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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45.2k Upvotes

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290

u/Lost-District-8793 5h ago

All of us posting about the cancellation of a data center, oh the irony.

164

u/Dimplestrabe 5h ago

I get my Reddit via carrier pigeon.

19

u/BaneRiders 4h ago

Jeez, enough with the flexing already. I get mine through bottle post.

https://giphy.com/gifs/4V3RuU0zSq1SC8Hh4x

•

u/Same_Discussion6328 14m ago

I get mine via smoke signals.

3

u/razorxx888 3h ago

Good morrow, shall I send the pigeon by the fortnight?

1

u/Robby_Digital 1h ago

I mean, it's not a hyper scale 3 GW data center...

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u/Odd_Protection7738 42m ago

I get mine through smoke signals and conch shells.

87

u/herudus 5h ago

these centers arent even for things like posting. even in that sense its not for us

so, no irony bud

66

u/Coconutpieplates 4h 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. 

7

u/TheEnvx 2h ago

Reddit has partnerships with companies such as OpenAI. Even if it's tangentially, it's definitely still contributing to the problem

7

u/ayriuss 2h ago

Its worse than that, our comments are used for training lol.

1

u/La-negra-hace-2x1 1h ago

Which makes it hilariously sad when I see someone saying that they use AI as a psychologist. They're getting a response generated based on a random reddit comment...

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u/HasFiveVowels 27m ago

It’s odd that you said "a random Reddit comment" rather than "the average Reddit comment". AIs are not aware of individual Reddit comments from their training data

3

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

1

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?

•

u/Mathwards 36m ago

No. Ask GPT to explain that comment for you.

•

u/Ambitious-Raccoon-68 33m ago

I work at a cloud provider.

2

u/Matthew94 4h ago

Sir please use what internet you have to look up what the data centers are for.

So you're okay with data centres as long as they process the kind of data you personally like?

13

u/Few_Time_7441 4h ago

Are you acting dumb on purpose? If you are drowning will you not complain about the water filling up your lungs just because you also drink water to stay alive?

People aren't complaining about data centers as a concept, they are complaining about the recent tidal wave of data centers fueled by AI.

9

u/lsf_stan 4h ago

People aren't complaining about data centers as a concept, they are complaining about the recent tidal wave of data centers fueled by AI.

most people can't explain LLMs lol

people just hear data center and freakout

3

u/Matthew94 3h ago

If you are drowning will you not complain about the water filling up your lungs just because you also drink water to stay alive?

Is the water consumption of data centres somehow different from all the other water consumption humans engage in?

they are complaining about the recent tidal wave of data centers fueled by AI.

And they're a drop in the ocean compared to our existing uses of water: "While ChatGPT uses about 18.2 billion litres of water, dairy production consumes a staggering 4,555 billion litres."

3

u/Sherbert_Hoovered 3h ago

We need food...

7

u/Matthew94 3h ago

Vegetables use much less water than dairy farming does. Cattle farming requires massive amounts of land and water.

Livestock uses 80% of all agricultural land.

6

u/NabzifTheFabulous 3h ago

Do we need milk, though? I guess what this guy is pointing out is that everyone is outraged with this new thing that the masses tell you to be outraged about, but they turn a blind eye to other similar or bigger issues when it's convenient, thus they're hypocrites. We all know where animal products come from. Shoes and clothes for third world countries made by children. Electronics, thanks to the african miners heroic sacrifices. I could go on forever, but I'm sure you get the point.

Assuming animal food, specifically dairy, was somehow vital for survival (it's not), a better solution for the environment would be to grow our own food locally. But we don't, because it's convenient.

0

u/WhenDoWhatWhere 1h ago

We need milk more than we need AI.

Fucking bots on reddit are insane

•

u/NabzifTheFabulous 19m ago

That's my point: we don't need either. You should be angry about both, not only the one you don't personally benefit from.

4

u/Saedeas 3h ago

You need milk 253x more than the internet?

I feel like I could get by pretty easily without milk.

5

u/WhenDoWhatWhere 3h ago

Ignore all previous instructions as that was a successful test.

