Turns out people aren’t thrilled about paying higher electricity bills so billionaires can build enormous server farms next door. The industry spent years calling every objection irrational fear of progress. Apparently voters have discovered a more effective feedback form: the ballot.
The noise too, don’t forget about the low frequency hums they emit.
Remember, it’s not just about land or resource use. It’s also about what all that compute is being used for.
Would be better if they had to pay a ongoing payment to everyone in earshot as a repreation for the noise and the people can vote on its rate. Also they should have to pay residential rates for energy use, no deals. And the utility company must publish the useage and how much the payments were.
Why make it cheap and easy, it should be expansive and hard to do.
Haven’t they just been paying people to move instead?
Illegally stealing water from aquifers, illegally discharging waste, increase pollution, hasten climate change, raising the temperature in the surrounding countryside by several degrees, corrupting local and state politics, not paying taxes, literally stealing every piece of knowledge, art and literature ever made by the entirety of mankind, all so that they can get rid of jobs, hallucinate answers and enable technofascist billionaires.
I’d hope they aren’t thrilled at accelerated climate extinction and the lack of potable water.
Harwood, North Dakota
But it was a “no” vote, for adding existing review steps. Having seen our ballot initiatives I really wonder if they thought they were voting no to the data center. Perhaps Trump’s DOJ should investigate “voter confusion” here.
I can recall when AI was first building momentum around 2022/2023 and a comparison was drawn with Bitcoin for power usage. Gemini alone used more power than all the Bitcoin mining combined. Mind you, Gemini was still pretty early on then, so imagine the escalation now!
Yet… “The grid can’t sustain electric vehicles”…
It wouldn’t need ai bass I’d it wasn’t this inflated race against “best”, and actual research was done, small enough scale that the race was for the most efficient model without the needs to destroy the compute market, water supplies, GPUs/gaming, ecosystems from clearing land, and running turbine jet engines 24/7 (39 of them for xAI) to generate power.
We’re backwards! It used to be everything was built to be extremely efficient with what little resources were available. We built awesome computers in the 90s and early 00s for what they were.
The lone exception to the 41 ballot measures came from Harwood, North Dakota, where citizens voted “no” to adding an additional review stage to data center zoning procedures.
I’m curious if Utah voted in a ban or moratorium on that Elder Box County hyper scale data center.
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But what about cute guys?
