Those data centers use more power than a medium size city and city scale amounts of water. No. Just no.
But they don’t have to be water-cooled.
They don’t have to exist.
Until some regulation is passed and enforced that they have to be closed loop, it’s cheaper for them to fuck up the local ecosystem by using evaporative cooling or local water sources as a heat sink.
Not true. My company only builds closed loop.
Where does the heat go in your systems?
Who cares? They still use the energy of a large city, all for profiting a handful of billionaire/trillionaire oligarchs.
The “Bill Cosby didn’t do anything to me” of Big Tech defense
They also don’t have to exist
Neither do airplanes.
Whataboutism fallacy.
We agree data centers don’t have to exist
AFAIK most water gets used in construction, and constructing city-sized facilities uses a LOT of resources. Now guess which side gets favored if there’s a resource conflict between a datacenter and the local population.
It’s not NIMBY if you don’t want new datacenters elsewhere, either.
“Yeah, that’s right. I’m a NOOP!”
Not On Our Planet
In 2025, about 48 datacenter projects worth an estimated $156bn were blocked or stalled by local opposition.
By the way, i believe these numbers to be completely useless.
Say a company wants to build a datacenter at location A, but it gets blocked. So it goes to B, but it also gets blocked. Finally it builds the same datacenter at location C. Now, two datacenters got blocked, but the amount of datacenters that ended up being built is still the same.
The article is partially a response to this article from jacobin which makes some good points, chief of which the author doesn’t really address in that they’ll just be built somewhere else. There will always be some city or state or country that will allow them being built and this sort of NIMBY activism only really protects the better off people who have the free time to attend city hall meetings.
Also the author seems to equate the means with the end. The jacobin article is criticizing the end goal being a blanket moratorium instead of regulation targeting the harms. It doesn’t say anything about the means, but the author of this one equates there criticism of the movements aims to be an elitist criticism of the grassroots organizing of the movement, which I assume the jacobin author would be more then fine with as long as it’s directed towards reasonable goals.
You can’t use “it isn’t ____, it’s ____” anymore! That’s LLM talk!
I get the frustration — AI-generated texts are pervasive, they’re everywhere these days. 🤦♂️
Here are three ways to phrase this in a way that does not scream LLM. 👍
1 …
