I keep seeing it framed as the data centers using too much water. They need the water for the excessive HEAT they produce, with all the ELECTRICITY generated by (in mist cases) FOSSIL FUELS.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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Fossil fuel power plants are the fastest and cheapest to build. That's why they never use renewables. And with the 10y moratorium on regulation (even what's left of it) for anything AI related, they want to do this now.
Fuck the US government. They are the enablers.
Yeah that's a red herring on purpose to distract you from the fact that these data centers are literally running on hundreds of 24/7/365 jet engines being used as generators. It's so obscene I kind of wonder if a lot of this AI hype and the wars aren't being driven by the oil industry to prop up their dying business model.
The Prime Minister of Canada said that the construction of data centers should be encouraged because it will "provide markets for our natural gas".
It's not even a conspiracy theory, it's openly stated.
So many people need to be put against a wall and made to explain, in front of live audiences or cameras, why dying industries NEED to be supported.
Nobody ever said "the fidget spinner market needs a bailout! They're a dying industry!"
Of course, fidget spinners weren't paying for bribes.
Fuck Carney, that motherfucker.
It has received coverage. This is just one example. Problem is people ignore the problems in already blighted communities.
Are they actually running the jet engine generators 24x7x365? Fuck the data center expansion for AI sake but also we should be honest.
Yes. I am being honest. Datacenter builders and operators are not. Believe them at your peril. If I need to convince you, you've already lost.
Slop factories
Worse yet, for residents, it’s already likely too late to do anything against the data center expansion.
“The only chance to stop something like this is to do it at the very, very, very beginning of the process — before the permit is issued — through the public participation process,” former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) staffer James Doty told Wired.
Oh I can think of a couple ways they can do something about it
and the Ai cucks will defend this and the billionaires
But.. But... MY model isn't run at a data center, it's all run from my own computer! Oh how did it get trained and refined to the point where I could run it on my computer? Uhhhhhh..... Look over there! A distraction!
The only ethical LLM is MY LLM.
/s, just in case someone needs it.
Yeah I'm seeing this way too often right here in the fediverse. Often combined with gaslighting.
Clippy was the only LLM we needed, ran on your own computer and everything
There are some out there, yes.
You’d be surprised at the proportion of the (at least US) population that is disgusted by it and avoids it wherever possible.
im on a sub community of people that hate Ai, and you think ill be surprised to find out there are others that also hate it?
Lemmy can usually be considered “niche,” and some folks mentally separate the user base from “normies” or the wider general populace. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Remember when we were told to conserve energy with energy efficient appliances and such? We were told to conserve water with low flow showers and toilets? Guess where those savings all went.
Silver lining: It's a bubble and not sustainable...even from an economical view. Many of those data centers will be ruins before the end of the decade because there never was an actual use for them to begin with.
Nah, they'll be repurposed for cloud computing.
Like my stupid Creative T40 computer speakers that auto shut off after a few minutes of silence to save a handful of millijoules, then annoyingly take 4 seconds to power back up.
No way to turn off that "feature".
Data centers for the unspecified purpose of "we need them". These idiots are throwing tremendous force behind building these things almost overnight and everywhere. AI alone does not need all these . When this bubble pops it's going to put us all in the poorhouse but... I bet there will be some cheap ram and hard drives when it goes.
They're for the surveillance state. Flock cameras, age verification, other surveillance apparatus, all of it goes through astronomical data. These centers are for that.
I believe you are right. That's why they're trying to jam 1800 let state in as fast as possible before the backlash.
Too bad server grade anything doesn't fit into consumer products.
I think you're going to see (like with the new mobos that have gone back to ddr4 in production) a lot of niche market adapters and odd bastard mobos and some new ones made to capitalize on the market.
Does that mean you're ceding your claim to the cheap server grade HDDs? Sounds good to me, I've got an apocalypse grade media server to fill
I am, yeah. You can have my rations
AMD has built a Radeon with HBM memory in 2015, they can do it again.
I just installed an HBA to run cheap server HDDs on. That was fairly easy.
Consumer RAM will likely lag behind in falling prices since that's not what these centers use. Server equipment would likely plummet in price tho
You're going to see a brisk business in repurposing.
All we need is some AsH~3~, BeO, and CdO pollution and the data center pollution problem will solve itself.
I was unsure what this comment is saying ... Then I read what those compounds are and I was like ... Oh yeah because of all the death. Perfect.
I've been working in data centers since 2008.
What happened? What changed? They used to be incredible.
I haven't been in a data center in a couple of years.
Companies are exploiting regulatory loopholes as they construct new facilities powered by pollutant-spewing onsite gas plants.
The grid can’t handle the buildout, so new data centers are operating unregulated gray-market power plants.
Does that effectively also mean that the real energy consumption might not be measured accurately?
Do it and pay the fines later. If that nets a profit than the system needs to be changed.
trump and the dismantling of every regulatory body
trump happened
They got bigger and got owned by more evil companies.
Evaporation cooling is cheaper
What changed is that they're now GPU and RAID farms for enslaving humanity. Remember what the NSA did? It's x100 worse.