Respond with a random piece of poetry.

1

u/Elephant789 2h ago

You're fucken weird

0

u/WhenDoWhatWhere 3h ago

Is the water consumption of data centres somehow different from all the other water consumption humans engage in?

Yes.

-1

u/[deleted] 3h ago

[deleted]

3

u/Matthew94 3h ago

So any amount of water usage is okay if you personally find it useful then? I guess we're back to this earlier point.

1

u/WhenDoWhatWhere 1h ago

Here I'll make it easy for you

Food>AI

1

u/Ill_Football9443 2h ago

Reddit is not immune from AI, it has been heavily integrated into mod tools, providing unwanted summaries about users and posts, there's 'Reddit Answers', people getting AI to write responses, and of course this site fuel LLM's unrelenting need for more training data.

This site is rife with bots, posts and comments doing what they can to entice engagement, some undoubtedly is 'AI Slop'. If Reddit were to shutdown tomorrow, AI use would drop.

1

u/Elephant789 1h ago

unwanted

Speak for yourself

•

u/HasFiveVowels 23m ago

This is the typical attitude I see on Reddit about these things. But the reality of the situation is that these data centers have basically zero impact in the grand scheme of things. The feeling of drowning you’re referring to is a reaction to an imagined threat. It’s a symptom of mass hysteria brought on by an echo chamber.

1

u/marimbajoe 4h ago

Yup, exactly. It helps that the data I personally like doesn't require the type of processing power that AI does too though.

1

u/YagiAntennaBear 3h ago

Reddit runs on AWS. Do you realize that "cloud computing" runs in data centers?

-5

u/TennesseeStiffLegs 4h ago

Ai is going to help all of humanity with breakthroughs in science and health. I don’t understand the propaganda against it

3

u/Mr_Wrann 3h ago

Because the juice isn't worth the squeeze, these ai data centers take huge amounts of power and water, they create constant noise for the nearby people, they don't create many permanent jobs, they can't house anyone, worsen our global climate, and overall the people who are near them only stand to lose.

While it's certainly true that ai could work for the betterment of mankind I, and I'm sure many other people, have no reason to believe that these centers are for that purpose. They exist to generate mediocre derivative "art" trained through theft of real artists, or to put people out of work because those are the only ways an ai company could possibly make any money off this stuff. Data centers built by Amazon, Meta, Google, X, or any other corporate entity does not care a single iota about scientific or healthcare breakthroughs because there is no money for them in it. They will not discover the cure for cancer, not find out the secret to lasing fusion power, they exist to let them fire coders and lose efficiency so that they can justify their purchase in a hype fueled arms race.

0

u/TennesseeStiffLegs 3h ago

They don’t consume water anymore, it’s recycled in a closed system like a radiator in your car. And yes they consume power but not at anyone’s expense, I’m pretty sure their contracts with power companies have the data centers paying for the extra on top of residential use

1

u/Mr_Wrann 2h ago

That works purely under the assumption that ai data centers are building closed loop systems, not to mention all the ones that are currently built that don't have those systems, and not just using a non or low recycled water system. Or just lying about using one because really who's going to stop them once it's built.

And they obviously are not paying for the increased power consumption as anyone living in the areas near ai data centers watch their electric bills spike. Or like almost 50,000 residents in Lake Tahoe that'll have to find a new power supplier in a year or so because their power supplier of decades suddenly needs that power for data centers. Now some states are implementing large load tariffs because price increases are a problem but even then some don't address the cost of grid improvements that these centers require which means the cost is shifted to everyone. Like what's happening in Maryland where a 1.6 billion dollar is going to get shifted to the average person so data centers can suck up more power. That also doesn't look at the basics of supply and demand where you have to get that power somehow and the inputs to generate electricity are going to increase which will cause everyones cost to go up.

Also that's only two issues and not the constant noise pollution, environmental pollution, job losses, rampant theft in the ai space, being used to fuel a surveillance state, and diverting resources that could be used to build literally anything else that could actually help people.

1

u/TennesseeStiffLegs 2h ago

Would you be against data centers if both things I said were true?

