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Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.

Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.

What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?

Look to Australia if you want to see how these energy policies work out in the long run.

Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy.

They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled grid. All the economics pointing to renewables being the way forward were proven correct.

Everyone gets their back scratched. If you’re a consumer and you invested, you have a massively discounted personal power station that generates you money. If you operate the grid, your transmission costs and peak transmission costs went down. General consumer prices went down because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs. Everyone in won.

Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story. Don’t let rhetoric become your reality.

The overall American economy is going to pay the price in the long term. And current foreign policy is reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner, which will make things even worse.
The environment's already lost. We've passed the 1.5ºC deviation mark from the pre-industrial global average, and we're on track to hit 3ºC in a few more decades.

The excess deaths and human misery (both that which is increasingly clearly ongoing, and we have to look forward to) are going to be tragic.

This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms. It also made solar inverters illegal last week.
Modern data centers can be designed with near-zero direct water consumption. It isn’t fundamentally necessary to consume huge amounts of water to cool computers. What’s the story with those new data centers? Do they actually choose to do evaporative cooling that people are complaining about or people are complaining about problem that doesn’t exist?
A country is but the sum of its people - and this american people have gotten what they voted for.

Nice opportunity for the rest of the world, though.

Exactly, this is all a symptom of underinvestment in grid capacity, and datacenter companies having to cobble together whatever electricity source they could get their hands on at the last minute.

It's a complete failure of the state in having any kind of foresight.

China, in comparison, has around 2X excess electric production capacity in their grid. That's what made mining Bitcoin, and now ultra-cheap LLM inference, economically viable.

The sense of urgency is strange and feels extremely forced. There’s no way this is all so important that all other concerns automatically go out the window so projects can complete construction yesterday.

It really wouldn’t hurt if the developers involved tried even a little bit to be good neighbors and to select sites where they’re not going to be a nuisance and net negative to adjacent communities at minimum.

The blatantly extractive, externalizing mindset of this all reminds me of the attitude that mining companies have taken towards Appalachian states for over a century at this point.

> Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.

I don't understand what "despite this" is doing here. People have thoughts about what good/bad policy should be, independent of what good/bad policy should do all the time.

This is not an argument for or against data centers, but rather against populism. People have too many feeling about too many things, that should simply should not be decided by feel (and, sometimes, not enough about things that should).

Given local grassroots opposition, the data centers are starting to move into less regulated countries where I would gather building them raises the local standard of living, but presents the new challenge of finding people qualified to run them.
The entire planet will lose as ecosystems die out, food and water supplies run low, refugee crises and global conflicts ramp up.

But hey, line go up!

> Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy.

Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)

So even when xAI (which is now Tesla? Or SpaceX maybe?) was "operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen the air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country"[0] this didn't place them above this new Amazon not-even-built-yet data center? Are they competing who can destroy the earth the fastest or what's going on?

- [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-ov...

It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.

Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.

Pretty sure it’s “is”, they were operating gas turbines for power and continue to do so
All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.
It's possible to have more than one existential risk at a time. We even have a third, since nuclear war doesn't seem completely impossible these days. We probably shouldn't ignore any of them.
Mass extinction event already happened though. Most known species became extinct because of humans.
It is the paperclip AI scenario: The AI is cheating humans to produce only one thing - but in reality today, its not paperclibs, but datacenters as "the most important product": So the scenario still holds :-D
The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.
Note that this is about absolute pollution, not relative to power output. Pollution is high, because power output is high. Relatively, for what it's worth, it's just a fairly normal gas plant.

So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.

Luckily the Trump administration has just paid over a billion dollars for the second time to stop a renewable energy project...
Mostly because coal is more expensive and slower to build
On this map I can't see _any_ nuclear under construction in the US yet the rest of the world seems to be building many. When a man has a hammer everything is a gas turbine. GEV stock has treated me well but I'd much rather nuclear was winning.

It's a catch22 problem because nuclear is much slower to build than a data center so there is no demand from the data centers. And the nuclear plant doesn't know the demand will be there in 5 years once with gas soaking up demand. So the build it and they will come strategy is risky. Building infrastructure is like a muscle that gets stronger with repetitions. The cost will only come down once some are built but nobody wants to build at the current high prices. Govt help is needed to kick start it.

