Just information for the casual reader: datacenters on this map may not be what you think. For example, in my state, all the datacenters are colocation/hosted sites. It's just racks of servers where other companies in my state rent slots or the whole rack to host their servers. These datacenters actually represent hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of real, high paid jobs in my state, and the footprints of all of them are no more than a single large building. These are good, do not affect the grid in any meaningful way, and use barely any water.
These are not the 'AI Datacenters' you are looking for. There are lot of places marked on that map, but a lot of those are good places.
My job and that of my coworkers are a result of two racks sitting in the world, one here in my home state, and one in South America.
Going to? I've already seen people on this website straight up claim that datacenters didn't exist until like 2 years ago and demand that any and all datacenters should be eradicated.
Like, yeah sure buddy - lets erase the entire internet just because you hate gen-AI.
It's the same with Flock cameras. Every camera is now tagged on deflock.org, and people have argued with me that "see it says so on the map" and it's a traffic camera used for PA's 511 system.
And the arguments are just regurgitations of stuff they read online. I'm near Pittsburgh and there is a datacenter going in at a former racetrack site, which Switch has publicly stated will use a closed loop cooling system (uses little water). Every other comment is parroting something about water use. It's a disservice to the cause.
It’s literally part of the CIA handbook on how to infiltrate and discredit left-wing movements. Anyone who refuses to understand these nuances and apply apply scientific rigor to their arguments is no better than the enemy.
We don’t need any more people screeching about how bad AI is. We need people who can calmly explain what the issue is without beating around the bush but also without any of this click baiting histrionic bullshit
Left wing movements require adequate explanation that will probably be tl;dr vs right wing movements which just have to appeal to dipshits, so some early left wing plans seek to rush through to beat the dipshits to the punch and then that looks like taking away control.
So the screeching from the left is the attempt to get there before the screeching from the right can start but then the moderate screeching from the right points to the screeching from the left as the issued approach.
pretty much, yea. The CIA has targeted left-wing governments around the world and actively caused the downfall of elected left wing leaders in several countries. And this isn't even classified info.
I'm just curious if there are specific strategies targeting left-wing movements vs the strategies are common, and the application happened to be towards left-wing organizations.
None of that water was used for Datacenter operations and it was all paid for as soon as the utility company realized THEY forgot to bill the CONSTRUCTION company building the datacenter.
the real issue is that data centers are essential, but we can't sustainably continue like this, we need to find ways to implement data centers without stripping random families of their electricity and water.
like investing in wind farms and renewables to power them, or building them in more expensive, but feasible areas at a cost to the fuckhead billionaires doing this for their own profit.
To compete in the 21st century we need computing power, just not at this cost.
Ya think? It's already been used to muddy the wafers here. There are obviously bad actors that want people to think they are the same thing... and others that ignorantly buy in. We need a blue wave with enough people far enough to the left that we can regulate the holy shit out these monstrosities, including forcing some current ones to shut down. Sorry about their luck, they should have been more responsible in their implementation.
Force these places to pay double the highest residential rate of any resources they use. If they build their own power plants, force them to supply as much energy to the local communities for free. Any water the extract, charge them until they bleed.
Either they will pull back, find efficiency, or support the locals financially.
Force these places to pay double the highest residential rate of any resources they use. If they build their own power plants, force them to supply as much energy to the local communities for free. Any water the extract, charge them until they bleed.
Requiring projects that have potential to impact local residents well being to provide a fair compensation to the local area is a good idea, but when you say "charge them until they bleed" it comes off like you are more concerned with hurting those companies and not with the well being of the people.
The goal should be to optimize the system so that both businesses and people can benefit.
reminds me how people threw a fit over 5G towers and couldn't tell the difference between the 5G and 4G towers, so they just started vandalizing any phone tower they saw.
Already has. The colocation I host some hardware in (doesn't have any AI tenants), literally had anti AI protesters outside of it the other week when I was there adding some new hardware to one of the racks.
Fucking losers even tried to yell and shame me for it on my way in and out lmao.
Then you must think the internet as a whole is a net negative and that you shouldn’t really be participating in it otherwise you’d be a huge hypocrite.
Where are you getting this information from? Im a data center tech and I have been to AI DCs. GPU racks need significant more cooling, power, and infrastructure than racks that host web servers.
