Something I havent heard alot of people talk about is meat. I dont think you can be against data centers, but also buy cheap meat. I understand food != compute, and thats a fact. BUT the same people who are protesting against AI data centers are the same people who fly every year, eat steak in every other dinner, and generally indulge in activities that are bad for the planet (and theres no acknowledgement).
I'm dismayed by the current political discourse on this topic. Seems like the two camps are 1) let mega corps build data centers with impunity or 2) use NIMBY tactics to oppose them in all cases.
I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protections in place to limit impacts on aquifers and other water sources.
Democracy isn't to blame, capitalism is. The mega corps have every incentive to dodge the costs of their negative externalities and they have them money to lobby for that. The "reasonable" citizen supporting growth with caveats will be drowned out by the mega corp and their mega wallets. The loud NIMBYs are the only group that have any chance of stopping the negative externalities which they achieve by blocking the growth. Your enemy isn't the NIMBY, it is the mega corp, the NIMBY is your ally, they are the backstop.
I am pro-AI datacenters. I just think they should all be built in Atherton, California and the Hamptons, with the stipulation they're only allowed to be built adjacent to the most expensive residential property in the area.
Seriously, it can't be that hard to build a datacenter and not piss people off. The economics demanded scale so fast that the capitalists don't care enough to thoughtfully plan this stuff out.
There’s the pro-growth Abundance faction, but they’re captured by special interests, so they’re predictably advocating for supply-side YIMBYism and relaxed regulation, without addressing the political economy that led us to the current situation.
One of the camps has all the money, hold all the power, and does indeed behave with impunity. The other camp has no power, has no way to affect anything, holds no political relevance, and NIMBY tactics is one of very few ways they can even hope to have at least some tiny chance of a minor change in their favor.
I think it does the discourse a disservice to take these two as equal.
> For longer queries or requests that rely on AI agents or reasoning, the footprint is higher. Epoch AI estimated that a long query (7,500 words of input) could consume about 2.5 Wh, and a very long one (75,000 words) could consume 40 Wh. Those are far higher than the simple text query.
One thing that's missing from almost all of these energy estimates is the impact of "agentic" queries, which were rare a year ago and increasingly common today.
I've asked questions of GPT-5.6 Pro that take 19 minutes to return an answer, as the model runs hundreds of search and site navigation tool calls (and a bit of executed Python code too) trying to get to a credible answer.
I'm confident that 19 minutes involves a lot more than 75,000 words worth of tokens.
With coding agents we can at least get an accurate token count. I'm already at 204,000 tokens of GPT-5.6 Sol today and I haven't started work yet.
I ran a couple of prompts to reverse-engineer my ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/*/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4" file - Codex figured out how to lz4 decompress the file, then I had it interpret some base64 encoded binary data in the JSON, that session is here: https://gisthost.github.io/?986cb066dd8502cf0200a5cc6fdeb4c6
So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.
If it was 2% for VOD streaming, and 3% for every other service that is delivered by a networked computer, I would think "wow, streaming is huge". 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all, versus 3% for everything else on the computer, is still a remarkable statistic. I'm not making any value judgment in order to say that.
I also don't think it's particularly conclusive about anything though. It doesn't on its face make me think anything like "it must be stopped", but it's remarkable.
Speak for yourself. For "most people", "streaming" is basically TV for them, and the average american watches 2.6 hours per day[1]. It's probably safe to say that at least half of that is "streaming" of some sort, even more if you include other types of "streaming" like music streaming. Moreover nowadays even if they're not plopped in front of a TV, they're watching short form videos.
Every company is using it? The deli and the laundromat too? Every consumer? Maybe transitively because they use Google or what have you, but most people I know still don't really know what AI is, never mind have a puritan revulsion over using it (some people are quite performative about this on here), but they just don't use it themselves, except transitively on occasion.
The author claims it's surprising that AI uses less electricity than the rest of data centers. Why?? Data centers do a million different things other than AI
It's surprising because that's all anyone hears about right now.
Many are surprised to learn that data centers use much less water than golf courses or pools. We hear about it so much in the news it sounds like it's the overwhelming largest consumption problem around.
If they use so little water and power, why aren't they being built in the empty office buildings? Seems like commercial real estate was made for ... commercial activity.
Nobody is saying that they use "so little water and power", just that the average person has no clue about the orders of magnitude at which anything outside of a private household uses these things, including things they previously didn't really have a problem with (like golf courses or almond farms)
Most people just hear <gigantic number of m³ or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"
Water usage for a data center is nowhere near any agricultural use (which is subsidized in California so they aren’t incentivized to change much). Data centers don’t need water at all. It’s just the municipality offering cheaper way to cool by offering water cheaper than power for cooling.
Traditionally they have been. Several data centres in London are colocated in office buildings for example. I used to manage servers in one that most tenants wouldn't even have known about.
