> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever.
'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'
'Minor source.'
I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those terms forever. It will take significant work to not refer to these as 'minor sources' when debating if they are a minor source.
FTA: 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'
From the researcher: 'We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date.' [0]
Still enormous, but there is a significant difference between being 'THE X of all time, and being 'among the X of all time'.
Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
> Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
I just love the irony of being absurdly callous and dismissive of human life while also getting the basic math wrong.
Nevermind that the 100,000 figure is across the nation of 300 million and includes things like automotive exhaust, while the other number is likely to be borne by that one specific community. Indeed, if you look at the study[0] your article cites -- which is looking at what we should be working on reducing -- industrial deaths are under 30,000, and electrical are around 10,000. So below half of your figure.
Health costs don't matter, because someone else is paying them. We handwave them with "well only 3-4 additional people die after paying that cost.
The air pollution does not matter, because global warming already exists and air is already polluted. And making all that worst also does not matter, because who cares about anything but what AI companies want.
> Based on Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ) air permit
No. 74242, the facility is authorized to operate eight natural-gas simple-cycle turbines and more than fifty diesel generators, including emergency and black-start units
It seems like there will be a collapse in building data centers, to the point that a large amount of the newly built ones will be reclaimed for other things. There is a very large group of people who are against building new data centers because they hate AI (and any pollution related arguments these people make are in support of their primary concern, being AI). But on the flip side of that, even people that I know that go out of their way to use AI, mostly seem interested in building their own AI rigs and running everything locally. I know that's what I do; I almost never use any hosted AI services these days, but I'm using more tokens than ever. The demand for data centers from people who actually like AI even seems to be plummeting.
We're already at the point where a few months worth of an SMB's token usage from the SaaS LLM providers costs is equivalent to the cost of installing on-prem infrastructure capable of running cutting-edge open-weight models at scale. At my company, we recently installed a server with an array of Gaudi 2 cards on our server rack, and have set up an Open WebUI frontend to expose an LLM connected to all of our internal resources to our staff. The total cost was about $20k, which we'd easily eat up with six months worth of equivalent Claude usage.
We'd originally set this up to be able to locally run larger models, in the 300-400 billion parameter range, but the rate of improvement of open-weight models has been so fast that, coupled with extensive custom skill creation, we're now getting similar results out of Qwen3.8 27B to we were getting out of Qwen 3.5 297B when we started out with the project, which frees enough memory allows 20-25 users to have 256K context concurrently. Both the hardware, the software, and the models are improving at an accelerating rate.
Investing in data centers to support SaaS LLM providers today feels a bit like investing in mainframes and minicomputers in the late '70s, with a massive paradigm shift lurking right around hte corner.
Actually, it's probably already closer to the early '80s, given that purpose-built local AI workstations are already available at price points lower than the inflation-adjusted initial price of the original IBM PC.
While I cautiously circle the AI programming concept, one thing close to my mind has definitely been whether the ultimately cloud-tied nature of it is what makes me much more stand offish to it.
I am GPU poor and have a piece of crap rx570 8GB but still get ok performance out of qwen3.5-9B-4bit and various fine tuned versions. Plan on finally buying a decent gpu like a amd 7900 xtx. I still use claude for coding primarily but do research locally. What everyone has said about qwen3.8 though is making me feel I really need to invest in a decent rig.
Many data centers will move north into the Nordic countries where the climate is colder and there is a lot of hydroelectric and wind power. Canada and the Nordic countries will end up building a lot of data centers in remote areas where they are less visible.
At the same time, the more the US government acts to support data centers, the greater the reaction will be against them. It is the classic situation where the more the government does, the less people will like it.
There isn’t much the federal government can do here. Planning permission is very local in the US. If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening.
In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.
No? This isn't a planning permission question, the federal government has eminent domain and can simply take land for federal use. Just like with the railroads and power grid.
Of course building datacenters is absolutely not what eminent domain is for, but rules don't apply anymore, so they'll probably do it anyway until the supreme court stops them.