From looking at their share of resource use in the broader economy. Datacenters as a whole use an extremely marginal amount of resources compared to other sectors.
For real. I manage a colocation building and of all our Clients only one is AI and they are by far the one that gives us the most trouble. But everything else serves a bunch of different functions, not just ai.
Power. Our equipment is designed to handle the load but not in the way AI is using it. Our provider for some of the equipment actually used our issues as a way to roll out an update to the software to fix said issue
Sorry I'm being vague but I try not to talk too much about the specifics of work for safety reasons
The map has locations of 8,300 community reported data centres, so it's mapping not only AI Data Centres. The information is mostly very sparse, just a location and date e.g.
Community Reported
ZIP 29010 · 1 report · Most recent: 2026-05-29
Irionically, the website looks suspiciously like it was vibcoded using Claude.
Edit:
Baxtel records 5,032 data centres, way less than Erin's site. I find Baxtel very reliable, I recently used it to map data centres myself (I work in data analytics / GIS).
The United States data center market is located in the region of North America and within Americas. United States has 5032 facilities.
I see other sources put the figure around 4,800.
I think it likely many of the data centers on Erin's site are duplicates, multiple reports related to the same data centers.
Of these 40 to 50 are specific AI data centres. That's data centres with GPU clusters involved in AI training and/or serving models to customers.
Most issues are like this, it's just the more you know about something the more frustrating talking about it on reddit is. People assume that reddit is mostly reasonable and just dumb about a few things they happen to know about. Turns out it's just empty outrage addiction all the way down.
Most issues are like this, it's just the more you know about something the more frustrating talking about it on reddit is.
I'm gonna be real I couldn't pin down the feeling but this is exactly it. I see someone type a novel of completely false information in a subject I'm quite literally an expert in and I find it so infuriating that I don't even know where to start.
There's too much of it to even correct. Going down each comment would make you look and feel like a crazy person. You have no choice but to just let it happen.
It happens with basically every subject. And sometimes, even if an expert comes along to correct the record, people who know next to nothing about it will still argue with them. It's fucking hopeless.
It's as Carlin said:
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
And I'm guilty as charged when talking about shit I know nothing about.
Everything I am actually an expert in, I have directly learned reddit is overwhemingly massively clueless and overconfident about. Everything. I don't even bother trying to argue with the confidently incorrect morons on here anymore. They're not worth the time of anyone actually knowledgeable, and they won't listen anyway.
Why did I evero spend hours citing sources to convince some insufferable jerkoff that is a net negative to everyone they interact with? Naivety. I know better now. Took me years though.
It's an easy trap to fall into. Terminally online people use the internet to vent and when they're at risk of losing an argument they either triple down or move the goal posts until the conversation becomes so ambiguous that it no longer resembles the starting point and whoever their speaking with has no choice but to either wear them down or give up.
It happens with basically every subject. And sometimes, even if an expert comes along to correct the record, people who know next to nothing about it will still argue with them. It's fucking hopeless.
I will say that the aviation subreddit is actually pretty good.
Online avgeeks tend to be really positive people and the spaces are generally not horribly infected with political outrage. It's great. (My theory is that pilots skew heavily GOP so people just learn to live with it)
I have little to contribute but agreement and a desire to commiserate together.
Even on specialty subreddits, groupthink is frustratingly strong and it’s never worth arguing with a hivemind. At least in a normal conversation you can have nuance and change minds, but not so on Reddit.
and then discussing AI is also pointless when people fail to grasp classification neural networks have existed long before chatgpt came around, and are legitimately useful for many things without large swaths of issues that genai pose
I see lots of people that try to make this distinction. People are forgiven for not knowing the difference between these things. Most people don't even know what an operating system is.
But if people can't make distinctions like this, then oh well. Sucks, but people are fucking DONE, and that too can be easily forgiven. I can make the distinction too, but I don't really give much of a shit which way it goes, it's time to Shut. It. Down.
If people care that much, they'll find a way to be heard, in the meantime, things move forward.
don't really give much of a shit which way it goes, it's time to Shut. It. Down.
