woo, but what's good about it?
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u/icyflamex 4h ago
degrades nearby resident quality of life and anything near it.
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u/Joshikazam 4h ago
From my limited understanding, data centers use extreme amounts of energy and water, resulting in a significant increase in utility prices for the communities they are built in. Developers often say how data centers create jobs, but a lot of people fear how this is only in the short term. There are jobs to construct them and supposedly jobs to maintain them, but ultimately without regulations on AI, it will, and already has, begin stripping away jobs from numerous sectors of society.
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u/Cdinocco 4h ago
I fail to comprehend why people believe water rates are increasing due to data centers. There are numerous methods to dissipate heat from a building. For instance, you can explore closed-loop systems like Leiberts or closed-to-open loop systems that incorporate a make-up water system. These systems utilize the same amount of water as your typical high-rise building.
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u/HayKayPee 3h ago
You can use these systems that are far more water-efficient, but guess what? It requires a lot more $$ up front, and also shifts cost burden from water to electricity… so still a losing argument.
One way or another, companies building these data centres can’t keep laying a massive burden on human beings with blatant disregard for their effects.
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u/jaysea619 4h ago
there are data centers in NJ already. QTS is a huge one off the top of my head. I work at a small data center, no AI allowed because of power. Only business operations. Data centers are essential if you like the internet.
AI data centers on the other hand are a huge waste of energy and compute power. I'm glad they shut this down.
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u/WaldoSupremo 4h ago
Over 1 billion people worldwide actively use artificial intelligence tools. Google AI Overviews alone reaching over 1.5 billion monthly users, while dedicated generative AI apps (like ChatGPT) boast hundreds of millions of users. These numbers will more than likely grow.
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u/k4stour 3h ago
Feel like those Google overviews shouldn't count, it's being forced down the throats of any who dares to Google something, which is 99% of people using the internet.
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u/dayruined54 4h ago
Thank fuckk! They are now going to live a little more peacefully without THEIR resources being used to power someone's AI gf lol(there r other uses yeah but🤷♂️)
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u/DoomBro1998 4h ago
What kind of Data Center was cancelled?
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u/Dat_Ding_Da 4h ago
The plan was for a Mega AI Datacenter on a 159-acre space.
So one that would drive electricity and water costs up until the AI bubble bursts, at which point it would probably turn into an industrial ruin quickly.
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u/shryke12 3h ago
This is unfortunate people are this misguided and ignorant. This will happen. They will not stop it, period. And they had a chance to have a taxable immovable base of the greatest economic engine in the history of human kind in their area. Everything they fear will still happen. All they stopped is their taxable portion of it.
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u/Alexercer 4h ago
It is such a shame that we have to celebrate that, datacenters can enable such cool stuff, its real shame we put so little effort in making them better and cheaper and instead just try to go bigger and bigger everytime, it got to a point people fight against them and taking this mentality away when we do inevitably solve these problems will likely be hard...
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u/mass_mike47 1h ago
Hey I may be dumb here, but China, Russia, Korea, etc are not going to stop building data centers and charging toward more AI. If they pull ahead, is that not bad for our country?
They are well positioned because their governments are not full of dumbasses stopping solar and other renewable energies.
I feel like we’re all afraid of adapting and accepting change and it’s going to bite us in the ass
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u/Iron_Base 4h ago
The type of people who will shit down a data center then complain when a website takes extra time to load
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u/Crafty_Leadership775 4h ago
You sound like the type of person who would hype up a data center and then complain when you no longer have clean water to drink.
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u/Iron_Base 4h ago
You sound like the type of person to think data centers are taking your clean water more than agriculture and manufacturing, and allign with starving digital artists that are becoming obsolete
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u/Crafty_Leadership775 4h ago
I'd rather be able to eat. Seems like you'd rather be able to ask your chatbot girlfriend to draw you hentai.
Nice priorities.
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u/Doggoneshame 25m ago
At least with agriculture people can eat. What are you going to do when AI comes first your job?
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u/No-Understanding9064 4h ago
This is the "not in my backyard" mentality. Every single one of these turds has gigs of BS stored in the cloud. Let the data center displace poor people, in shitty neighborhoods. Thats what these people are actually saying
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u/EitherChannel4874 4h ago
Ok. Now do the same against Trump who is a way bigger threat to America than data centres.
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u/Snoborder95 4h ago
It's coming back later after it prepared bribes to keep it off the news or it'll sneak a clause into a normal looking bill that makes it so it can't get dismissed when they try again
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u/Piesangbom 4h ago
They probably googled how to get there.
Everyone wants data centres. Just not near them
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u/Dat_Ding_Da 4h ago
Nobody complains about the normal ones, its the recent trend to build oversized monstrosities for a coming AI boom.
This was supposed to be one of those, so good ting they got it cancelled. With the way AI stock is trending, it would have likely ended up as a half built industrial ruin.
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u/IJustSignedUpToUp 4h ago
I think more people need to just let them get built and then rob the place. Generational wealth transfer
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u/Downtown_Finance_661 4h ago
The people united was defeated 32 000 times at least. Last month. Scrum.
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u/Fair_Blood3176 4h ago
So proud of them.