DOE is investing heavily in SMRs right now. There's 4 which have reached criticality so far. Chris Wright the DOE head is a o&g political appointee hack, but the career employees at DOE are working on pushing clean energy forward.

https://nric.inl.gov/news/

Forgot to post the link -> https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...
Most polluting power plant so far

This race to the bottom will have plenty more to give us in the coming years.

Aren't coal power plants waaaay more polluting than natural gas? Not just in terms of C02, but also really nasty stuff like particulates, sulphur, and metals?

It's very trendy right now to get mad at datacenters, but I'd much rather energy come from natural gas than from an existing coal power plant. (Obviously, renewables would be better than either.)

Who could have predicted that Microsoft building their own nuclear reactor would be the lesser evil.
Ok. A serious question. I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Then why are they using gas turbines? Is it because they can generate more power with a smaller real estate footprint?
A recent discussion

The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686

Zero data on Greenhouse gas CO2-equivalent per kWh. A combined-cycle gas power plant is going to have lower impact per kWh than the 200+ coal plants in the US.
A lot of new data centres have been announced in Alberta, Canada. Which is a weird location given that Alberta has a derelict power grid that can barely serve the current load, and runs almost entirely on fossil fuels.

Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.

https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/alberta-approved-a-932-me...

They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...

We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.

7 GW! All California load is 35GW right now.
I am sure if these guys worked on it they could have better PR. It is like AI is the modern version of the oil industry.
really time for these companies to have to switch to options like Nuclear SMR from providers like Rolls Royce who already have the megawatt solutions ready in the market, which don't release giant volumes of CO2 which we cannot afford.
Finally, a structure worthy of its namesake.
Divest all your stocks from all this AI data-center race bullshit, invest into renewable projects. Worst case, the orange buffoon will bail you out with taxpayer money to prevent the US grid from being too clean or something. Only money talks in the US.
1786171869 | Amazon behind private gas plant for new data centers | https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/amazon-behind-mass... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219445

1786121329 | Scoop: Amazon Is Behind One of the Largest Planned Gas Power Plants in the US | https://www.distilled.earth/p/scoop-amazon-is-behind-one-of-...

1786014051 | AWS eyes potential data center development at 4.5GW natural gas plant in Pennsylvania | https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-eyes-potentia...

1786181141 | 'Better ways to use gas': Amazon finances massive US plant for data centres | https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...

1786202472 | Amazon plans massive Texas AI campus and an enormous gas power plant | https://www.chron.com/news/article/amazon-texas-data-center-...

1784098800 | Amazon to install hundreds of gas-fired generators at Bucks County data center site | https://whyy.org/articles/amazon-data-center-bucks-county-pa...

1786140583 | Amazon Is Building America's Biggest Fossil Fuel Plant to Power AI | https://heatmap.news/energy/amazon-gw-ranch

1786173935 | Amazon Backs 7.65-GW Gas Plant in Texas to Power New AI Data Center Campus | https://constructionreviewonline.com/amazon-backs-7-65-gw-ga...

1786131006 | Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Entire Country | https://newrepublic.com/post/214111/amazon-data-center-bigge...

1784358000 | Pennsylvania set to approve 283 new generators at Amazon data center despite objections | https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/amazon-data-center-bu...

1780556400 | What the rise of natural gas-powered data centers means for emission-reduction pledges | https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2026/06/04/data-centers-a...

Now no one talks about global warming and climate change.
If we reach AGI at some point, it will wonder why we are so dumb
Downvote me all you want. China is doing something right. Nuclear, renewables, whatever the mix, they're not parking gas turbines next to a data center and calling it a power strategy. That US tech companies reached for that first tells you everything. Speed over consequences, every time. And shut up about that China still fires a lot of coal. They are phasing it out... the right way.
Bitcoin received a lot of backslash due to its power usage and ecological footprint. It's obvious that HN users don't have the same criticisms towards AI data centers. Maybe someone with a short position will coordinate that communication soon..
You know, we don't actually have to do this. The people could block the gates and prevent the delivery of the turbines. The local fire department could fail their inspection and prevent the gas from being turned on. The UPS could "mysteriously" go up in smoke during it's commissioning.

None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.