This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect.
>(well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
This is potentially good news for everyone who wants to do anything less dirty than a datacenter (logistics, cold chain, light manufacturing/assembly, etc) because they'll probably be able to get the precedent extended to them in the next decade or so. The people and communities that make money off that sort of stuff will probably do well. Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state because the municipalities want to permit it but state rules make that hard. So there is potential for some good to come out of it.
These changes will last exactly as long as this administration, so it would be a pretty foolish business that makes long term investment decisions based on this announcement.
I can’t believe we’re seeing so much bad news coming from EPA. Why all this backtracking from an agency that used to be so effective and well organized? Well, I guess we know the reason.
A good start is to vote in the midterms to reduce the amount of power that these antihuman criminals have. The US is currently in the midst of a serious political disaster and there will be no quick fix to any of this. But if we take every opportunity possible whenever we can to rid ourselves of these people and to stand in their way as much as possible, we can work our way back from the brink.
I don't know about you but I've been hearing for two decades now that we "in the midst" of a political disaster. Every election is the most important election we've ever had! Just one more election going a certain way and surely things will start to get better! And then someone gets elected and they start "doing the work" or whatever but as soon as the wrong person gets elected we're right back "in the midst" of it again.
It's all just so tiresome, but perhaps more importantly - it's not true. We are no more "on the brink" now than we were in 2020, or 2016, or 2008, or 2000, or 1996, or 1992. Or any of the elections in between those.
Your hyperbolic "antihuman criminals" nonsense certainly isn't helping your point, either.
Two decades puts us back to the post-9/11 war on terror era, from which it seems like a fairly straight line to, for example, ICE murdering people in the streets.
So, yeah, political disasters take time to reach their conclusions, and the slide can be arrested at any point before it gets too bad. I think it’s probably correct that we’ve been in the midst of one for at least two decades, if not longer.
Unfortunately the answer is ”it requires effort”, or in other words: Vote (and hold them accountable after the ballots have been counted), Shout (literally), Protest (including civil disobedience), join any civil or environmental movement, help file legal challenges.
Democracy is for good and for worse not a one-and-done thing, it is a continuous fight.
The time cost to the thousands of people putting in long hours to organize against bad ideas is a measurable loss to the economy. It's very clear that the system itself is deficient because it massively rewards first movers, incumbents, and amplifies economic leverage rather than mitigating it.
This doesn't seem like a very effective method. I would expect something more along the lines of developing laws around noise pollution or something. Literally shouting at a data center seems more cathartic than helpful.
> I would expect something more along the lines of developing laws around noise pollution or something.
How do you think you as a voter who presumably aren't a billionaire (or CEO of a mega corporation) with politicians on speed dial who will take the call get the politicians to pass those laws?
If the electorate is asleep at the wheel, the people pushing the politicians are all pushing them one way and the car isn't going in the direction that most of the electorate would necessarily want.
If you value your democracy you sometimes have to be an active participant in it and sometimes that means turning up more than once ever X years and ticking a box.
It's about numbers. A small group isn't going to do anything directly to the data center, but it can raise awareness that other people do indeed care. This, in turn, can slowly (over multiple demonstrations) grow the size of the demonstrations to a critical mass that cannot be ignored.
If such reviews are required by legislation then you stop it in the courts; approvals without legally required steps are invalid.
If they are not required by legislation then you just deal with the change.
While you're thinking about this, realize even the Democrats are annoyed at how weaponized things like NEPA have become to slow down necessary changes.
4. Find every publicly accessible local forum with _your_ representatives at every level, and get on the mic. Tell your reps they will lose your vote and the votes of your entire network for complicity in harm against society on behalf of the billionaire class. Follow through on that threat.
Extreme option: Run for election yourself on the platform and get voted into office. The bar is lower than ever in some places.
Elections have consequences. Vote democrat in November and again in 2028. When someone tells you both sides are the same tell them no, it's only Republicans that are allowing Datacenters to sidestep the law in order to poison us more efficiently.
Democrats aren't by default better on this issue vs republicans so you need to be more involved than just voting in the general.
If you are in a D leaning district, then register as a D and vote in the D primary. Make sure the candidate you vote for is the most likely to win who isn't captured by big business.
A good example of a datacenter friendly dem that just won by the skin of their teeth is Crowley for governor in Wisconson.
We need ranked choice like yesterday. It's not a magic fix-it solution, but it is a giant step in the right direction. I'm so tired of the whiplash between these two parties.
> Democrats aren't by default better on this issue vs republicans so you need to be more involved than just voting in the general.
The only thing that matters is Democrats gaining control of Congress and state governments. The choice that isn't a democrat is the wrong one. The time to vote out an incumbent was the primary.