AI focused data centres also could, but require a higher amount of power and cooling per rack, so it's less practical. The point is not that they don't use more than a typical office, but that they don't use the world-ending amounts people assume they use.
The operators should still be made to pay for the externalities, and regulated to ensure they don't make life miserable for people around them.
But that doesn't mean we need to stop building them.
This makes no sense? How is one even correlated with the other? Data centers obviously have much different requirements than office buildings for people. On a very small scale this works but not on a larger scale.
The data centers in L.A. are in old bank buildings. I used to locate my servers at One Wilshire.
Water is too expensive and wasteful to just run through pipes and send out to the ocean just for cooling. Power though… the reason bank buildings are loved for data centers is that they are on two power lines so if one goes out the other is available.
I think its easy to forget how much energy is required to boil a liter of water, and these charts are a great reminder of the mundane things like that which escape our attention.
We all just look at energy as a price. I think more people are concerned if our prices will go up, not how much energy it uses. The bigger question is water.
How much water do they use? Is it potable to begin with? Is it usable after? Will they drive prices up. These are one time builds with minimal jobs created after for a tech that could end my career. If I lose my job, I don’t also want to have no water and higher bills.
The talk about AI water usage exists because in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, she got water usage wrong by three orders of magnitude.[1] For data centers that use water cooling, it's almost always non-potable water, and it's usually returned to the body of water it was pumped out of (though slightly warmer).
If you're worried about water consumption, things like golf courses and farm subsidies for water-intensive crops are much bigger issues.
I presume running an electric shower includes heating up the water? Otherwise I don't understand how it could be so energy intensive. The energy is the mgh of the water lifted, plus the heat you put into it. Heat tends to be by far bigger in that calculation unless I've missed something.
Our World in Data is great, but this article would've been improved if it offered a chart that offered a comparison to it's leading "1.5% of global electricity number".
For example: 7% to 10% of all global electricity is consumed by air conditioning. It's not hard to think of relatively small interventions that could save 1.5% of global energy use annually.
Increasing global electricity production by 1.5% (or 500 terawatt-hours) would also be a solution. Production from solar power increased by 600TWh from 2024-2025 and its rate of adoption is increasing as costs go down, so this doesn't seem like a problem worth worrying about.
I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protections in place to limit impacts on aquifers and other water sources.
Democracies don't handle nuance well.
Especially when modern discourse revolves around 140-character hot takes.
I think it does the discourse a disservice to take these two as equal.
One thing that's missing from almost all of these energy estimates is the impact of "agentic" queries, which were rare a year ago and increasingly common today.
I've asked questions of GPT-5.6 Pro that take 19 minutes to return an answer, as the model runs hundreds of search and site navigation tool calls (and a bit of executed Python code too) trying to get to a credible answer.
I'm confident that 19 minutes involves a lot more than 75,000 words worth of tokens.
With coding agents we can at least get an accurate token count. I'm already at 204,000 tokens of GPT-5.6 Sol today and I haven't started work yet.
* 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.*
I think it’s massive.
So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.
I also don't think it's particularly conclusive about anything though. It doesn't on its face make me think anything like "it must be stopped", but it's remarkable.
Speak for yourself. For "most people", "streaming" is basically TV for them, and the average american watches 2.6 hours per day[1]. It's probably safe to say that at least half of that is "streaming" of some sort, even more if you include other types of "streaming" like music streaming. Moreover nowadays even if they're not plopped in front of a TV, they're watching short form videos.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
AI is hardly used at all? Basically every company and consumer in the country is using it, transitively if not directly.
How did you read that in my comment?
Many are surprised to learn that data centers use much less water than golf courses or pools. We hear about it so much in the news it sounds like it's the overwhelming largest consumption problem around.
Most people just hear <gigantic number of m³ or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"
AI focused data centres also could, but require a higher amount of power and cooling per rack, so it's less practical. The point is not that they don't use more than a typical office, but that they don't use the world-ending amounts people assume they use.
The operators should still be made to pay for the externalities, and regulated to ensure they don't make life miserable for people around them.
But that doesn't mean we need to stop building them.
Water is too expensive and wasteful to just run through pipes and send out to the ocean just for cooling. Power though… the reason bank buildings are loved for data centers is that they are on two power lines so if one goes out the other is available.
How much water do they use? Is it potable to begin with? Is it usable after? Will they drive prices up. These are one time builds with minimal jobs created after for a tech that could end my career. If I lose my job, I don’t also want to have no water and higher bills.
If you're worried about water consumption, things like golf courses and farm subsidies for water-intensive crops are much bigger issues.
1. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
Our World in Data is based in the UK. Electric showers like this one https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-shower... are more common there than they are in the US.
For example: 7% to 10% of all global electricity is consumed by air conditioning. It's not hard to think of relatively small interventions that could save 1.5% of global energy use annually.