Well the reason data center stuff is news is that local boards are resisting all the usual efforts. It’s been quite extraordinary, but town after town is sending the data center folks packing.
What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere.
Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.
They can, surely, but I presume that in some cases there's a lack of preexisting regulation on land use and on others politicians are not properly representing the interests of their constituency.
It’s funny as Greg Abbott says the data center industry did this to themselves and people’s complaints are justified; the feds say it’s “paid protestors”, the same way they say any protests are inorganic paid leftist agitators. Meanwhile “real” American patriots know data centers make America great, and can’t wait to have one built down the road.
I'm sure the luddites got all their ideas from TikTok aye?
At least were not at this point yet:
"Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the Luddites were suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites."
Why? The hacker ethos is all about understanding systems as they actually are; not as the people at the top want them to be. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the Luddites were right; the industrialization of weaving did destroy their profession, and, contrary to the opinions of the political leaders, this had a direct, negative impact on society for many decades. The curious-minded hacker should not ignore that reality, even if they think the circumstances are different this time.
What part confuses you? The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply? The water, light and noise pollution? The threat to jobs? The threat to truth and transparency? The threat to privacy?
> The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply
The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations. The idea that we will from here on just have degrown and decline is insane. I'm not up for that. Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
As for water supply. Data centers barely make a blip on the water usage.
> The water, light and noise pollution?
The only one of these which actually has any validity is noise pollution, and the US has one of the lowest population densities of any country in the world, and data centres don't need to be close to population centres.
> The threat to jobs?
CEOs saying they are laying people off because of AI is not the same as anyone losing their job because of AI, but even if that was the case, it's about as smart as not using an electric drill to save jobs.
> The threat to truth and transparency?
AI does not only not threaten truth and transparency, it makes it easier to find the truth and to circumvent transperency restrictions.
> The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations
That is straight up not true. Theres currently a threat due to the imprudently started war in the Middle East, there will be more once rivers start drying up and hydropower becomes unreliable or nuclear power plants can no longer be cooled.
> Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
This is an ideological dogma smuggled in as a self-evident truth. Please do make a point, not just an unsupported declaration.
> That is straight up not true. Theres currently a threat due to the imprudently started war in the Middle East
The US does not use crude oil from the Gulf to generate electricity. The US could scale electricity production at least 100 times without needing to import anything from the Middle East.
> there will be more once rivers start drying up
Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.
> The US does not use crude oil from the Gulf to generate electricity.
And yet, reserves are at historic lows. Markets are weird, huh?
> Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.
That wasn't the claim made, rivers will be drying up because of climate change (they are already!), which is a threat to energy supply. Data centers will accelerate said climate change, but that's not even relevant to disprove your previous assertion of regulation being the only factor.
I'll also note you still haven't justified your core ideological assertion you tried smuggling in earlier in any way.
are you confident the demand for massive ai datacenters peppered everywhere isn't just some financial gambit? wouldn't you ask for consequences and side-effects that are socially desirable, even if the facility brings no wealth to the immediate area (either as a consequence of being owned by a remote corp, or by the investment failing completely).
You’re going to get modded down but you’re right. Go look at these sites in Google Maps compared to datacenter sites that already exist and have existed for a decade.
Why would people possibly not want something that uses up water in times of constant draught, uses up energy in an energy crisis and pollutes the air and contributes to climate change in times of climate catastrophe, all so a few already way-too-rich dudes can become even richer?
It just doesn't make sense! Surely they were manipulated to hate progress!
'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'
'Minor source.'
I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those terms forever. It will take significant work to not refer to these as 'minor sources' when debating if they are a minor source.
From the researcher: 'We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date.' [0]
Still enormous, but there is a significant difference between being 'THE X of all time, and being 'among the X of all time'.
Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
[0]: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/analyzing-air-pollution-health...
[1]: https://www.pecva.org/wp-content/uploads/Health-Impacts-Vant...
