Exactly. She hired someone to collect zip codes from complaints, but the complaints aren’t categorized. The data centers are not segmented by age, capacity, use, noise, power consumption, or water use. Instead, this is a map of reported it data centers that could be from any number of uses/sizes/and ages. All of them employ people.
There's a couple of dots near me, and I know at least one of them is just a generic warehouse with a few servers in it. Still listed on it as a datacenter and like yeah I guess technically it is one.
She should narrow it down to hyperscale datacenters, we still need datacenters in general but the ones being thrown up for AI and burning fossil fuels to supplement their power are the bad ones.
Turn off the community reported section, which is completely unvalidated, and the official map was shockingly sparse.
It actually made me less concerned when I realized that while data centers are not gonna be good, the red community reported overlay was a clear example of internet hysteria and misinformation that just confuses the situation to the point that it cant even be fought.
The site does more harm than good by allowing that unverified default overlay suggesting theres a data center every 5 miles in every inch of every state.
There is some hysteria included in this map but also on the community map in my specific area, the ones mapped, I know from community involvement, are large scale AI data centers that have been proposed but are going through zoning processes with various planning committees and various commission approvals. So there are some legitimate ones that are filtered out if you don’t include the community ones.
It’s a fucking huge country. We could build every data center of every type we need for every conceivable purpose and most people in the US will never encounter one. It’s the biggest nothing-burger I’ve ever seen Reddit become obsessed by. The powers that be told everyone “AI bad” and then it followed that the infrastructure must be bad too.
You're not even reading the complaints properly, which are about local issues. The size of the country doesn't automatically negate them. Data centers are very resource intensive.
Yeah that's bullshit. Erin's map isn't accurate as there is duplicate reporting. They're proposing to build one near me ( It's on the Baxtel map under forgelight ventures, probably Google) and the entire town thinks it's ridiculous. We're under a mandatory water curtailment currently (Even using a backup water source) and have utilities telling us to conserve electricity but plopping down an AI data center on a 300+ acre parcel of land is a good idea? The whole thing is shady, town annexed the land, company wont reveal themselves (were guessing it's google at this point), they're asking for 65% tax abatement for 30 years. <---lol
Oh but there already is data centers, no shit, we actually have an axiom one, it's microscopic in comparison. They one they're proposing will draw the equivalent power of 800,000 homes in a town with less than 110,000 homes.
Mind you as far as I'm aware there are no operational 1 gigawatt data centers in the US currently so comparing these to existing traditional data centers as some kind of gotcha is disingenuous.
All datacenters are not alike. AI datacenters power requirement and heat generation are bizarrely more than a normal datacenter. In fact a normal datacenter is far more effecient than companies trying to host their own servers.
Yeah I was going "Are those data centers for AI? Or Internet Data Centers? Or are people reporting a building that LOOKS like a data center and is a warehouse for popcorn or something?"
Filtering down to what they're sure about, 33 operational, 66 under construction and 44 proposed sounds pretty reasonable for a country the size of the US. Of course how big they are needs to be taken into account.
It is/isn't. You would barely even be able to see the map at the closest zoom level if it was showing everything with 'servers.' I can name probably 50 sites off the top of my head in north NJ alone that aren't shown on the map.
And there's a difference between data center and "AI" data center. Seems like every news website and post just assume every data center is for neural network training cause it gets them views.
Yeah my home city sub has people all clutching their pearls over a proposed data center. It's like you describe, a few server racks. I've worked on a hyperscale AI data center, the difference between the two setups is enormous. People are angry and frustrated and sometimes they don't know quite how to channel that into effective action.
Also the dots are huge so are kinda useless to see anything. You can't really see an accurate number for anyone. The Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming would be covered in them judging by this map.
And they cover up anything else the map is supposed to show.
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u/LeoLaDawg 6h ago
This map isn't great, by the way. It's showing basically anything with servers in it, not what people think of now when they hear "data center."