We usually have had less than 30% participation for the local Democratic primary in off years (Republican primary in off-years is not much better). The complete lack of civic-mindedness is why the only strategy that works at the general election is "vote for the lesser evil." Note: that only include 2 viable candidates, a third party will never win the Presidential election without elimination of the parties themselves or implementation of rank-choice voting by a majority of states to counteract the anti-democratic (that's small "d") bias of the Electoral College.
> The time to vote out an incumbent was the primary.
I agree, that's why I'm saying you should be involved in the primary and not just the general. Because, as I said, it's not the default position of the democrat party to be for regulating datacenters. I gave an explicit example of that where a dem is completely aligned with the republicans on DCs.
Dems win power, but they are still beholden to OpenAI, then they'll be no better than the republicans on this issue.
It's too late for 2026 and IMO you should vote for Ds wherever you are at. But if you want to affect change on DCs then voting in the primary for anti-dc dems is what you have to do. It's not enough to just vote in the general elections.
You're not wrong, but you are muddying the waters. The sides are clear and bringing up primaries when it's too late is irrelevant.
> they'll be no better than the republicans on this issue.
There is no reason to think this is true. I will eat a gas generator if a Democrat president orders his EPA administrator to break established rules and precedent like the current one is doing.
> You're not wrong, but you are muddying the waters.
No I'm not. We can walk and chew gum. It's important to recognize when and how Dems fail and this is one case where more than a few are failing their voters.
> There is no reason to think this is true.
There is if people aren't involved. A Gavin Newsom president would absolutely be pretty happy to receive campaign funding from AI firms.
> I will eat a gas generator if a Democrat president orders his EPA administrator to break established rules and precedent like the current one is doing.
Break the rules, no that's unlikely. However, it's entirely possible that the same results and rubber-stamping happens with enough campaign contributions. You need to look no further than all the money that's been dumped into "clean coal" and "CO2 capture" boondoggles by democrats to understand how this sort of thing works.
I could completely see a democrat president allowing DCs to be built so long as they buy carbon offsets, which is every bit as corrupt as just telling the EPA to not regulate. It's simply just not as brazen.
But I don't think this is true of any or all democrat presidential candidates, just some. Specifically Newsom would very much pull this sort of shit.
> Elections have consequences. Vote democrat in November and again in 2028. When someone tells you both sides are the same tell them no, it's only Republicans that are allowing Datacenters to sidestep the law in order to poison us more efficiently.
It's not that simple. The Democrats are shit, and lost to Trump twice because of that shittiness. Perversely, Trump has allowed them to convince themselves that they don't have to reform.
I don't expect anything to change if the Democrats gain power, they'll curb only the most egregious abuses curbed a bit, while leaving the overall thing intact. Then they'll lose again because they're shit.
The people in power are making a lot of mistakes right now. You ignore popular will at your peril. The more the bought-and-paid for Supreme Court and politicians weaken the power of the individual voter through shit like Citizens United and gerrymandering, the further they push people towards "uncivilized" methods.
The crazy part is that everybody in the US calls this "data center pollution". Over here in Frankfurt/Germany, we have data centers in the middle of the city, right next to residential housing. You don't smell anything, you do not hear anything.
A data center can simply put the heat pumps onto the roof or in the backyard pointing away from housing. Humans have developed noise protection systems for ages. All this stuff is available.
This is just end-stage capitalism giving a sh*t about humans, burning fossil fuels without any filters of any kind next to kids playing outside like it's the year 1920.
It’s strange because on one hand, people don’t want to live near data centers, but on the other: the rampant use of AI signals people really *do* want data centers.
The proposal to put data centers in space doesn’t seem too far fetched.
>Last year, Lee Zeldin, who runs the EPA, said it was now the agency’s top priority to “make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world.” The 56-year-old agency was established in 1970 to protect the environment and public health.
lol, reminds me of those videos where a host will say one thing and then the cameraman pans to reveal the lie
Funnily enough this probably the most safetyist thing the administration could do at the moment, since this will certainly autocatalyze more opposition to DC construction in a bunch of states and probably accelerate the state-level moratoriums. A big thank you to the White House for taking AI pause as such an urgent priority.
Goddamnit this is the worst possible administration to have while we’re having this massive buildup of data centers. Any reasonable government would have done what Massachusetts did and stipulated that you can build a data center, but it needs to be powered by renewable energy so build out your own energy sources, which would have been a win-win for everyone but instead we get this. Also, if the Democrats were in power, I hope they wouldn’t succumb to a minority in their base and just ban data centers and completely take us out of the race.
I'm pro-information and believe generally that anti-data-center activists are chasing a Glonzo on par with anti-5G electrosensitives. That said given the tide of opinion I'm overjoyed that Trump and his allies want to step into the fusilade to defend the unpopular.