[2]: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/identifying-sources...
I just love the irony of being absurdly callous and dismissive of human life while also getting the basic math wrong.
Nevermind that the 100,000 figure is across the nation of 300 million and includes things like automotive exhaust, while the other number is likely to be borne by that one specific community. Indeed, if you look at the study[0] your article cites -- which is looking at what we should be working on reducing -- industrial deaths are under 30,000, and electrical are around 10,000. So below half of your figure.
[0]: https://pubs.acs.org/estlcu/article/7/9/639/504911/Reducing-...
“It’s not that bad, just a little bad, so it’s okay”
We’re talking about air pollution and death rates, not financial risk.
The air pollution does not matter, because global warming already exists and air is already polluted. And making all that worst also does not matter, because who cares about anything but what AI companies want.
> Based on Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ) air permit No. 74242, the facility is authorized to operate eight natural-gas simple-cycle turbines and more than fifty diesel generators, including emergency and black-start units
We'd originally set this up to be able to locally run larger models, in the 300-400 billion parameter range, but the rate of improvement of open-weight models has been so fast that, coupled with extensive custom skill creation, we're now getting similar results out of Qwen3.8 27B to we were getting out of Qwen 3.5 297B when we started out with the project, which frees enough memory allows 20-25 users to have 256K context concurrently. Both the hardware, the software, and the models are improving at an accelerating rate.
Investing in data centers to support SaaS LLM providers today feels a bit like investing in mainframes and minicomputers in the late '70s, with a massive paradigm shift lurking right around hte corner.
Actually, it's probably already closer to the early '80s, given that purpose-built local AI workstations are already available at price points lower than the inflation-adjusted initial price of the original IBM PC.
And even if you do inference at home you are not training the models. Moreover, most people certainly are not doing inference locally.
While I cautiously circle the AI programming concept, one thing close to my mind has definitely been whether the ultimately cloud-tied nature of it is what makes me much more stand offish to it.
I also use pi.dev as my agent harness.
At the same time, the more the US government acts to support data centers, the greater the reaction will be against them. It is the classic situation where the more the government does, the less people will like it.
In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.
https://ferc.gov/
Of course building datacenters is absolutely not what eminent domain is for, but rules don't apply anymore, so they'll probably do it anyway until the supreme court stops them.
Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.
At least were not at this point yet:
"Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the Luddites were suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites
The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations. The idea that we will from here on just have degrown and decline is insane. I'm not up for that. Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
As for water supply. Data centers barely make a blip on the water usage.
> The water, light and noise pollution?
The only one of these which actually has any validity is noise pollution, and the US has one of the lowest population densities of any country in the world, and data centres don't need to be close to population centres.
> The threat to jobs?
CEOs saying they are laying people off because of AI is not the same as anyone losing their job because of AI, but even if that was the case, it's about as smart as not using an electric drill to save jobs.
> The threat to truth and transparency?
AI does not only not threaten truth and transparency, it makes it easier to find the truth and to circumvent transperency restrictions.
> The threat to privacy?
It's not.
That is straight up not true. Theres currently a threat due to the imprudently started war in the Middle East, there will be more once rivers start drying up and hydropower becomes unreliable or nuclear power plants can no longer be cooled.
> Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
This is an ideological dogma smuggled in as a self-evident truth. Please do make a point, not just an unsupported declaration.
The US does not use crude oil from the Gulf to generate electricity. The US could scale electricity production at least 100 times without needing to import anything from the Middle East.
> there will be more once rivers start drying up
Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.
And yet, reserves are at historic lows. Markets are weird, huh?
> Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.
That wasn't the claim made, rivers will be drying up because of climate change (they are already!), which is a threat to energy supply. Data centers will accelerate said climate change, but that's not even relevant to disprove your previous assertion of regulation being the only factor.
I'll also note you still haven't justified your core ideological assertion you tried smuggling in earlier in any way.
yes.
It just doesn't make sense! Surely they were manipulated to hate progress!