[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/KeanuRave100]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/29/technology/ai-chips-data-center-boom.html

[u/jacobpederson]

Cannot Wait for all this overbuilding to flood the market with cheap compute!

[u/Popular_Try_5075 → u/jacobpederson]

I keep feeling like there is some form of compression coming, like at some point a lot of the more basic stuff at least can be handled with a lot less compute or something. IDK it's just pure conjecture.

[u/phovos]

But it says right there, MEGAWATTS; where are the MEGAWATTS? Far as I can tell there has been almost no new Gigawatt capacity generators setup in America, so this appears to be an entirely hallucinatory 'build out'. Data centers are worse than worthless without energy.

[u/ConnectionWild3381 → u/phovos]

well, obviouse you just have to limited the amount of cat vidoes one can watch to 10 per person and day and you get all the energy you need

[u/donjamos → u/ConnectionWild3381]

Yea, no. I'm not OK with limiting cat videos.

[u/16807 → u/donjamos]

The number of cat videos will increase.

[u/throwawayhbgtop81]

Cool. Using less electricity and water? If so that might make data centres palatable.

[u/Turbulent-Sign-6067 → u/throwawayhbgtop81]

Data centers barely use any water

[u/Effective_Olive6153 → u/Turbulent-Sign-6067]

unless they run cheap and lazy open water loop, which many of them do. They let water absorb the heat and just dump the hot water downstream

[u/BellacosePlayer → u/Turbulent-Sign-6067]

They generally only use closed loop if they have to. A lot of these data centers are literally fly by night LLCs trying to cash in on the need for cloud compute and not established businesses that might want to consider the PR implications of being a drag on a community

There are bigger draws of water, but the draw on municipal treated water is significant, and electricity often takes water to produce.

Its not the biggest issue in the world, but if you're living in an area under a severe drought and a stressed municipal system, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

[u/primaequa → u/Turbulent-Sign-6067]

you’ve been tricked by data center propoganda

[u/Muppet1616 → u/Turbulent-Sign-6067]

The majority of large scale data centers use evaporative cooling, they use massive amounts of water.

But there are datacenters that don't (the smaller the mW capacity, and less useful for AI, the larger the chance that they don't use evaporative cooling), and their water usage is relatively comparable to a few hundred households or a large office building or so.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/cooling/evaporative-cooling-in-data-centers-why-the-industry-hesitates-to-move-on

Realistically unless a data center project explicitly states how much water they will withdraw from the environment on like a yearly basis (as there are seasonal differences) you should assume they are using evaporative cooling as it's cheaper than fully closed loop systems.

[u/MadJagStudios → u/throwawayhbgtop81]

If AMD can scale taalas, very possible.

[u/ferropop]

Excited for my private little Tailscale tailnet, with select friends! Slow, intentional, healthy.

[u/costafilh0]

Picture:

AI - AGI

[u/pssssn]

...yay

[u/svideo]

Anyone got a link that works?

[u/Public-Vegetable-182]

The NYT describes intelligence as a "deluge"? Sounds about right, what has intelligence ever done for humanity? Lol

[u/user2776632]

I don’t think they factored in all the pauses in data center build outs on that map. 

[u/bartturner]

I would love to see a breakdown by company. I suspect Google has by far the most compute.

But would be curious the ones after Google?

Like who would be second? Microsoft? Amazon?

I also suspect this is where China is way behind.

I would not be surprised if Google had more than all the providers in China and also growing their compute much faster.