Datacenters, oh my
Where does the individual end and abundance begin?
I am endlessly ambivalent about the datacenter conversation. I’m deliberately using “ambivalent” here even though many folks are instead what I would call “enraged” and that’s part of what I’m unpacking.
This is perhaps a privilege thing. While I’m not happy about power bills climbing, I’m not horrified by it. I don’t live in a desert or generally worry about water availability. I do not have one being built next door or next to my child’s school. I am minimally impacted. I am also a technologist and am willing to have societal costs in pursuit of cool new shit. I naturally want to push back against NIMBYs and I think my Abundance proclivities are pretty obvious. And perhaps the last wrinkle is that I truly think AI is revolutionary.
All that said… there’s lots of pretty hairy shit going down with AI right now.
The Dispatch, a flagrantly conservative publication, is arguing for more government oversight on this stuff. They also had a detailed write-up on yet more places which are being impacted by what they called one of the largest infrastructure projects ever in America.
Utah just approved something that will consume more energy than the whole fucking state.
A Georgia utility found out that, oops, a datacenter had been stealing a shitload of water from them and didn’t even give them a fine.
In Lake Tahoe the consumers have to find some power from somewhere else because the datacenter is going to take all their energy.
In South Carolina the datacenter folks vastly underestimated how many natural gas generators and turbines they need.
These are just the links I’ve gotten in the past week. Like holy shit.
But at the same time my profession is fundamentally changing, especially in the past six months. Sean Goedecke has a good piece on exactly what is different now compared to a year ago for him.
There is a distinct tension here between technological progress, civic impact, and the levers that companies with lots of cash can pull on.
Who is right and who is the bad guy?
The most fun answer of all: maybe everybody! And it amused me that the answer of “everybody” can apply either to “who is right” or to “who is the bad guy.” Spouse and I were talking today about housing issues around the country. The constant churn between the YIMBYs and the NIMBYs. Growth requires change somewhere. The answer of “where” is what nobody can agree on. What fascinates me about the breadth of the datacenter conversation is that it highlights that nowhere is, apparently, a “good” place to put one.
The citizens:
“Growth is great, as long as it’s somewhere else.”
“I don’t want growth, the world should just stay the way it is.”
The investors and builders:
“We will build wherever we can even if it fucks over our neighbors.”
“We will devour natural resources because we can turn them into shareholder value.”
Ain’t nobody without sin. So it’s the most frustrating of conversations. I don’t have any answers. I don’t think anybody does, but sure as shit most people have opinions about who the bad guys are and…it’s whoever is on the other side.
Anyways, I don’t have a point here beyond recognizing the complexities here. Like everyone else, I am fearful of what the future holds with AI. Unlike many I am also excited for what the future holds with AI. It complicates my life but it also empowers me. I think it does the same for humanity as a whole and, overall, I like things that empower humanity, but it would be silly to not recognize that there is always a price to the empowerment.
Always.
