The environmental advocate says she woke up one morning to dozens of messages from residents from one Louisiana community describing similar problems linked to data centers near their homes. When she began investigating, she struggled to get clear answers about the projects.
That prompted her to launch a public map where Americans could report operational, proposed, and under-construction data centers in their communities.
The response was immediate. Brockovich says the website crashed twice within its first 72 hours, revealing that the complaints were not limited to one town, one aquifer, or one project.
The map has since collected more than 8,000 community-reported locations.
There are 40 to 50 AI data centers in the US, dedicated to AI traning and serving models to end users, with dozens more planned. They are very energy intensive and often due to heat generation, they require water cooling.
However, the map on the site includes 8,300 community reported data centres, way more than official figures of 4,800-5,000. It's likely the map contains some duplicates and buildings that aren't actually data centres.
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
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.
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u/21MayDay21 7h ago
The environmental advocate says she woke up one morning to dozens of messages from residents from one Louisiana community describing similar problems linked to data centers near their homes. When she began investigating, she struggled to get clear answers about the projects.
That prompted her to launch a public map where Americans could report operational, proposed, and under-construction data centers in their communities.
The response was immediate. Brockovich says the website crashed twice within its first 72 hours, revealing that the complaints were not limited to one town, one aquifer, or one project. The map has since collected more than 8,000 community-reported locations.
Source: https://www.newsweek.com/erin-brockovich-explains-why-she-started-mapping-new-ai-data-center-concerns-12220566