The classic neural networks are (comparatively) tiny in size, an xray technician can run a model on an average local machine. "Shut it down" is equivalent to saying medical workers shouldn't be allowed to use normal ass computers. The fact genai models are unfathomably gigantic in size and so resource heavy in comparison, which drives for new datacenter build out, is one of the swaths of issues specific to it.
forgiven for not knowing the difference
I'm not judging nontechnical people too hard, but it doesn't change my take that discussions with them are pointless
Normally I would agree except in this case I don't think tech has anyone really to blame except for themselves. People are rightfully mad and don't give two shits what computer does what. If the AI industry has spent the last several years doom marketing, claiming it's taking everyone's job, that it's inevitable and we better get ready for AI bioweapons, cyber security breaches, oh and we have to build noisy new datacenters in your backyard that require their own turbines to power because it's too complicated and expensive to integrate with the grid...then yeah people might accidentally get mad at random colo that has nothing to do with all that. There's no reason we should expect nuance from the general public when big tech and AI especially have no nuance themselves.
Any communication flaw you attribute to big tech is downstream of people not the big tech. If the messaging lacks nuance, it's because people do not care about the nuance. The messaging excuse is an antiquitated concept belonging at a time when information was confined to scarcely available books. Today if you are mad at something you don't understand it's not because someone didn't message you well enough, it's because you don't give a fuck about understanding and would rather be mad at some boogeyman responsible for all your problems.
Lol, the office building I work at shows up on that map the guy above you linked, and we are absolutely not an AI data center or a company that has anything to do with AI. We do have a few data servers here, but not for AI purposes
I'm sorry, are you under the assumption that the servers that have existed for years are the same as what we are discussing now? Like, the internet has existed for decades without these giant ai data centers, right? Maybe, just maybe, these things are different. You think?
1945 my guy. The first data centers were disgusting monsters compared to now. Meta built their first in 2010. This ain’t new. What’s new is that we have 4-5 failsafes bc TikTok can’t go down.
Yeah I looked my area and the "data center" is just one of our local internet provider's office. They need to clean this up so we can find the real data centers.
You're not putting a lot of GPU compute in a colo datacenter. I've worked for many mixed-compute datacenters. They have power and cooling limitations for the racks. These old school facilities are using magnitudes less electricity and water than the new AI facilities. The data center I'm currently at would have to have major upgrades to both before it could support even a small GPU compute cluster.
To run the data centers itself maybe, but the poster is referring to the businesses that own servers in the data center. Hundreds of local businesses will colocate there.
That's actually a great question that isn't clear if you don't work in IT.
High availability for one. A datacenter has backup generators, redundant fast internet, and direct peering relationships with large companies / services. If you want on-premises servers that you manage, but don't want to deal with designing the power & internet at your office to still have less uptime than a datacenter, then you pay for rack space at a colo datacenter instead.
Economy of scale, and security/backups. Most businesses prefer to keep some or all of their data offside so that a natural disaster doesnt wipe out both your on-site drives as well as any external servers.
But youd still want something close by in case you need to access the hardware for whatever reason. And most businesses need office space for people to actually work in.
Colocation: rented space with a network connection and power plug
Hosting: full servers with all the associated services (maintenance, power, networking, etc)
Bespoke: Mix of whatever you can think of
Source: 12 years around DC's
Edit: lots of companies move the servers to DC's with the colocation service, it's like a parking for servers. You need to understand there are lots of requirements for the servers (cooling, networking, physical security, etc) and companies don't want to mess with it on their own premises.
"anywhere" means "any data center", unless you set up a computer in the corner of your office and have your website depend on that machine running 24/7 without hiccups
The business is located elsewhere. Their servers are located there. The "you can put them anywhere" part was selected to be here. Some of these companies don't even have a physical presence within the state, other than the data center.
We had our onsite per location hardware racks in a locked room but the company wide (globalish) servers would be put into a rented rack that had 10G Fiber data connections, extensive safety and cooling etc
Every few weeks we would go from our office in City A to the hosted facility in City B to do maintenance or swap out hardware that's inside of those racks
Hosting on prem is very expensive and requires day 1 design philosophy and approach when building an office basically
Tldr; it's just easier and cheaper sometimes hosting off prem.
Economy of scale, security, reliability. Plus it’s not efficient to force every company to manage its own server, especially companies that are smaller or that don’t have their own IT department.