That data centers need a lot of power and some cases a lot of water isn't some sort of conspiracy theory. When you have data centers like the box elder county DC that is planed to consume more power than the entire state of Utah and it wants to do that by burning natural gas, that's not some sort of conspiracy theory that it would be tremendously bad for the environment and the regional gas and electric bills (particularly since a decent amount of power already is generated via natural gas there).
I'm not wholesale against data centers, but there are more than a few projects that are downright irresponsible.
I'm sure this will stop all the public opposition to data centers! /s
This type of thing will just enrage the opposition more, give them far more fuel, and attract far more people into opposing data centers.
The ruling regime is used to controlling a subservient political group that always, 100% falls in line to marching orders. Now that they control the entire country, they either need to have oppressed tho populace enough that all objection gets arrested or is subject to immediate political violence. But that's not going to be possible with how unpopular they have made themselves.
With diesel over $6/gallon now that's probably not too attractive. Natural gas probably more likely, and less polluting at least as far as particulates go. CO2 still created.
Are all new data centers being built with on-site power generation (for regular operations, not just emergency backup)? I'd assume they'd prefer utility power where they could get it.
Diesel generators are mostly for emergencies. Natural gas turbines (many of which are or are derived from jumbo jet engines) are for on-prem power generation.
I live in Loudoun County, the wealthiest county in the United States. The amount of lamborghinis and Ferraris on the road around here is obscene. You know what else we have a lot of? Data centers. Loudoun County is also the data center capital of the US. Your idea that datacenters are racists transitively is woke slop.
> Your idea that datacenters are racists transitively is woke slop.
Your knee jerk reaction to refer to something as “woke slop” belies your privileged distance from anything remotely resembling hardship (I LiVe iN LoUdOuN) and an underdeveloped sense of empathy.
Anyway, we should be extremely skeptical of how infrastructure is built out in the US because of historical baggage. Poverty and industrial development create a vicious cycle that leads people to walk around with their thumb in their ass and claim that the poors just aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough.
You're not responding to their point, though. If data centers were built only in poor areas because of classism, they're correct that there probably wouldn't be a lot of data centers in one of the richest areas in the country. And there are. So if you want to make a convincing argument that data centers are classist you should probably have a response to that beyond "well you just don't have any empathy."
The pre-AI datacenters where you live are very different than the Colossus-style methane turbine and inadequately soundproofed AI datacenters that are being built today.
Perhaps the next administration will drop a few cluster bombs on some hyperscaler data centers. The air force needs targets to practice on, after all. Then throughout the land there will be much rejoicing and feelings of justice done, as trillions of dollars of GPUs go up in smoke.
This is potentially good news for everyone who wants to do anything less dirty than a datacenter (logistics, cold chain, light manufacturing/assembly, etc) because they'll probably be able to get the precedent extended to them in the next decade or so. The people and communities that make money off that sort of stuff will probably do well. Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state because the municipalities want to permit it but state rules make that hard. So there is potential for some good to come out of it.
Pros are running out of time to square their ambitions with a public that's about to go from needing a leg up to a public that wants their heads.
I can surely squirrel away a couple of GPUs into any random closet and rent out the capacity.
It's all just so tiresome, but perhaps more importantly - it's not true. We are no more "on the brink" now than we were in 2020, or 2016, or 2008, or 2000, or 1996, or 1992. Or any of the elections in between those.
Your hyperbolic "antihuman criminals" nonsense certainly isn't helping your point, either.
So, yeah, political disasters take time to reach their conclusions, and the slide can be arrested at any point before it gets too bad. I think it’s probably correct that we’ve been in the midst of one for at least two decades, if not longer.
The world has not literally ended yet, so all concerns are overblown.
Democracy is for good and for worse not a one-and-done thing, it is a continuous fight.
How do you think you as a voter who presumably aren't a billionaire (or CEO of a mega corporation) with politicians on speed dial who will take the call get the politicians to pass those laws?
If the electorate is asleep at the wheel, the people pushing the politicians are all pushing them one way and the car isn't going in the direction that most of the electorate would necessarily want.
If you value your democracy you sometimes have to be an active participant in it and sometimes that means turning up more than once ever X years and ticking a box.
If they are not required by legislation then you just deal with the change.
While you're thinking about this, realize even the Democrats are annoyed at how weaponized things like NEPA have become to slow down necessary changes.
2. Vote
3. Vote
4. Find every publicly accessible local forum with _your_ representatives at every level, and get on the mic. Tell your reps they will lose your vote and the votes of your entire network for complicity in harm against society on behalf of the billionaire class. Follow through on that threat.
