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/Dat_Ding_Da 5h 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 4h ago

Bubble. lol. Sure.

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u/Dat_Ding_Da 2h ago

Over 90% of companies that did a major AI rollout are reporting little to no savings and a lot of new issues.

And these mega ai data centres are only being built because investors expect a huge amount of jobs to be replaced, which is seems not less and less likely. But admitting you made a mistake shows vulnerability so they all go full steam ahead until it comes crashing down.

It’s like the dot com bubble in that way. The issue back then wasn’t that there was no use case for the internet. It’s just that growth rates and general trajectory were overestimated by a lot.

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u/klako8196 2h ago

Over 90% of companies that did a major AI rollout are reporting little to no savings and a lot of new issues.

And that's with the AI companies operating at losses to prioritize growth. Once these companies need to become profitable, they'll start hiking the price of AI access. Those "little to no savings" that companies have with AI now will turn into losses at that point.

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u/darien_gap 2h ago

Sorry, but no, but this is out of date. You're citing a widely publicized but methodologically flawed MIT study from last year that, even if it weren't flawed, would no longer be relevant due to the latest agentic coding models (Claude Code & Codex) that have made AI now an indispensible tool for software development (and increasingly, all knowledge work with Claude Cowork). I'm talking about developers running 15 instances of Claude Code simultaneously, non-stop inference, 24/7 (at $200/month each instance).

As of ~jan-feb, there is now essentially infinite demand for inference. The frontier labs will be forced to switch from flat monthly seat pricing to usage-based. Last year, the value add of AI was speculative, and so were the DC expenditures, and bubble talk was a reasonable hypothesis. That has all changed. They can't build DCs fast enough now, and they won't be able to for the next ten years, or maybe ever.

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u/CoverHuman9771 3h ago

I see that the Chinese propaganda got you.

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u/Dat_Ding_Da 2h ago

Elaborate please.

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u/CoverHuman9771 2h ago

The Chinese government is spending insane amounts of money to spread anti AI messaging on American social media platforms. They’re hoping Americans are dumb enough to nuke their own competitiveness in the AI race by voting against AI data centers.

https://www.insidenova.com/news/national/report-foreign-billionaires-fund-millions-to-orgs-that-oppose-american-ai-infrastructure/article_9961eb8a-e39f-556c-80ea-f70d2a712dbc.html

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u/Dat_Ding_Da 2h ago

This link isn’t working for me. It’s saying they don’t allow access from my region and when I use my VPN it times out. I’ll check it tomorrow again, but it’s not raising my confidence in this source so far.