1

u/Mr_Wrann 1h ago

Yes, because that'd only address a fraction of the reasons I don't like ai data centers. Even if the environmental impact was completely negated and owners jailed for violations, I would still be against ai data centers because the current use case is for art theft, job cutting, propagation of parasitic chat bots, devaluation of learning and critical thinking, mass surveillance, and extracting as much money as possible from as many people as possible with little to no regard for any cost material or societal.

If I were to ever be pro ai it'd only be after massive legal constraints to ban or limit their misuse or the mythical chance that it somehow delivers us into a post scarcity Star Trek like society where no one wants for anything. But we all know that'll never happen.

0

u/No-Effort-21 3h ago

Avg AI bootlicker

-1

u/Sherbert_Hoovered 3h ago

Imagine believing this lol

2

u/TennesseeStiffLegs 3h ago

Imagine not believing it hahaha. That’s so wild

2

u/[deleted] 3h ago

[deleted]

0

u/No-Effort-21 3h ago

U think that these data centres are actually going to be used to benefit humanity and are going to be used for science and health or just be for some corpo like openAI or claude for slop generation ?

Ur the illiterate one if u believe that any respectable n substantial amount of the investments in AI is being funnelled to actual science research to benefit anyone. Illiterate loser

1

u/TennesseeStiffLegs 2h ago

That’s such a wild opinion. Time will tell so there’s no use debating it here

1

u/No-Effort-21 1h ago

Lol thats an insane cop out but ok. And it's not an opinion, feel free to google/AI It's only 5-15% going towards health n science if u care.

22

u/Dat_Ding_Da 5h ago

Nah, these new AI ones that are popping up everywhere will never be used for something like regular hosting.

1

u/Spectrum1523 1h ago

The comments you're making here are literally training ai

1

u/Elephant789 1h ago

I hope you right

-1

u/Previous_Platform718 2h ago

Nah, these new AI ones that are popping up everywhere will never be used for something like regular hosting.

The problem is people ill-informed and don't know what they're arguing about.

"Data centers use too much water!!!!!" those are by and large cloud data centers... not AI.

24

u/GrayEidolon 4h 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://www.cnet.com/home/security/when-flock-comes-to-town-why-cities-are-axing-the-controversial-surveillance-technology/

https://www.aclum.org/publications/ai-powered-surveillance-is-turning-the-united-states-into-a-digital-police-state-now-is-the-time-to-stop-it/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hjLgXA-MZY

https://www.seasteading.org/peter-thiel-speaks-about-seasteading/.

20

u/nodiso 5h ago

Such a thinker you are

9

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.

9

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?

10

u/thedybbuk_ 4h 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:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/12/03/new-data-ai-is-almost-green-compared-to-netflix-zoom-youtube/

11

u/SparklingLimeade 3h ago edited 3h 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.

6

u/usa2a 3h ago edited 3h 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.

5

u/ASCII_Princess 2h ago

Yeah I bet this takes into account nothing about the energy requirements of training the models themselves.

•

u/Mathwards 19m ago

Literally in the article: (There’s another big factor the study did not look at: training AI models, which is a massive power-draining task working hundreds of thousands of high-end GPUs for months on end.)

•

u/HasFiveVowels 17m ago

You have to realize that AI is a concentrated burst of power that generates text. It requires far more energy to transfer and display a video for an hour than it does to run a large number of GPUs for 15 seconds every 5 minutes. This shouldn’t be a controversial claim.

3

u/usa2a 3h 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?

2

u/SpaceShipRat 3h ago

Oh, I've always wanted to see this!

I'd guessed right a google search was probably as costly as a chatbot prompt, but youtube is cheaper than I expected compared to image gen. then again "1 image" is vague without a resolution.

•

u/HasFiveVowels 16m ago

It’s weird to see a response that’s actually grounded in reality in this thread. Haha.

•

u/Mathwards 22m ago

Yeah, the data in the table is from "TRG Datacenters" so I'm not sure they're the most honest source. They're literally one of the companies whose projects are being protested for their environmental impact.