Extreme option: Run for election yourself on the platform and get voted into office. The bar is lower than ever in some places.
Democrats aren't by default better on this issue vs republicans so you need to be more involved than just voting in the general.
If you are in a D leaning district, then register as a D and vote in the D primary. Make sure the candidate you vote for is the most likely to win who isn't captured by big business.
A good example of a datacenter friendly dem that just won by the skin of their teeth is Crowley for governor in Wisconson.
The only thing that matters is Democrats gaining control of Congress and state governments. The choice that isn't a democrat is the wrong one. The time to vote out an incumbent was the primary.
I agree, that's why I'm saying you should be involved in the primary and not just the general. Because, as I said, it's not the default position of the democrat party to be for regulating datacenters. I gave an explicit example of that where a dem is completely aligned with the republicans on DCs.
Dems win power, but they are still beholden to OpenAI, then they'll be no better than the republicans on this issue.
It's too late for 2026 and IMO you should vote for Ds wherever you are at. But if you want to affect change on DCs then voting in the primary for anti-dc dems is what you have to do. It's not enough to just vote in the general elections.
> they'll be no better than the republicans on this issue.
There is no reason to think this is true. I will eat a gas generator if a Democrat president orders his EPA administrator to break established rules and precedent like the current one is doing.
No I'm not. We can walk and chew gum. It's important to recognize when and how Dems fail and this is one case where more than a few are failing their voters.
> There is no reason to think this is true.
There is if people aren't involved. A Gavin Newsom president would absolutely be pretty happy to receive campaign funding from AI firms.
> I will eat a gas generator if a Democrat president orders his EPA administrator to break established rules and precedent like the current one is doing.
Break the rules, no that's unlikely. However, it's entirely possible that the same results and rubber-stamping happens with enough campaign contributions. You need to look no further than all the money that's been dumped into "clean coal" and "CO2 capture" boondoggles by democrats to understand how this sort of thing works.
I could completely see a democrat president allowing DCs to be built so long as they buy carbon offsets, which is every bit as corrupt as just telling the EPA to not regulate. It's simply just not as brazen.
But I don't think this is true of any or all democrat presidential candidates, just some. Specifically Newsom would very much pull this sort of shit.
It's not that simple. The Democrats are shit, and lost to Trump twice because of that shittiness. Perversely, Trump has allowed them to convince themselves that they don't have to reform.
I don't expect anything to change if the Democrats gain power, they'll curb only the most egregious abuses curbed a bit, while leaving the overall thing intact. Then they'll lose again because they're shit.
Elections will never save you when the parties in power serve the billionaires.
A data center can simply put the heat pumps onto the roof or in the backyard pointing away from housing. Humans have developed noise protection systems for ages. All this stuff is available.
This is just end-stage capitalism giving a sh*t about humans, burning fossil fuels without any filters of any kind next to kids playing outside like it's the year 1920.
The proposal to put data centers in space doesn’t seem too far fetched.
but of course a lot of permanent damage can be set in motion in that time
>Last year, Lee Zeldin, who runs the EPA, said it was now the agency’s top priority to “make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world.” The 56-year-old agency was established in 1970 to protect the environment and public health.
lol, reminds me of those videos where a host will say one thing and then the cameraman pans to reveal the lie
I'm not wholesale against data centers, but there are more than a few projects that are downright irresponsible.
This type of thing will just enrage the opposition more, give them far more fuel, and attract far more people into opposing data centers.
The ruling regime is used to controlling a subservient political group that always, 100% falls in line to marching orders. Now that they control the entire country, they either need to have oppressed tho populace enough that all objection gets arrested or is subject to immediate political violence. But that's not going to be possible with how unpopular they have made themselves.
Second, why is the article trying so hard to make datacenters out as racist?
The article is from Capital B, which focuses on news affecting the Black community.
Also noise is pollution too.
Are all new data centers being built with on-site power generation (for regular operations, not just emergency backup)? I'd assume they'd prefer utility power where they could get it.
Also the article is trying to connect gas turbines from 2 years ago with cancer rates..
AI Datacenters are classist.
Because of their negative externalities they will always be constructed near the poor who have the least political power.
Humans are racist.
So there is a strong systemic correlation between that group of disenfranchised people and people of color.
The most directly harmful impacts of datacenters are racist, transitively.
Your knee jerk reaction to refer to something as “woke slop” belies your privileged distance from anything remotely resembling hardship (I LiVe iN LoUdOuN) and an underdeveloped sense of empathy.
Anyway, we should be extremely skeptical of how infrastructure is built out in the US because of historical baggage. Poverty and industrial development create a vicious cycle that leads people to walk around with their thumb in their ass and claim that the poors just aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough.