Erin Brockovich is popular enough that it justifies duplicacy of efforts, amount of visibility her name will brings in much more value than cost of building it.
The page mentioned in the article seems to focus on "AI Data Centers". Looks like it's a much smaller set of hyperscale stuff, not every telco building with a bunch of racks.
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever xAI is doing with "mobile" generators.
I mean, the wastewater issues can be real in some environments. It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed and mitigated. It's not like these things have the ecological impact of steel foundries or fruit orchards, but they're not parks either.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
It does seem most of the pro-AI people aren't actually affected by any of the negative aspects of it. It's a lot easier to be in favor of something that doesn't actually affect you or anyone you care about.
It’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?
What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
Data center mech eng here - from our perspective it's higher rack densities typically due to GPUs. It's certainly possible to have high densities due to CPUs as well but I've seen a significant spike in rack densities in the last couple of years which has caused a switch from air cooling to liquid to chip.
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled chillers which leads to large water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled chillers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data centre waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
This strikes me as a combination of semantics and false equivalence. You might as well argue that a new crowd of people illegally dirt-biking in a public park isn’t a meaningful change because people with baby strollers are also technically violating the “no vehicles” sign.
How isn't this the actual link in the post? Have to go through all these loops and hoops and the post doesn't even link to the source from what I can tell.
I was thinking some of the community ones are bogus and then I started looking closer at a few of the hotspots. There is what appears to be a compelling site for a datacenter right in the middle of a cluster of these reports:
I looked around North Dakota and there are several that say community reported. Pretty sure those either don't exist or aren't significant in size if they do exist.
People have gotten so intense with the anti-AI sentiment that I hope this doesn't end up guiding people to places where they can exercise violence "for a just cause".
> I also think Americans have the right to decide what happens in their neighborhoods.
I agree with this.
At the same time, all of the data center proposals in my state are in remote locations nowhere near any residences. They’re still the target of protests.
Just because a data center is way outside your neighborhood; doesn't mean it can't have a direct impact on you personally. Electrical and water resources used can affect your utility bills.
But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.
I don't know that local control is an unalloyed good. The interstate highway system would never have been built if we followed this as a principle, for example. For another example, Californian voters consistently vote for state level increases in housing, yet locally consistently vote against increasing housing in their community.
At some point national and state level goals must supercede local control if progress is to ever be made.
I came here to say this. I'm highly confident the site was built with Claude. I asked Claude how it was built and Claude was confident it was built with Claude. Kind of ironic, honestly.
Opposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing.
No one is stopping them from building out their own renewables and if they were doing that while also _fully_ accounting for water usage and any other externalities I don't think there would be much (if any) opposition to them. But that's really expensive so they (by and large) aren't doing that so there's opposition. Seems normal and expected to me.
Is there a map of munitions plants and spy centers and other facilities whose sole purpose is to active oppress, harm and outright kill people?
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
False equivalencies, you can be against ai and imperialism and ads. Go make those maps if you think they’re problems, otherwise you’re just shutting someone down for caring about something that impacts them but you don’t care about
I love this. Yeah there's some FUD out there about water usage and whatnot, but using the internet to spread actual awareness about local concerns is a fine demonstration of free speech at work.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
AI compute is a major emerging export industry that the U.S. could become the global leader in. Strong First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control also make the U.S. uniquely well-suited for AI, unlike, let's say, manufacturing, where authoritarian states seem to have an advantage.
I don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.
Nobody is complaining about the acreage used. The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. If they were just purchasing 100 acre lots of land and letting it sit vacant I don't think anyone would really care for the most part.
the money being talked about is so large that eventually the lobbyists will get their checks and the politicians will pass laws forbidding local scrutiny of data centers
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
AI is good, but the impact of data centers on the environment cannot be ignored. Over a longer time scale, AI is just one wave, while the environment will take much longer to recover.
It seems pretty insincere of a complaint, when in those communities, 100x more land and water is used for farming, just because farming is a heritage, no?
AI is useful for programmers and a few other groups of people to do their jobs faster.
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.
* if that's a sarcastic / troll comment, congratulations, you got me but good :-)
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
I purchase surplus xeons on ebay, grind them into powder, and mix them into my milkshakes. If you aren't going that route then the real question here is what you're supplementing with to get the necessary computational boost. I'm aware of the complaints that surplus gear has a lower overall nutritional value but you'll see that it's highly cost effective if you can just be bothered to do the math.
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
Why go through the effort when such work has already been done?
https://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters/
Not being negative. But isn’t there existing highly reliable data that already exists for this?
Erin Brockovich is popular enough that it justifies duplicacy of efforts, amount of visibility her name will brings in much more value than cost of building it.
The page mentioned in the article seems to focus on "AI Data Centers". Looks like it's a much smaller set of hyperscale stuff, not every telco building with a bunch of racks.