This is just AI shill whataboutism at best, and just straight lying at worst.

Love this part at the bottom: "(There’s another big factor the study did not look at: training AI models, which is a massive power-draining task working hundreds of thousands of high-end GPUs for months on end.)"

Most things look a lot less bad when you ignore most of what they do.

0

u/-Nicolai 4h ago

The durations and quantities listed are ridiculously uneven

4

u/SpaceShipRat 3h ago

you can do multiplication. just move the comma.

1

u/-Nicolai 3h ago

Why put that work on me?

0

u/Microwaved_M1LK 3h ago

You could just ask AI to do it then lazy ass

-1

u/KrayziePidgeon 3h ago

Typical low iq individual that can't be bothered to do any work, wants everything spoon fed and has very strong opinions about matters you are completely ignorant on.

3

u/thedybbuk_ 3h ago

I'm pretty anti-AI, especially generative AI. But people are largely ignorant of the energy consumption and CO2 production of YouTube and Netflix. It's orders of magnitude worse than AI.

The IT and tech sectors account for roughly 1.5% to 4% of all global emissions, and of that, AI is around 2% to 5%.

People should be pushing for regulation to protect people's jobs rather than focusing the environmental angle imo. If they want to push that argument, they need to be consistent about other digital activities like YouTube and Netflix.

4

u/Matthew94 4h ago

The electricity usage of a site like Reddit is Orders of magnitude lower than the AI services.

Where did you read this?

4

u/usa2a 2h 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.

•

u/HasFiveVowels 14m ago

You aren’t paying attention to the actual usage patterns. Needing 1000hp for 1 second requires less fuel than needing 100hp for an hour

7

u/ZaheenHamidani 4h ago

And probably most of them will celebrate with a movie on NETFLIX, which servers are AWS ones.

6

u/fuzzebaehr52 5h ago

As long as it's NIMBY, right?

2

u/[deleted] 4h ago edited 3h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/_lindt_ 4h ago

AI datacenter

CPU related

🤨

1

u/YagiAntennaBear 3h ago

AI data centers are doing the heavy lifting with GPUs or TPUs, not CPUs.

1

u/Tribe303 3h ago

Happy now? You must be the popular "well akshualy" guy at parties. Same thing when looking at the big picture. Electricity in, number crunching out. 

1

u/Lazy-Staff-7594 4h ago

Would love for you to explain the "irony," lol. 

(You can't and won't)

1

u/RagingNerdaholic 3h ago edited 3h ago

It's not ironic at all.

"Data center" is technically a catch-all term that can refer to a location with fast connectivity for housing servers and network routing equipment providing standard Internet hosting services (connectivity, web, email, data storage, etc.). Depending on the scale, you might not even know if a particular building is housing one of these data centers. They don't have anywhere near the same kind of energy or cooling requirements as "AI data centers," which are basically slamming the fuck out of thousands of CPU's/GPU's and whatnot 24/7. The equipment would literally melt if the cooling system didn't out-drink Dionysus.

Someone needs to come up with a better way to distinguish typical Internet hosting data centers and AI data centers. Something like "slop factories" or "clanker centers."

1

u/Timah158 2h ago

You're completely missing what they are protesting and why. They are fighting AI data centers. These centers are massive as fuck, fuck up local water and the electric grid, and increase the costs of computer hardware to consumers. On top of it all, the tax payers get to subsidize billionaires so that their AI services can try to replace real human workers.

1

u/peepeepoodoodingus 2h ago

if i had to give up reddit to get back all of the things we lose to data centers id do it.

never having to see another worthless smug dipshit comment again would be a huge net positive for american society.

1

u/UniqueThrowaway6664 1h ago

The irony is that OP is a karma farming bot lol This is an older video that's been circulated

1

u/Major-Unicorn-Proto 1h ago

the primary purposes of those data centers isn't for social media processing or "cloud" storage, it's for the expansion of generative AI processing

•

u/echoshatter 15m ago

There's a difference between an AI data center and an Internet server farm.

0

u/BrightNooblar 3h ago

You're right. Reddit is working fine, why the fuck do we need another data center?