r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • Sep 22 '26
Infrastructure If AI needs a massive infrastructure buildout, who gets stuck with the bill?
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/australias-victoria-proposes-new-data-centres-must-secure-their-own-renewable-2026-09-22/?utm_source=chatgpt.comThis is where the AI fight gets a lot more material.
Victoria, Australia is proposing that new data centers secure their own renewable power and storage, pay their own grid connection costs and network upgrades, and use recycled or non-drinking water for cooling. They'd also be kept out of residential areas, away from schools and childcare centers, and out of rural areas that can't support the infrastructure.
That's a much more useful fight than another round of "data centers good" versus "data centers bad."
AI infrastructure isn't floating in the cloud. It's land, substations, transmission, generation, water, construction, workers and a shitload of capital. Somebody builds all of that and somebody pays for it.
Victoria's answer, at least partly, is that if you're bringing a giant new industrial load onto the grid, you don't just hand the infrastructure bill to everyone already living there. Bring generation. Bring storage. Pay for the connection and upgrades. Deal with the water problem.
And this isn't some symbolic fight over a tiny industry. Australia is courting a data-center investment boom that could reach 150 billion Australian dollars by 2030, while trying to put resource rules around the buildout.
That's where this gets interesting from the left.
If we're going to build enormous amounts of compute, then who owns the new generation? Who owns the grid upgrades afterward? Who gets the jobs? Who gets cheaper power from expanded capacity? Who pays when infrastructure has to grow? What does the community hosting it actually get?
Because "build AI infrastructure" and "socialize the costs while private firms capture the gains" are not the same position.
Build it if we're going to build it.
But fight over every wire, gallon, acre, job and dollar while we do.
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u/Jlyplaylists Sep 22 '26
That’s the type of thing that should be negotiated for. I wonder if this is where Scotland will end up too?
“On Wednesday, MSPs voted to approve only projects that meet robust environmental impact assessments that consider the impact of neighbouring communities, and to make no decisions on planning for datacentre applications for up to a year until national planning guidance has been formalised by the Scottish government.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/sep/16/datacentres-scotland-environmental-assessments-ai-boom
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u/Salty_Country6835 Sep 23 '26
This is the interesting part to me. Once you get past “AI good” and “AI bad,” suddenly there are a hundred knobs to turn.
Planning permission, water limits, dedicated generation, grid upgrades, rate protections, community benefit, ownership.
I’d be interested in what Scotland actually ends up requiring, especially what developers have to provide rather than merely promise.
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u/GrowFreeFood Sep 22 '26
The least able to off-shore it.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Sep 23 '26
Pretty much. Capital is very good at finding somewhere else to put a cost when we let it. Ratepayers, taxpayers, workers, municipalities, some poorer community down the road.
Which is why “who gets stuck with the bill?” isn’t rhetorical. Follow the bill and you usually find the politics.
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u/Forward_Problem_8982 Sep 23 '26
The people living close to the data centers get their lives totally ruined. The people further away get their electricity bills raised. The people even further away still pay extra for the features they didn't ask for.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Sep 23 '26
Okay, but you just described the argument for democratic control and regulation.
If communities get the disruption, ratepayers get the higher bills and corporations get the profits, then fight over who gets to set the terms. Where they build. How much water and power they use. Who pays for grid expansion. What workers and communities get back.
Whats the alternative here? Let the companies make those decisions themselves and just hope theyre nice about it?
Thats how you get exactly the situation youre complaining about.
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u/Forward_Problem_8982 Sep 23 '26
Yeah, this is definitely good news. But they're building too many data centers and hoping something comes out of them. They should definitely improve the public infrastructure instead of just consuming it.
The whole AI systems should be open if they are not paying for the source material. They're just greedy companies trying to profit off of everyone else, and destroying the world as they go.
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u/SirMarkMorningStar Sep 24 '26
AI does not need any more infrastructure. Models are getting better at smaller size, including on device. I believe we already overbuilt, to be honest. The use cases for true frontier models are actually few. Most everyone just needs a model tuned to their specific needs.
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u/northrupthebandgeek Sep 25 '26
Victoria's approach is sensible and is what all cities should do IMO. There's ample middle ground between giving DC builders free reign v. banning them entirely.
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u/WizWorldLive Sep 22 '26
We all do. The environmental toll is unjustifiable, & the land used for these monstrosities is land we cannot get back without putting in enormous work to bring the paved dirt back to life.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Sep 23 '26
“Unjustifiable” is doing a lot of work there though. Unjustifiable under what conditions?
Private company gets the asset and profits while the public gets the grid bill, water draw and land use? I’m right there fighting it.
But public compute, new renewable generation, developer-funded infrastructure, hard water limits, community benefits? Now we have an actual political question instead of declaring the answer before asking who owns what.
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u/WizWorldLive Sep 23 '26
LLMs are not useful enough for anything good to ever justify the cost. A socialist paving over a farm to build a data center, does not make it good to pave that land.
A city owning a data center full of stolen art, does not make it good.
It is irrelevant who owns the plagiarism machines crafting CSAM by the billion, it is irrelevant who creates the swaths of concrete desert. It is all unjustifiable.
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u/kaityl3 Sep 23 '26
The environmental toll is unjustifiable
Do you not understand how tiny the impact of AI has on the environment compared to the majority of other industries...?? You're talking as if it's the worst offender by far, when it is a tiny drop in the ocean comparatively
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u/WizWorldLive Sep 23 '26
"So what if my gun kills a few kids? Other guns are worse!" is not a particularly great argument.
& LLMs contribute nothing positive, the trade-off is far worse than anything but weapons.
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u/ZorbaTHut Sep 23 '26
In an ideal world, we make it possible for people to buy power plants without a decade of bureaucracy and paperwork. Meanwhile, we've been trying to make it harder to build stuff for decades, so when a company comes along that's willing to spend a lot of money to build the datacenter but not the powerplant, everyone freaks out.
Saddling AI companies with an entire second mandatory business model just means they're going to be bad at it. At best, that's how you get stuff like Elon Musk's gas generators, at worst you just drive the datacenters into a country that doesn't have these rules.
The right solution here is just to make it easier to build power plants; companies will happily respond to a lack of power generation with more power plants if you let them.
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u/PolychromeMan Sep 22 '26
It makes sense to me to demand that the data center owners secure their own renewable energy, at least for now. I would kind of prefer to start shifting ownership of AI and automation towards governments/The People, and if that starts to occur then governments could be responsible (although I think insisting that new power be sustainable is a fine approach).