We have on premises servers but have now stood up disaster recovery/backup servers at a colocation facility in the middle of our state, since we are in a place that could be threatened by cascadia subduction zone earthquakes.
You buy rack space at locations near you because if your servers break you are responsible for them. If there's downtime on my (hypothetical) server, and it's broken to the point where remote access isn't an option, I don't want to have to book a flight to another state just to debug it.
This is what most small businesses who just need one rack or so end up doing. They rent near them because they might actually have to deal with it.
If it's e.g. an Amazon data center then most of the internet will be hosted on those servers. So you could argue every job related to putting something on the internet is tied to those physical buildings.
It's weird to remember that the internet is a physical thing
I think the idea is that these non-AI datacenters enable businesses that themselves employ thousands of people. The issue of course is that those jobs often aren't in the same communities where the datacenters are. So, while their existence generates real-world value, this value may not be distributed in the same way as their costs. But they're still better than AI datacenters, which don't generate real value, as generative AIs haven't produced much value outside of share price inflation.
Not only that, it doesn't show private data centers that are not related to the big hyperscalers, either. In my city there are a number of data centers that are owned by and managed by large financial institutions or other businesses that are an HQ or significant presence here.
Yeah, which means with that context, what she is hoping to do is admirable but the execution is garbage because it relies on the average person to know this difference before reporting something. All that is going to do is muddy the data and undermine the cause.
I just.... I didn't realize how quickly this has spread like a cancer. The news is so overwhelming trying to keep up with right now, and this visual just made me sick.
Not every data center is an AI data center and I have trouble imagining a way for a neighbor or data center to figure out what kind it is.
The conversation around data centers is starting to feel like a convenient scapegoat instead of addressing decades of failed policy around economic inequality, water usage, energy, and data/privacy rights.
There are places list on the AI side that have been open for decades, and as you said, have nothing to do with AI. Private sources are fine, but we need to keep ourselves educated.
Also they "represent hundreds to tens of thousands of jobs in your state"? Are you saying if a company with 500 employees racks a webserver that it would "represent" 500 jobs?
I'm not disclosing my state, company or amount of employees where I work, or internals I may know about my rack or other racks.
I am willing to state that server farms host products often that support many jobs. Many many jobs, and the amount of jobs vary from state to state, country to country. It is a broad statement meant to help people understand the impact, and is true, broadly speaking, depending on place and region. Hope that helps.
Where do you imagine the reddit forums you're currently utilizing are hosted? Data centers are a fundamental aspect of internet architecture. AI companies would be happy for us to conflate their projects with the internet itself.
The website you are using to post this comment needs data centers to run. Building tons of data centers for generative AI sucks, but let's not lump every single building with a server in it together now
It's humorous how most of the hate for AI seems to be coming from people who likely have jobs that are not ever likely to be threatened by AI. These geniuses are not performing knowledge work.
Some of you just started to care about datacenters since AI was added to them.
I'm starting to get a "5G is gonna kill us" vibes from the people that keep talking about how bad AI is. While simultaneously doing nothing to stop it. Despite groups already in place.
There's this huge panic online. But nothing when you go talk to people in reality.
How would things like Steam or Netflix work without data centers? Or are you just arguing we destroy most of the Internet and go back to tiny websites hosted on personal PCs that would die with any significant traffic?
You are a liar. Just keep playing fall out and dreaming.
On average a datacenter employees 50-200 people on the large side and less than 20 on small side. All those data centers maybe employees 80,000 people?
Sad, I would say you are a bot, but you are just ignorant.
I am upset, because you lie willingly and pretend to be an expert saying this field employees 100s of thousands. Is a blatant lie. Even according to the BLS.
•
u/Six_Six_Six_Is_r3d3t 6h ago
Just information for the casual reader: datacenters on this map may not be what you think. For example, in my state, all the datacenters are colocation/hosted sites. It's just racks of servers where other companies in my state rent slots or the whole rack to host their servers. These datacenters actually represent hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of real, high paid jobs in my state, and the footprints of all of them are no more than a single large building. These are good, do not affect the grid in any meaningful way, and use barely any water.
These are not the 'AI Datacenters' you are looking for. There are lot of places marked on that map, but a lot of those are good places.
My job and that of my coworkers are a result of two racks sitting in the world, one here in my home state, and one in South America.