However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.
To document the impacts and organize people against the harms.
Giving equal weight to real data centers and 1000sqft telco switches on this map is sort of misleading.
I mean, why was OpenStreetMap created?
It puts a number greater than 4,000 in the middle of the US. Maybe that’s reliable, maybe it’s accurate, but it’s certainly not useful.
You can click on that to see more detail :)
I guess it’s just not designed for mobile. Tapping didn’t reveal anything.
It works well on Android. Just zoom in and click the number, and you can breakdown per state. Click on any state number and it breaks down per city.
Pretty functional design.
you click on that number to drill down into more and more granular information
The Erin Brockovich page itself repeats the canard, on the front page, that these sites endanger ecosystems with their water consumption.
Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever xAI is doing with "mobile" generators.
Because they do.
Not inherently they don’t.
Sure, but we don’t live in theory, we live in reality.
I mean, the wastewater issues can be real in some environments. It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed and mitigated. It's not like these things have the ecological impact of steel foundries or fruit orchards, but they're not parks either.
I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!
And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!
Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.
It's poetically beautiful that the tool was very very clearly built mostly if not entirely using AI
A lot of the copy also looks like AI.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
It might be, I'm not sure.
The code is interesting though, it's not minified, it's very readable, and nicely indented with lots of comments.
The curated data center list is just some inline JSON.
The javascript uses var instead of let or const, I'm not sure if this is just style choice, or there is some code post processing.
It doesn't use react, AI seems to almost always opt for react for front end design, unless told otherwise.
This datacenter stuff is such populist brainrot.
Big Tech isn't exactly doing a great job of marketing them. Saying they're for AI while doing mass layoffs attributed to AI isn't a winning message.
Any individual layoff is truly awful.
But at the macro level, it is not really a big number so far. From ~2.48 million in 2023 to ~2.37million now. Or a 5% drop in employment in 3 years.
Fred: All Employees, Computer Systems Design and Related Services (CES6054150001)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ces6054150001
I take it you don't live next to a data center.
It does seem most of the pro-AI people aren't actually affected by any of the negative aspects of it. It's a lot easier to be in favor of something that doesn't actually affect you or anyone you care about.
It’s interesting how many more community reported data centres there are compared to operational and proposed. I’m wondering if this is because of over reporting? Like - does the public mistake any new, big building as a data centre, or are the other categories under reported (or something else)?
Seems under-reported to me (as far as PDX goes).
For reference: https://www.datacenterjournal.com/data-centers/oregon/portla...
Are privately-held datacenters counted? Like, prssumably chipmakers have a few of their own in their home regions..?
“Privately-held”? I don’t think governments are building them.
The US government has a lot.
Just one random Google result:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Companies that aren’t publicly traded, is another way to say that.
What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
Data center mech eng here - from our perspective it's higher rack densities typically due to GPUs. It's certainly possible to have high densities due to CPUs as well but I've seen a significant spike in rack densities in the last couple of years which has caused a switch from air cooling to liquid to chip.
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled chillers which leads to large water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled chillers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data centre waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
Different I/O, power and cooling requirements for majority GPU workloads?
GPUs have been in high demand since cryptocurrency became a thing? Are you saying that something built for AI can't be used for other workloads?
This strikes me as a combination of semantics and false equivalence. You might as well argue that a new crowd of people illegally dirt-biking in a public park isn’t a meaningful change because people with baby strollers are also technically violating the “no vehicles” sign.
Did crypto workload ever take over an entire data center?
Direct Link: https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/
How isn't this the actual link in the post? Have to go through all these loops and hoops and the post doesn't even link to the source from what I can tell.
I saw a comment from another site that a lot of the data center locations on this map aren’t accurate. Is there any truth to that?
I was thinking some of the community ones are bogus and then I started looking closer at a few of the hotspots. There is what appears to be a compelling site for a datacenter right in the middle of a cluster of these reports:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/nZyt5Yb3kqxj5thc8
I looked around North Dakota and there are several that say community reported. Pretty sure those either don't exist or aren't significant in size if they do exist.
People have gotten so intense with the anti-AI sentiment that I hope this doesn't end up guiding people to places where they can exercise violence "for a just cause".
Do real people genuinely care about this more than CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) (for example)?
I can eat animals off a feedlot. I can’t eat anything that comes out of an ai data center.
Why are you ok with spending $100 on groceries but not $100 on poison?
what's funny is the website looks AI generated though that's just the style of the time i guess.
I'm very pro-AI. I also think Americans have the right to decide what happens in their neighborhoods. There is no hypocrisy there.
> I also think Americans have the right to decide what happens in their neighborhoods.
I agree with this.
At the same time, all of the data center proposals in my state are in remote locations nowhere near any residences. They’re still the target of protests.
Just because a data center is way outside your neighborhood; doesn't mean it can't have a direct impact on you personally. Electrical and water resources used can affect your utility bills.
But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.
I don't know that local control is an unalloyed good. The interstate highway system would never have been built if we followed this as a principle, for example. For another example, Californian voters consistently vote for state level increases in housing, yet locally consistently vote against increasing housing in their community.
At some point national and state level goals must supercede local control if progress is to ever be made.
No I actually do think this is AI generated. I came here to say the same.
Brokovich might not know it. But her web people certainly used AI to build this site. From the Emojis, cards, to the single colored left border.
the more I look at it the more I think this is AI yeah. sigh. I'm tired boss.
I came here to say this. I'm highly confident the site was built with Claude. I asked Claude how it was built and Claude was confident it was built with Claude. Kind of ironic, honestly.
There’s lots of anti ai and anti tech coming from hn and in general lately. I guess this is start of the hit list.
Opposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?
> We need as many data centers as possible
Why?
So we can destroy as many jobs as possible in as short an amount of time while nuking the environment from orbit and funneling trillions to china for the hardware?
The fact that you position anti-ai as a “left” thing means you’re not engaging with this seriously anyway. The environment isn’t a left-right thing.
No one is stopping them from building out their own renewables and if they were doing that while also _fully_ accounting for water usage and any other externalities I don't think there would be much (if any) opposition to them. But that's really expensive so they (by and large) aren't doing that so there's opposition. Seems normal and expected to me.
Is there a map of munitions plants and spy centers and other facilities whose sole purpose is to active oppress, harm and outright kill people?
Or the offices of ads agencies defacing countless public spaces, injecting noise into every activity and wasting billions of hours combined of everybody's life?
False equivalencies, you can be against ai and imperialism and ads. Go make those maps if you think they’re problems, otherwise you’re just shutting someone down for caring about something that impacts them but you don’t care about
I love this. Yeah there's some FUD out there about water usage and whatnot, but using the internet to spread actual awareness about local concerns is a fine demonstration of free speech at work.
If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.
Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law predates AI.
is there one to store bunker locations?
AI compute is a major emerging export industry that the U.S. could become the global leader in. Strong First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control also make the U.S. uniquely well-suited for AI, unlike, let's say, manufacturing, where authoritarian states seem to have an advantage.
> First Amendment protections, due process, and limits on arbitrary government control
In what fairytale land does this describe the US today?
Describes the US since founding. It’s the Constitution.
I don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.
Nobody is complaining about the acreage used. The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. If they were just purchasing 100 acre lots of land and letting it sit vacant I don't think anyone would really care for the most part.
the money being talked about is so large that eventually the lobbyists will get their checks and the politicians will pass laws forbidding local scrutiny of data centers
Much of the money is funny and doesn’t actually exist (yet).
"Erin Brockovich uses AI to make a map to track data centers around the country."
"...investigating data centers is quickly becoming its own beat"
ie it is in the economic interest of the writers to tap into (and foment) the FUD around "data centers."
c'mon now it's not nice to say mean things about ed zitron like that
They should just make the entirety of Silicon Valley as a mega data center.
That data centers are burning fossil fuels and burning up the earth is not FUD.
I love these new modern-day AI-hating Luddites.
Maybe they'll seize the means of computing and repurpose it for putting pictures of pillow shams on Pinterest.
I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025 and the Internet was run as some sort of underground railroad out of broom closets and people's basements.
Keep kind lud’s name out your damn mouth. Failure to understand history, doomed to repeat.
> I wonder if they think data centers didn't exist before 2025
They of course call them “hyperscalers” because they’re the same size as all the other things. /s
AI is good, but the impact of data centers on the environment cannot be ignored. Over a longer time scale, AI is just one wave, while the environment will take much longer to recover.
Exactly. How about instead of demanding that we become some regressive, Luddite pieces of shit we actually ask for more clean power generation.
Keep king Lud’s name out your damn mouth. Claiming to value progress without understanding the past isn’t a good look.
It seems pretty insincere of a complaint, when in those communities, 100x more land and water is used for farming, just because farming is a heritage, no?
AI is useful for programmers and a few other groups of people to do their jobs faster.
For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.
If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.
* if that's a sarcastic / troll comment, congratulations, you got me but good :-)
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
I purchase surplus xeons on ebay, grind them into powder, and mix them into my milkshakes. If you aren't going that route then the real question here is what you're supplementing with to get the necessary computational boost. I'm aware of the complaints that surplus gear has a lower overall nutritional value but you'll see that it's highly cost effective if you can just be bothered to do the math.
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
Ah yes. If you don’t buy during the surge you’ll have to pay the price later when costs have come down. Makes sense.